Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 21st, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Murdoch is a man who has tried over and over again over almost 40 years to create a successful, financially viable newspaper in the US, and he's failed every time." – Michael Wolff


"An Internet predicated on order, rather than chaos, facilitates achievement of this goal." – RIAA


"For about a half hour I really felt uplifted. It wore off." – John Mellencamp


"I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape." – Eva Finne



































Angry Radicals Getting Desperate?

It looks like somebody’s mad at Al Franken. When the freshman senator returned home from Washington this week after excoriating ISPs on net neutrality, he and his wife were startled to find a bullet-sized hole in the window of their Minneapolis condominium. Local and Capitol Hill police are investigating. Meanwhile in Sweden, WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange was deeply disturbed upon learning Friday that prosecutors had issued a warrant for his arrest after unidentified women accused him of rape and molestation in not one but two separate instances. He used the WikiLeaks twitter account to call the charges bogus and predict further political "dirty tricks" against him. On Saturday prosecutors withdrew the warrant.














Enjoy,

Jack













August 21st, 2010




Four Democrats Urge U.S. to Act on Internet Traffic

Four Democrats on a congressional panel called on regulators on Monday to press ahead with their own Internet traffic rules instead of relying on a proposal from two communications companies.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said any outcome or deal that does not preserve an open and free Internet for consumers and entrepreneurs would be unacceptable.

Last week, Verizon Communications Inc and Google Inc said regulators should be able to police Internet traffic over cable and telephone lines, but that carriers themselves should be able to control the speed of consumers' access to content on wireless devices such as smartphones and iPads.

The companies' joint proposal marked a surprising compromise on so-called "net neutrality," which refers to the concept that high-speed Internet providers should not block or slow information or make websites pay for faster ways to reach users.

Democrats Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Anna Eshoo of California, Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania and Jay Inslee of Washington, all members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent a letter to Genachowski that said he should maintain a free and open Internet.

"Rather than expansion upon a proposal by two large communications companies with a vested financial interest in the outcome, formal FCC action is needed," they wrote.

FCC spokeswoman Jen Howard declined to comment on the letter.

Last October, the FCC issued a net neutrality proposal and collected public comments, but it has not said when it plans to implement it.

In its proposal, the FCC asked for public comment on if operators should be prevented from discriminating against any legal content a third party wants to deliver to consumers on their land line and wireless networks.

It would allow for "reasonable" network management to unclog congestion, clear viruses and spam and block unlawful content such as child pornography or the transfer of pirated content.

(Reporting by John Poirier; editing by Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67F4Y620100816





Franken Goes Ballistic on Verizon, Google, Comcast, and NBCU
Matthew Lasar

"I believe that net neutrality is the First Amendment issue of our time," declared Democratic Senator Al Franken at Thursday's public hearing on the Internet, held in his home state of Minnesota.

"Unless it's freedom of religion," he added, "which, until last week, I thought we had kind of worked out."

The audience at Minneapolis' South High School cracked up over Franken's reference to the Ground Zero Mosque slugfest. But this was a warm-up rally for their own cause—getting the Federal Communications Commission to pass rules that would partially reclassify ISPs as common carriers and apply various neutrality provision to their activities. Two Democratic members of the FCC also attended the event: Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn.

"We're standing at a precipice," warned Josh Silver of Free Press as he introduced Franken. "Despite the Internet's vital importance to our democracy, there are no laws on the books that ensure net neutrality."

In April a federal appeals court struck down the FCC's attempt to sanction the P2P blocking practices of Comcast based on a classification of ISPs as "information" services. The setback effectively forced the pro-net neutrality wing of the agency to consider the common carrier route.

The only thing

The hearing also comes on the heels of Google and Verizon's proposal to limit the FCC's oversight in this area—essentially putting it in the hands of some kind of industry governance body that would tell the agency when to ding an ISP for discriminating against a content provider (limited to $2 million per ding).

Nondiscrimination principles, as this body chose to define them, would apply to wireline broadband, but not wireless, with exemptions for "additional" or "differentiated" services that could be subject to "traffic prioritization."

"The FCC would publish an annual report on the effect of these additional services," the proposal recommends, "and immediately report if it finds at any time that these services threaten the meaningful availability of broadband Internet access services."

Franken had choice words for this plan, none of them good.

Google and Verizon's scheme empowers the FCC to, "get this—'publish a report'," he dryly commented, while his audience laughed again.

"But there's an even bigger issue here. It's that when government will not act, corporations will. And unlike government agencies, which have a legal responsibility to protect American consumers, the only thing corporations care about, the only thing that they have a legal duty to promote, is their bottom line."

"We can't let companies write the rules that they're supposed to follow," Franken added, "because if that happens those rules are going to be written only to protect corporations."

Gaggle this

That "if government will not act" line was another oblique dig, this time at the FCC—these days widely criticized for not moving faster on its reclassification plan. Instead, the agency has been holding on-again, off-again informal discussions with Verizon, Google, Skype, and several trade associations on a framework for Congress to consider, a move that may have facilitated the Google/Verizon proposal.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps accepted Franken's implied criticism, calling the agency's eight-year-long practice of classifying ISPs as "information" rather than "telecommunications" services a dodge to avoid providing common carrier protections to consumers. "Our job now is to correct course by reclassifying broadband as the telecommunications service that it is," Copps told the applauding crowd.

As for Verizon and Google (or, as Copps called them, the "Verizon-Google gaggle"), their proposal "would almost completely exclude wireless broadband from the future of Internet openness, even though that's where everybody is migrating," he charged. "Don't we want that part of the Internet to be free from gatekeepers too?"

They want a "tiered Internet," Copps continued. "Gated communities for the affluent. So for example, a special Verizon-Google or Comcast-NBC service could come to you extra quickly, with special quality of service or priority, and therefore decrease the amount of bandwidth left for the open Internet that you and I know today."

"I suppose you can't blame companies for seeking to protect their own interests," the Commissioner concluded. "But you can blame policy makers if we let them get away with it."

In her remarks, Mignon Clyburn cited a study indicating that minority consumers more often get their Internet via wireless handsets than from laptops or desktop computers. "So any proposal that treats fixed and mobile broadband differently would be impossible for me to support," Clyburn declared.

Very, very dangerous

Franken didn't limit his comments to net neutrality. He also touched on another of his favorite matters before the FCC—the proposed merger of Comcast and NBC Universal. Comcast wrapped up the comment process on Thursday with a reply to various critics of the marriage. Now, after a seven-month application period, the ball is in the FCC and Department of Justice's court.

"If Comcast is allowed to merge with NBC," Franken warned, "it will not be long before Verizon or AT&T say, 'You know what? We better buy Disney/ABC. We better buy CBS/Viacom.' And what you're going to have is a handful of companies that own all the programming and provide all the Internet service. So a handful of companies will have their hands on all of the information that all of us get. And that is very, very dangerous."

The senator's comments raise an interesting question. To what extent can the FCC and DoJ base their analysis of the potentially harmful effects of the merger on what other companies might do in its aftermath? Probably not a whole lot.

But Internet-related problems certainly hang over the proposed union, such as the fate of Hulu.com, the online TV service in which Comcast would acquire a 32 percent stake. Several months ago, Franken's colleague Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) wondered out loud whether the cable giant sees Hulu as an asset or a threat to its cable TV network.

"Concerns that the transaction will eliminate Hulu as a free, advertising-supported service are misplaced," Comcast's new filing insists. "NBCU has long-term contractual commitments to provide content to Hulu on an ad-supported basis, and these commitments will not be affected by the transaction."

Expect Internet and antitrust questions to be on the table as the FCC grapples with net neutrality and the proposed Comcast/NBCU deal. The agency's next Open Commission meeting is scheduled for Thursday, September 23.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...n-proposal.ars





Shot Fired Into Al Franken’s Home
Alan

A shot was fired into the condo belonging to MN Senator Al Franken and his wife.

Nobody was home at the time of the incident, which was not reported until after the senator and his wife returned home to Minneapolis after a two-day trip out of town on Tuesday and discovered the damage to their window facing the street.

“Right now it’s under investigation by the Minneapolis Police and the Capitol Hill Police,” Franken spokesman Marc Kimball told POLITICO.

Kimball said that “there was some damage to one of the window panes” in a double-paned window.

Kimball added that “nothing like this” has ever happened to the senator’s residence.
http://www.alan.com/2010/08/19/shot-...frankens-home/





RIAA: Google/Verizon Deal Needs Yet Another Gaping Loophole
Nate Anderson

Plenty of people are worried that the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal has too many exceptions. The recording industry is worried that it doesn't have enough.

In a letter sent today to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the RIAA and other music trade groups expressed their concern that the riddled-with-gaping-loopholes policy framework nevertheless might put a damper on ISP attempts to find and filter piratical material flowing through the Internet's tubes. Failure to allow for this sort of behavior would lead to an Internet of "chaos."

"The music community we represent believes it is vital that any Internet policy initiative permit and encourage ISPs and other intermediaries to take measures to deter unlawful activity such as copyright infringement and child pornography," says the letter. "We all share the goal of a robust Internet that is highly accessible, secure and safe for individuals and commerce. An Internet predicated on order, rather than chaos, facilitates achievement of this goal."

(The RIAA is fond of this "Internet of chaos" rhetoric.)

"Accordingly, we are deeply interested in the details of your proposal as they may relate to the protection of content and to making sure that the distinction between lawful and unlawful activity has operational meaning."

The major content industries have pushed for this lawful/unlawful distinction every time the FCC has a net neutrality proceeding, and they even pushed to include it in the National Broadband Plan. Yet the "three strikes" proposals that copyright owners have pushed around the globe don't require any sort of ISP monitoring, wiretapping, or non-neutral behavior, and the RIAA's own now-defunct lawsuit campaign about P2P users likewise required no such help from the ISPs.

But that campaign cost so much money and produced so little in the way of results that it was never going to scale well—and the cases that went to court could take years to finish. So the MPAA and RIAA have also been pushing a parallel approach for years, one that would allow or perhaps compel ISPs to get involved and make the whole process of stopping copyrighted file transfers faster and easier.

A higher education law passed by Congress a few years back went some way down this road; starting this fall, all schools that take federal funds need to use technological measures to deter on-campus file sharing. Many schools have adopted surveillance gear from companies like Audible Magic for this purpose. The copyright industries would like to preserve this approach as (at the very least) an option that public ISPs might consider, but nondiscrimination rules could prevent any ISP from taking a risk with traffic-blocking. (Wiretapping laws could also prove problematic, but that's a separate issue.)

"The current legal and regulatory regime is not working for America’s creators," warns the recording industry. "Our businesses are being undermined, as are the dreams and careers of songwriters, artists, musicians, studio technicians, and other professionals."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...g-loophole.ars





Google Plan With Verizon Disillusions Some Allies
Claire Cain Miller and Miguel Helft

On Friday at lunchtime, as Google employees dined al fresco, a hundred protesters descended on the company’s Silicon Valley campus. A group called the Raging Grannies sang a song called “The Battle Hymn for the Internet,” and others carried signs reading, “Google is evil if the price is right.”

They were there to complain about what they saw as Google’s about-face on how Internet access should be regulated and to deliver a petition with about 300,000 signatures.

Several of the groups at the protest, like MoveOn.org and Free Press, once saw Google as their top corporate ally in the fight for net neutrality — the principle that the Internet should be a level playing field, with all applications and services treated equally.

But a week ago, Google stunned many of its allies by crossing the aisle and teaming up with Verizon Communications to propose that net neutrality rules should not apply to wireless access and to outline rules for the wired Internet that critics say are riddled with loopholes.

Google’s compromise with Verizon is the latest collision between idealism and pragmatism at the company, which has long promoted the idea that its mission, organizing the world’s information, is for the public good, as underscored by its unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil.”

Some say that as Google has grown up and become a large multinational company, it has been forced to start weighing its business interests against the more idealistic leanings of its founders and many of its employees.

“I don’t know that Google pondered the moral decision this time,” said Jordan Rohan, an Internet and digital media analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. “I think the business decision to cooperate with Verizon superseded the other complications and side effects that it may cause.”

Google strongly defends its proposal with Verizon, saying it does not violate net neutrality principles and, if adopted by regulators, would protect wired Internet access more than it is protected now.

“We don’t view this as a retreat at all,” Alan Davidson, Google’s director of public policy, said in an interview. “Google believes very strongly in net neutrality.”

But the proposal left Google’s former allies, as well as many other technology and media companies, feeling disappointed and even betrayed. The risk, they say, is that without adequate regulation, Internet access companies could exercise too much control over what their customers can do online, or how quickly they can gain access to certain content. They could charge companies for faster access to consumers, hurting smaller players and innovation.

“Google has been the most reliable corporate ally to the public interest community,” said Josh Silver, president of Free Press, an advocacy group. “That is why their sellout on net neutrality is so stunning.”

The proposal from Google and Verizon was all the more surprising to some advocates because it was released just as broader talks brokered by the Federal Communications Commission were close to producing a draft compromise agreement, according to three people briefed on the talks, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because the talks were supposed to be confidential.

Unlike the Google-Verizon proposal, the agreement would have imposed some rules on wireless Internet, these people said.

“We were very close,” said one person briefed on the talks. Both the F.C.C. and Google declined to comment on those discussions. After reports of a Google-Verizon deal emerged, the F.C.C. called off the talks, which in addition to those two companies included AT&T, a cable industry group, Skype and the Open Internet Coalition.

Though Google has long said that it thinks openness rules should be applied broadly to Internet access, the company was persuaded that wireless is different because it is evolving rapidly and there is more competition, Mr. Davidson said. Wireless carriers say they need more leeway to manage their networks because it is difficult and expensive for them to add more capacity.

The shift was also a pragmatic compromise to get “broader support, in this case from Verizon and hopefully others,” he said.

Still, Google’s new position on net neutrality represents a scaling back of the company’s ambitious goals. When Google began building a presence in Washington in 2005, net neutrality was one of the first issues it embraced. And over the years, Google’s drive to open up the wireless industry became a corporate mission, backed by the company’s financial might.

In 2007, Google made a $4.7 billion bid in a government auction of wireless airwaves. The company’s goal was not to win the auction, but to raise the price above a threshold that would set off rules forcing openness on the airwaves. Verizon won the auction and soon plans to deploy a high-speed network that will be bound by those rules.

In January, Google introduced its own phone, the Nexus One, and opened an online store to distribute it. By selling directly to consumers, Google was challenging the control that wireless carriers have over the distribution of phones, especially in the United States. But Google quietly killed the Nexus One and the phone store this year.

Analysts say Google’s new, more conciliatory approach to the wireless industry was born of necessity.

Verizon offers a number of smartphones that run the Android software from Google, and Verizon is handling growing amounts of data flowing through its network to and from those phones. The volume will only increase as new mobile devices are developed and people use them to watch movies and do other bandwidth-intensive activities. Meanwhile, Google is looking to the mobile Web to feed much of its future growth.

“This is about Google becoming friendlier with the wireless industry so that more Google searches are conducted on wireless devices,” Mr. Rohan said. If wireless was exempted from net neutrality rules, Verizon could limit the use of some applications and spend less money improving its network, or get paid by Web companies for delivering content.

Some people see echoes of Google’s decision to go into China in 2006. In that case, after a lengthy internal debate, Google put aside its aversion to censorship and decided to enter what quickly became the world’s largest Internet market. Google has since pulled its search engine out of mainland China after online attacks that originated there, but the decision to do business there tarnished the company’s reputation among human rights advocates and disappointed many employees.

“I don’t fault Google and Verizon for striking a deal,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School and a longtime supporter of net neutrality. “A large private company is always going to operate in its own interest, and for anyone to believe otherwise would be naïve.”

Professor Crawford, who is critical of the proposal, said the F.C.C.’s lack of action on access rules pushed Google to seek a compromise. “Google had no choice but to cooperate with the friendliest carrier it can find, which is Verizon,” she said.

But disappointed consumers and advocates seem to be holding Google to a different standard, in large part because of the image it created.

“If the world of business is an ugly world full of rats, they’ve managed to create a bushy tail for themselves and come across as a very, very cute rat with terms like ‘Do no evil,’ ” said Scott Galloway, professor of brand strategy at the Stern School of Business at New York University. “The downside of that is that people have expectations that they’re going to fight these quixotic battles, and the bottom line is their obligation to their shareholders.”

Not all believe that Google has betrayed its principles. Some longtime Silicon Valley chroniclers say they still think Google is trying to do the right thing, not only for itself, but also for the Internet as a whole.

“I would rather have a company like Google that means to do no evil and is struggling with compromises on these hard issues than a company that doesn’t see a struggle,” said Tim O’Reilly, founder and chief executive of the technology publisher O’Reilly Media. “Most companies don’t even see things in those terms.”


Ashlee Vance contributed reporting from Mountain View, Calif.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/te.../16google.html





Google TV Plan is Causing Jitters in Hollywood

Many worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just like the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries.
Dawn C. Chmielewski and Jessica Guynn

Google revolutionized the way people access information. Now it wants to transform how people get entertainment.

The search giant is touting an ambitious new technology, called Google TV, that would marry the Internet with traditional television, enabling viewers to watch TV shows and movies unshackled from the broadcast networks or cable channels on which they air. Users would need to buy a TV or set-top box with Google software that could connect to the Internet, along with a keyboard to type commands. Users could also use their iPhone or Android phone to operate Google TV.

The prospect of Google getting into television frightens many in Hollywood, who worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just like the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries.

By bringing the Web directly to the living room TV, entertainment industry executives fear Google TV will encourage consumers to ditch their $70 monthly cable and satellite subscriptions in favor of watching video free via the Internet.

Others believe it will fan piracy because Google refuses to block access to bootleg movies and television shows.

FOR THE RECORD:
An earlier version of this story online said a demonstration of Google TV for a network executive showed how users could access BitTorrent, a major source of bootleg TV shows and movies. A Google spokesman said that no such demonstration took place.

And, perhaps most troubling to Hollywood, Google doesn't yet know how it will make money on Google TV — and whether it intends to compensate the studios and networks for the content.

"It's kind of an end-run around their control of signal, and that's scary," said Harold Vogel, president of media investment firm Vogel Capital Management, of broadcasters' response to Google TV. "Because if you don't control the signal, then you can't provide your own advertising. It really destroys the legacy business model."

Google sees its role as harnessing the power of the Internet to improve television viewing. It's an opportunity, company project managers argue, for the movie studios and television networks to use the limitless storage capacity of the Web to make their libraries of programs available whenever someone wants to watch an old episode of "All in the Family" or classic films such as "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

The concept is simple. Google TV uses Google's expertise in search to cull through viewing options — both in the traditional program lineups and through online services such as Hulu, Amazon.com or even a network's own website — and then displays them on the TV set, just as a browser finds information on the Web.

"We want to use the Internet to change the television experience," said Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology. "There's no secret plan. We're not designing a rocket that's going to the moon. At the end of the day, the story's simple. We're putting a browser in the TV to enable a whole bunch of things that the studios and the networks are already doing today, but in a less disjointed fashion."

Lazard Capital Markets media analyst Barton Crockett predicts Internet video will be the biggest thing to happen in the living room since the advent of digital video recorders. Within five years, television sets and set-top boxes that connect to the Web will be commonplace, he said.

That represents a potential boon to content creators, as distributors pay substantial sums for the right to stream movies and TV shows to subscribers, Crockett said. Consider the five-year, $900-million deal subscription service Netflix Inc. struck last week with fledgling pay-TV channel Epix to offer movies via the Web from Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate within 90 days of opening in theaters.

"I understand being scared of Google. They are big, smart, powerful and disruptive. It makes them scary from the moment they enter the room," Crockett said. "But they also represent the future."

The two-man team leading the Google TV effort — Dureau and Rishi Chandra — say they believe technological innovation can make television better and more profitable for everyone.

Cable operators, television programmers and others have in recent months journeyed to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., for a demonstration of Google TV, parking themselves on a black leather couch across from a Google TV-enabled Sony flat screen TV resting on a desk draped with a black cloth.

Dureau and Chandra say Google's software — and the developers who would use it to create legions of new applications — would give viewers more bang and content producers more bucks, much the same way innovation from Google and Apple have transformed the mobile phone industry.

"We fundamentally believe the advertising mechanisms we have online will improve ad products on television, whether we do it or someone else does it," Chandra said.

Analysts agree: They say the Internet is coming to television with or without Google and that it's the only medium that can bring with it the long-awaited promise of targeted and interactive advertising. Yet trepidation continues to trump optimism among television executives.

"While CBS is open to discussing additional ways to distribute our content, we need to have a firmer understanding of Google's plans for monetizing the content that flows through Google TV before we accurately evaluate the opportunity," said Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president of entertainment at CBS Interactive.

In meetings, Google touted the software as presenting a new opportunity to make more money from TV shows distributed online. Google erected a massive technology infrastructure to make money on online video — and not coincidentally take a small piece of every transaction.

But broadcasters are worried about Google gaining too much control over online video advertising. The company continues to advocate an advertising auction model that's been successful in its core search business, whereby search terms are sold to the highest bidder. That makes perfect sense for a manufacturer selling digital cameras, but it would be disruptive for network ad sales, where prime-time hits are bundled with other less-popular shows so that the winners pay for the losers.

Google needs the cooperation of the programming community to improve the overall effectiveness of video search. Right now, Google TV isn't very effective in correctly identifying TV shows. In demonstrations with network executives, Google TV confused one network's shows for a rival's. On another occasion, it listed the several ways a popular prime-time show could be watched online and on TV — except on the network's own website.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...0,785196.story





Will Google TV do to Hollywood what Napster Did to the Music Biz?
Patrick Goldstein

My colleagues Dawn Chmielewski and Jessica Guynn have a fascinating Page 1 story in our paper today about the upcoming arrival of Google TV, which would allow viewers to watch movies and TV shows "unshackled" from the networks and cable channels that currently send them to our homes. It's the unshackled part that has Hollywood in a tizzy. As my colleagues dryly put it: "Entertainment industry executives fear Google TV will encourage consumers to ditch their $70 monthly cable and satellite subscriptions in favor of watching video free via the Internet."

In other words, Google TV could do to Hollywood what Napster did to the music business by upending the industry's entire carefully calibrated business model. If you can watch nearly everything you want to watch without dealing with a middleman, it could be a liberating experience for consumers but a disaster for the old media giants who've been raking in giant profits from their programming. Guynn wrote a separate piece for our business section that actually shows a young San Francisco couple, sitting in their living room, watching everything from AMC's "Mad Men" to Facebook updates and Flickr photos, all on the same TV screen. As it turns out, one member of the couple is running the marketing campaign for Google TV, so they're simply testing out the new venture.

But in Hollywood, everyone is wigged out about the dire possibilities of Google essentially inserting itself between the studios and their customers, since it remains unclear just how Google plans to compensate studios for their content or manage the advertising revenues from the shows it airs. In fact, the story makes it clear that Google's much-touted video search capacity isn't all that accurate, especially when it comes to identifying what networks envision as the most obvious place to find a show--their own websites. When Google had demonstrations with network execs, its TV confused one network's show for a rival's program and, even worse, "it listed the several ways a popular prime-time show could be watched online and on TV--except on the network's own website."

Ouch!

As I wrote in a post the other day, whenever new technology emerges that allows consumers more choices, it is inevitably a destructive experience for the companies making money off the old model, since they are the ones who find it most difficult to embrace and take advantage of the sweeping changes. Nearly all of the wealth that has been generated by new media technology in recent years has gone to entrepreneurial companies from outside of the old business--Apple, EBay, Amazon, Netflix and Google, even before its ambitious attempt to move into TV. I suspect the networks will fight tooth and nail to stop Google from invading their lucrative territory, but when it's an old media company battling a new media company, the winner comes from the new media camp nearly every time.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_...music-biz.html





Argentina Closes Clarin Internet Unit in `Totalitarian' Attack on Company
Eliana Raszewski

Argentina’s government shut down the Internet service provided by Grupo Clarin SA’s Fibertel unit, saying the company’s merger with Cablevision SA was illegal.

The move is the latest in a fight between Clarin and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, which says Argentina’s biggest media company is biased in its coverage of the government. The media company also owns the newspaper Clarin, the most-read Spanish-language daily in Latin America.

Cablevision, in a statement, accused the government of acting in a “totalitarian” manner.

“Fibertel doesn’t exist anymore because of its own decision,” Planning Minister Julio De Vido said in a news conference today in Buenos Aires. “They announced a merger that was never approved.” Fibertel customers are free to find other service providers and the company will cease operations within 90 days, De Vido said.

The government’s decision is “illegal and arbitrary,” and Cablevision will pursue all legal actions to continue with Fibertel’s internet service, the company said in an e-mail statement.

“This is a new and serious chapter amid an increasingly totalitarian series of attacks by the government against companies owned by Grupo Clarin,” Cablevision said.

About 63 percent of Grupo Clarin’s 1.87 billion pesos ($470 million) in sales in the second quarter came from its cable and internet services, according to the company’s earnings report. Fibertel has about 1 million clients, the company said.

Clarin shares fell 5.8 percent to 12.3 pesos at 3:59 p.m. New York time, the most since September 2009. The shares have climbed 31.7 percent this year, compared with a 4.7 percent rise on the benchmark Merval index.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-0...n-90-days.html





Wired Declares 'The Web Is Dead,' Apps and Mobile Devices to Blame
Amar Toor

Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, like Prince, thinks the Web is dead. Unlike Prince, though, Anderson actually has some facts to back up his claim. In the cover story of the September issue of Wired, both Anderson and Michael Wolff use Internet traffic trends to support the argument that smartphone apps and e-readers have gradually begun to overtake the Web browser as our primary conduit of online consumption. And, according to Anderson, these trends will shape our future.

As he points out, ten years ago, Web-based, HTML-driven traffic comprised about half of all online activity. By 2010, though, that figure, according to Wired, had already dropped to 23-percent, due, in large part, to the rise of peer-to-peer services (23-percent), video (51-percent), and apps that aren't tied to browsers. These statistics lead Anderson to envision "a world Google can't crawl, one where HTML doesn't rule."

BoingBoing's Rob Beschizza, however, re-worked some of Anderson's numbers, to take into account for the increase of Internet traffic over the same time period. According to his admittedly crude reconstruction of the layered graph, with total traffic on the y-axis, the growth of browser traffic hasn't noticeably decreased over time, as one could infer from Wired's representation; it's just had to compete with even more exponential growth from peer-to-peer and video traffic. Regardless of Anderson's angle, though, the underlying message remains the same: that browsers are facing greater competition from new forms of Internet access. And, according to him, there are very real factors behind this trend.

As Anderson argues, consumers are increasingly rejecting the Web in favor of apps or mobile platforms "not because they're rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don't have to go to the screen)." Over time, companies have found ways to corner off their own monetized sections of the Internet, creating new ways to meet consumer demand. Anderson argues that this transition is simply part of an inexorable, capitalist evolution. "A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others," he writes. "It happens every time."

The crux of Anderson's thesis, then, seems to be this: the Web isn't "new" anymore. At one point, consumers may have viewed the Web's openness with a sense of excitement or adventure -- and value. Now that the medium has reached "adulthood," though, we've all begun assigning greater value to quality, convenience and reliability. We're more likely to buy a song on iTunes than download it for free, and we're more likely to consume media on our smartphones than at our desktops. Sure, there's still a vast, non-monetized space of the Internet, where people can create things and express themselves. (For reassurance, check out this list of great things about the Web.) As a marketplace, though, the Web is quickly narrowing, and becoming more and more fragmented in an attempt to meet an evolving consumer demand. And, ultimately, that may not be such a bad thing. We do, after all, still enjoy it.
http://www.switched.com/2010/08/17/w...evices-to-bla/





Verizon and AT&T Ban BitTorrent On Wireless Networks
Ernesto

A recent Net Neutrality proposal from Google and Verizon has dominated the news this week, with opponents claiming that the deal would kill Net Neutrality on wireless (cellular) networks. What hasn’t been mentioned thus far, however, is that BitTorrent and other types of evil traffic have already been banned for years by Verizon, AT&T and others.

This week, Google has been bashed by dozens of self-respecting news outlets on the Internet after it published a joint proposal with Verizon that aims to preserve Net Neutrality. Most of the critique is aimed at the suggestion of limiting the proposed rules to wired networks for now, while leaving wireless networks untouched.

Although the proposal is far from perfect, we are even more surprised by the misplaced outrage towards Google. How can it be that thousands of reporters and activists claim that the Google / Verizon deal will kill Net Neutrality if there’s no such thing in the first place?

Next week marks the three year anniversary of the story that Comcast was preventing BitTorrent users from uploading content to others after they had finished downloading. Rightfully so, Comcast’s practices led to a thorough FCC investigation and the ISP was eventually punished for its interventions.

But Comcast was not the only one who play(ed)s foul.

Despite Net Neutrality being in the spotlight for nearly three years due to the Comcast debacle, nobody seemed to pay attention to the fact that wireless broadband providers such as Verizon and AT&T were completely banning BitTorrent traffic on their networks.

In the spring of 2007, months before Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking practices were revealed, we already reported that Verizon was not allowing any BitTorrent traffic on its wireless networks. In the years that followed the company slightly changed the wording of its Terms of Service, but up until today BitTorrent users are still not welcome.

Verizon isn’t the only wireless carrier with such a policy either. The Terms of Service at AT&T for example, includes the following section under the heading Prohibited and Permissible Uses.

While most common uses for Intranet browsing, email and intranet access are permitted by your data plan, there are certain uses that cause extreme network capacity issues and interference with the network and are therefore prohibited. Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) server devices or host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine-to-machine connections or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing.

That doesn’t sounds very neutral does it?

For years nobody gave a cent for Net Neutrality on wireless networks, but this all changed a few days ago when Google and Verizon presented their plans. The thousands of reports, calls for protests, petitions and random Google bashing that followed were mind-blowing to say the least.

Although we’re not backing the proposal, we can’t help but note that Google’s proposal is in essence very similar to the (widely praised) Net Neutrality regulations that were suggested a few month ago by the FCC. On several points it’s actually an improvement, as the EFF also noted.

Even the most troubling part of Google’s proposal – that wireless networks would be excluded for the time being – is not much different from what the FCC suggested. In fact, buried in their proposals the FCC also acknowledged that wireless networks needed special treatment.

“We seek comment on the application of the principles to different access platforms, including how, in what time frames or phases, and to what extent the principles should apply to non-wireline forms of Internet access,” the FCC wrote in their proposed rulemaking a few months ago.

Despite this vagueness about how the rules would apply to wireless networks, the majority of the Net Neutrality proponents hailed the FCC proposal. Take this comment from Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press for example:

“After years of hard work, we are pleased that the FCC has begun this crucially important rulemaking on Network Neutrality. A well-crafted Net Neutrality rule can ensure that the open Internet continues to serve as a great force for economic innovation and democratic participation for all Americans.”

Then compare that the statement Free Press released a few hours ago, when it rallied support for a protest at Google’s offices.

“In the week since news of Google’s deal with Verizon broke, more than 300,000 people have signed letters calling on Google to abandon the proposal, which threatens to destroy Network Neutrality – the fundamental principle that keeps the Internet open and free from discrimination.”

Seriously, we don’t understand where all the hatred towards Google comes from. The proposal is not going to destroy Net Neutrality, simply because Net Neutrality doesn’t exist yet.

In our view, the proposal is a great step forward to Net Neutrality on wired networks, something that doesn’t yet exist. Of course it still leaves the door open for BitTorrent throttling, but so did the FCC proposal.

The reality is that the Internet would be better off with the rules put forward in the Google / Verizon proposal than with no rules at all. That said, wireless networks need to be neutral in the long run of course.

Whether running a lot of BitTorrent downloads on a Wireless network is wise thing at the moment is doubtful though. George Ou of the Digital Society told TorrentFreak that “a single BitTorrent user would ruin the experience on the entire cell tower. There are just too many random packets being flung into the air.”

I guess the take home message is that you can’t kill something that isn’t there. So, if all the people who are so outraged at Google’s proposal could also organize protests at the offices of Verizon and AT&T to demand the right to use BitTorrent on their wireless services, we’ll stop complaining.
http://torrentfreak.com/verizon-and-...tworks-100813/





AT&T Claims Net Neutrality is Oppressive

Says that wireless is different
Lawrence Latif

US TELECOM AT&T has come out in support of Google's contention that wireless communications are different than wireline Internet services.

Last week Google and Verizon agreed on a deal that left wireless communications free to be carved up by telecoms operators and tiered for commercial exploitation. Given Google's stance as a supporter of net neutrality, it has faced widespread criticism and even had 100 or so demonstrators outside its doors claiming that it had sold out.

Google defended its deal with Verizon by saying that its users simply misunderstood technology and that wireless was somehow different from wired technology. It comes as no big surprise that AT&T has also adopted this patronising position to concur with Google and Verizon, its largest competitor.

The firm claimed that even long term evolution (LTE) networks have only a fraction of the bandwidth found in fibre-optic networks. It also claims that the wireless network companies often "split cells" by installing new towers, but that is restricted by local authorities.

AT&T has come up with a three point action plan that includes the deployment of HSPA+ and LTE networks, using WiFi and microcells and installing even more cell towers.

AT&T said that policy makers can help by "protecting wireless broadband networks from onerous new net neutrality regulations", which it claims is "vital to the continued growth of the industry". Or in other words, net neutrality will limit the profits it can extract from wireless services.

The bare-faced cheek of the company calling net neutrality 'onerous' is a disgrace and simply goes to show how much AT&T and the like care for their paying customers. As we and many others had predicted, Google's deal with Verizon has opened the floodgates for telecoms operators to make ridiculous claims in order to destroy net neutrality and promote their own agenda of what AT&T termed 'continued growth'.

It should also be noted that AT&T's statement made no reference to how its network performance affects its subscribers. Rather it reads like a sob story, except that it's being told by a company that raked in $123 billion in revenues and about 12.5 billion profit last year alone.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...ty-oppressive/





Demon to Prioritise Gaming Broadband Traffic
Nicole Kobie

Demon has unveiled a new broadband package that prioritises the traffic of gamers.

The ISP's new Game Pro broadband will prioritise traffic, raising the issue of net neutrality, where all traffic is given an equal chance to travel networks. Demon will essentially give an assured rate to anyone willing to shell out the extra £3 a month for the gaming broadband - or more for a business connection.

"What we're doing is putting gamers into a business grade network," Demon proposition manager Carl Warner told PC Pro. "Looking at the usage of gamers, it's actually more akin to a small business."

With most playing in the evening, gamers will essentially be using up the idle capacity that Demon's business customers normally use during the day.

Warner said Demon's home customers wouldn't see much of an impact, because the ISP has enough extra capacity to cover any surge. "Maybe across other networks, where there may be a shared backbone or something like that, but from our perspective, our customers get the priority," he said, noting Demon doesn't actually have that many standard residential accounts.

Other features

Aside from prioritising the traffic, Demon also promises lower latency, faster ping times, 24-hour UK-based support and 20MBits/sec downloads with 1Mbit/sec uploads.

Off-peak, there will be no usage restrictions, but those who sign up to the package will be limited to 100GB a month between 8am and 11pm - which Demon said was double the top usage needed according to gaming companies it asked.

Demon also has peering connections set up with gaming companies, so it can offer an even faster network for playing or downloading.

Warner said Demon compared gamers who were closer to the exchange and had faster speeds with those who were further away with slower speeds, saying it had a clear affect on players' success. "The actual difference against competition is very good for the player nearer to the exchange," he said.

Such benefits don't just appeal to gaming aficiandos, Warner admitted, saying the deal would be useful for any multimedia streaming. "I guess you could call it more a multimedia broadband connection."

The Game Pro package starts from £23 a month.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/360496/d...adband-traffic





Your Fears Confirmed: "Up To" Broadband Speeds are Bogus
Nate Anderson

Broadband providers in the US have long hawked their wares in "up to" terms. You know—"up to" 10Mbps, where "up to" sits like a tiny pebble beside the huge font size of the raw number.

In reality, no one gets these speeds. That's not news to the techno-literate, of course, but a new Federal Communications Commission report shines a probing flashlight on the issue and makes a sharp conclusion: broadband users get, on average, a mere 50 percent of that "up to" speed they had hoped to achieve.

After crunching the data, FCC wonks have concluded that ISPs advertised an average (mean) "up to" download speed of 6.7Mbps in 2009. That's not what broadband users got, though.

"However, FCC analysis shows that the median actual speed consumers experienced in the first half of 2009 was roughly 3 Mbps, while the average (mean) actual speed was approximately 4 Mbps," says the report. "Therefore actual download speeds experienced by US consumers appear to lag advertised speeds by roughly 50 percent."

The agency used metrics data from Akamai and comScore to make this determination, though a more accurate direct measurement is currently taking place under FCC auspices. The more accurate measurement will put small boxes in people's homes for weeks at a time, recording actual line speeds in thousands of US homes at all times of the day and night. But, until that data set is complete, Internet traffic data from Akamai and comScore will have to suffice.

When you look at actual speeds, most Americans have fairly slow service

The gap between advertisement and reality isn't a function of technology—it applied to all kinds of broadband connections, from cable to DSL to fiber. The less-than-ideal speeds aren't necessarily the "fault" of the ISP, either; crufty computers, poky routers, misconfigured WiFi, transient line noise, and Internet congestion all play a role.

Whatever the cause, though, the FCC has concluded that advertising the "up to" speed is so inaccurate (and so confusing to consumers) that something better should be tried, sort of a "nutrition label" for Internet access. The National Broadband Plan suggested something along these lines and the new FCC report supports the idea, recommending that a standard truth-in-labeling form should be drafted by the FCC, "the National Institute of Standards and Technology, consumer groups, industry and other technical experts."

The New America Foundation last year proposed a standardized "truth-in-labeling" box with far more detail, and it used the new FCC report as a way to pitch its idea once more.

For now, broadband buyers should just expect their connections to offer about half the promised maximum speed. If that gets you down, just remember: you aren't in this alone. UK broadband users also see speeds only half as fast as advertised.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...advertised.ars





ISP's Top Data Hog Gobbles 2.7TB of Data in a Month
Nate Anderson

ISPs sometimes complain about "data hogs," often in the service of ridiculously tight-fisted data caps on Internet service. But there are users who deserve the porcine label, and Belgian ISP Telenet recently offered a rare picture of them. Can you imagine downloading 2,680GB of data in a single month?

One Belgian can. Between July 4 and August 6 of this year, Telenet's single largest user slurped up 2.7TB of data. He was followed by similarly impressive downloaders who transferred 1.9TB, 1.5TB, and 1.3 TB.

These numbers drop off quickly, though. Only a single user on the entire network topped 2TB in a month, while another seven topped 1TB.

Telenet recently published a list of its top 25 downloaders to a discussion forum—but the goal wasn't to demonize the users. Instead, it was to show other people just how much data could be transferred in a single month. The ISP hopes to encourage people to migrate up from its least-expensive plans (with 50GB and 80GB data caps, respectively) to its more expensive "fair use" plans.

In this case, "fair use" doesn't refer to copyright but to downloading. Telenet doesn't want to call its plans "unlimited," but it does say that "'fair use' means that you can send and receive a very large quantity of data via the Telenet network. Telenet will only ask you to adjust your consumption in the case of excessive volume consumption that may threaten the comfort of other subscribers."

If you turn out to be an "excessive" user (double the average data use for your speed tier), Telenet can throttle you down to 512 Kbps until your next billing period begins. Oh, and subscribers can only use this bandwidth to "disseminate legal data."

According to Rudolf van der Berg, a Dutch Internet consultant and policy analyst, Telenet has the fastest network in the area, so this list "pretty much is the top 25 [downloaders] for Belgium."

Still, the Belgians have nothing on Americans when it comes to downloads. One US ISP told me last year that a single user had transferred 4TB of data in a single month from a consumer Internet account, and we've received reports from readers who have been warned by their ISPs after sucking a cool terabyte of data down their home pipes in a month.

Such numbers are outliers, of course. ISPs have told us that average broadband user is in the range of 2-6GB per user, but you can see why some ISPs like Comcast prefer to set high monthly limits to rein in the few peak users, who can use more bandwidth (and, more importantly, cause more local congestion on a cable line) than hundreds of other customers combined.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...in-a-month.ars





“The Pirate Bay Really Sucks,” Says Co-Founder
Ernesto

Pirate Bay co-founder and former spokesperson Peter Sunde gave a talk at the Campus Party 2010, where he went over the site’s history and how it became the number one enemy of Hollywood and the music industry. Aside from reminiscing about some classic pranks and the famous raid on The Pirate Bay’s servers, Peter said that he hoped the site would be soon replaced by something better, as it really sucks.

At the Campus Party 2010 held in Mexico, a bare-footed Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde offered some background information on how the site became the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker in a relatively short period of time.

Sunde discussed in detail how they responded to threats from copyright holders, mockings that can be read in detail in the Pirate Bay’s legal section.

Aside from responses to takedown notices, The Pirate Bay crew has pulled off other ludicrous pranks, such as scooping the domain of IFPI to found the International Federation of Pirate Interests.

There is of course also a downside to all the hilarity as Hollywood and the music industry, helped by the US Government, managed to convince Swedish authorities to raid the site’s servers back in 2006. The raid eventually led to a criminal trial where Sunde and three others were sentenced to a year in prison, a verdict that will be appealed later this year.

For those who haven’t seen Sunde’s previous public performances, the talk gives a good overview of what motivated a group of friends to maintain a file-sharing platform that has become a major threat to the entertainment industry.

Towards the end of the talk Sunde, who is no longer associated with the site, gives his thoughts on the future of the BitTorrent giant. Here, he reiterates what he has said before. The Pirate Bay has served its purpose, and it’s time for something new to take its place.

“The Pirate Bay should die, really. Nobody works on The Pirate Bay, it’s just there and it works all the time. And it’s still growing,” Sunde said. “If you see the site, nothing has happened in five years and still more and more users are using it, which is bad.”

“We need some form of new technology. So, that’s kind of the future for The Pirate Bay, hopefully dying, and being replaced with something better of course, because the Pirate Bay really sucks,” he adds.

It is hard to disagree with Sunde here. Although The Pirate Bay has played a major role in popularizing BitTorrent, the site itself has brought few innovations recently, aside from installing pop-under ads maybe.

The fact that it’s still the largest torrent site shows how strong the brand is, but in its current form it is hard to imagine that the site will still be as big as it is now in a few years. Whether another torrent site takes over, or even a new technology, an era is about to end.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...ounder-100815/





Pirate Bay Typo Squatter Trying To Seize Site Trademark
enigmax

This Wednesday a security blog reported that several rogue sites are in operation which aim to pull in people who were aiming to reach The Pirate Bay, but accidentally entered the URL with typos. While this kind of activity is nothing new, there is a more interesting detail being overlooked. One of the companies behind the scheme is trying to register the Pirate Bay trademark in the United States.

For as long as illicit file-sharing has been around there have been entrepreneurs targeting those out for a free lunch – or a free movie or song. Since many thousands of people new to the downloading game are aware that what they are doing could land them in a little hot water, these individuals are perfect targets for scammers.

Rogue file-sharing sites have been flourishing for years and keeping up with them all is an impossible task. What most of them have in common though is that generally users don’t get what they expected from their visit. In some cases they do get what they want but end up paying, often quite high prices too through shady small print or confusing terms and conditions.

These days more often than not they get what they were looking for but also get something unexpected on top – such as some nasty malware.

Since victims are visiting the file-sharing equivalent of a clip joint, in many cases they find themselves with no legal recourse, meaning these sites run and run.

There are probably a dozen methods of pulling people into these sites, but the main technique is to utilize established file-sharing brands and themes. There are hundreds of scammy sites with ‘MP3 download’ in the title and countless others which play on the LimeWire, BitTorrent and eDonkey/eMule brands.

Yesterday the Sunbelt Blog reported on a scam, actually several different scams, which in part target two very well known brands, eMule and The Pirate Bay. The method of drawing people in relies on them typing in The Pirate Bay’s domain name incorrectly. A small typo here or there takes the victim to a fake domain which results in them downloading a piece of malware. All pretty standard stuff for file-sharing scammers.

However, while researching the companies and individuals behind the dozen or so domains, one particular name stood out. Several of the domains are registered to a company called Pioneer Enterprises and many have their true owners obscured by a privacy service. But a few, and indeed others not listed by Sunbelt, are registered to one Craig Pratka of Yaphank, New York.

Pratka appears to be behind a company called BladeBook, LLC which is the registrant of dozens of other domains. Nothing particularly unusual about that except that BladeBook seem to be branching out into a new area – trademarks.

June 30th 2009 was a pretty exciting day. Sweden’s Global Gaming Factory shocked the world by announcing that it would buy The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million in the hope that it could turn the site into a cash cow.

This event didn’t go unnoticed by BladeBook, LLC. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Pratka filed a U.S. federal trademark registration for PirateBay (Serial 77770964) on that same day, later going on to file registration for PiratesBay for good measure.

While both of those applications have now expired with the statement “Abandoned” others are in the pipeline.

On Thursday May 6th 2010, BladeBook filed trademark registrations for Pirate Bay (Serial 85032017) and Pirates Bay (Serial 85032022). The description given by BladeBook for ‘their’ business is as follows;

Provision of telecommunications access and links to computer databases, computer networks and the Internet, namely, providing users online access via a website to third party websites featuring downloadable audio-visual media content in the nature of full-length, partial-length, and clips from motion pictures, television programming, sports events, videos, music videos, music, and interactive games. FIRST USE: 20020611. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20070111

Last year Sweden-based Englishman and alcohol entrepreneur Colin Scragg registered The Pirate Bay (Serial 77787908) so that he could put the site’s famous logo on bottles of rum. That registration is now listed as “opposition pending”.

At the time of publication, Craig Pratka has not responded to our requests for comment.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-t...demark-100820/





Supreme Court Told P2P Users Can be "Innocent Infringers"
Nate Anderson

Two prominent lawyers in the fight against RIAA P2P lawsuits have taken their battle to the Supreme Court. Today, Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson and "Recording Industry vs. the People" blogger/lawyer Ray Beckerman joined with a few other law professors to ask the Supreme Court not to gut copyright law's "innocent infringer" defense.

The case concerns a woman named Whitney Harper. Several years ago, when she was a teenaged cheerleader, Harper downloaded music using P2P networks. She was caught by MediaSentry, which investigated file-sharing for the major music labels, but she claimed to be an "innocent infringer" under US copyright law, saying that in her early teen years she had thought P2P use to be just like listening to free music on the radio. That defense, accepted by the judge in her case, reduced the statutory minimum damages against Harper from $750 per song down to just $200.

On appeal, though, the decision was overturned by a three-judge panel in the Fifth Circuit, and it took a big whack at the law's innocent infringer protections. Copyright law allows that, "where the infringer sustains the burden of proving... that [she] was not aware and had no reason to believe that... her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200."

But the judges noted that the defense has a limitation: when a copyright notice "appears on the published... phonorecords to which a defendant... had access, then no weight shall be given to such a defendant's interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement in mitigation of actual or statutory damages." That is, since CDs contain printed copyright notices, Harper could not claim innocence of the law—even though she testified that none of the tracks in question came from compact discs.

Final damage award: $750 per song, multiplied by 37 songs, or $27,750.

The case has now been appealed to the Supreme Court, where Harper is represented by Kiwi Camara (who also represented Jammie Thomas-Rasset at her second trial). Camara studied under Nesson at Harvard, and now his former professor has filed an amici brief arguing that the appeals court decision is simply bizarre on its face. "The absurd conclusion is reached whereby notice in the record stores, never seen by the infringer, is sufficient to put a digital use, in his or her home, on notice of copyright liability," they write.

The law was written in an analog era, and it targeted those who copied tapes or CDs. Such people couldn't claim not to know about the copyrighted nature of the works they were copying—it was written right there on the cassette or CD! But in the digital world, this makes no sense. How could slapping a copyright notice on a CD alert anyone using a P2P network about anything?

"It is wrong to interpret a law passed by Congress to protect innocent infringers in an analog world so as to deny the mitigation of damages to digital infringers," write the law professors. "This pernicious doctrine deserves review before it becomes permanent and a precedential foundation for further impositions on Internet users."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...infringers.ars





Radio, RIAA: Mandatory FM Radio in Cell Phones is the Future
Nate Anderson

Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.

The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. "The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity," thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is "not in our national interest."

"Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do."

But the music and radio industries say it's a consumer-focused proposition, one that would provide "more music choices."

A grand bargain

Autumn, "that season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," approaches, and as Congress returns soon from recess, it will find its autumn agenda packed with supplicants who want the government to put its stamp on private negotiations. Google and Verizon famously released their own legislative framework on network neutrality earlier this month, and the broadcasters and music labels are nearing completion on a similar framework of their own.

In this case, the framework concerns public performance rights. Radio broadcasters and music labels are at each other's throats over the question of whether radio ought to pay performance rights to labels or artists when it plays their music on the air (currently, only songwriters get paid, not artists or labels). A bill percolating in Congress, the Performance Rights Act, would rationalize performance rights in the US; satellite radio and webcasters currently pay full performance fees to labels or artists, but radio does not, thanks to a longstanding exemption in copyright law.

The bill has already passed out of committee in both the House and Senate, but it is vigorously opposed by the broadcasters; they argue that radio provides valuable promotion to artists and shouldn't have to pay. Congress tried to force two of the main lobbying groups, the National Association of Broadcasters and musicFIRST (RIAA is a member), to hash out a solution last November. None was forthcoming, but talks have continued since then and are now close to completion.

The two sides hope to strike a grand bargain: radio would agree to pay around $100 million a year (less than it feared), but in return it would get access to a larger market through the mandated FM radio chips in portable devices.

"As regards the chip, this is a key issue for the radio industry," musicFIRST told Ars today. "musicFIRST, too, likes FM chips in cell phones, PDAs, etc. It gives consumers access to more music choices."

As the contours of this deal came into sight last week, the consumer electronics companies saw the prospect of a new government mandate, and one that was transparently about propping up a particular (and aging) business model.

"The performance royalty legislation voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee does not include this onerous and backward-looking radio requirement," said the CEA's Shapiro, and he wants to keep it that way.

The deal has not been finalized, we're told. When it is, the two sides still need to convince Congress to go along, but they're hopeful something can be wrapped up late this year or early in 2011.

Update: NAB stresses to us that no deal has been finalized. "However, if there is a decision made by the Board of Directors to go forward and seek legislation, including radio-enabled chips in mobile devices in possible legislation seems to us to be a reasonable idea," says NAB's Dennis Wharton.

As for the CEA criticism, "It's no surprise that CEA opposes this, since trade associations generally always oppose new rules. CEA also opposed DTV tuners in digital television sets; the FCC decided that having DTV tuners in TV sets was a good thing, and passed a rule that gave consumers access to local TV stations on DTV sets.

"We would argue that having radio capability on cell phones and other mobile devices would be a great thing, particularly from a public safety perspective. There are few if any technologies that match the reliability of broadcast radio in terms of getting lifeline information to the masses."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...the-future.ars





Firm Predicts HD Radio Boom By 2015
FMQB

A new report from ABI Research predicts a boom in HD Radio usage in the next five years. ABI attributes a pending increase in HD Radio to its current standardization in Europe, as well as HD technology being used in smartphones.

According to Media Daily News, ABI sees a worldwide "installed base" of HD Radios to hit 200 million by 2015, an impressive cumulative annual growth rate of 60 percent. ABI says that as of 2010, there were four million HD receivers sold in the U.S. and 13.5 million in Europe, led by the U.K.

The study points out that HD technology is going to be increasingly included in smartphones, partially in response to concerns about the amount of bandwidth and data being sucked up by streaming Internet radio. ABI Research senior analyst Sam Rosen points out "AT&T's decision to stop offering unlimited data plans, due largely to high data usage in New York and San Francisco."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1914787





Authors Explore Grateful Dead's Marketing Vision
Antony Bruno and Louis Hau

The Grateful Dead was renowned for many things. But were its members business role models as well? Brian Halligan, co-founder/CEO of marketing software firm HubSpot, and marketing strategist/author David Meerman Scott think they were.

The two self-described Deadheads have teamed up to write "Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead," which hit stores earlier this month. In their book, Halligan and Scott discuss how the Dead's members were pioneers in embracing many of the marketing and career-building strategies that artists pursue today, such as concentrating on touring, maintaining fan mailing lists, establishing their own ticketing office that offered the most loyal fans the best seats and offering "free" music by allowing fans to tape their shows.

In an interview with Billboard, Halligan and Scott expounded on the Dead's business legacy.

Billboard: Why write a marketing book about the Grateful Dead?

Brian Halligan: Both of us have been Dead fans for a long time. And every time I go to a show, I think about how unique it was that they built this whole phenomenon and how differently they went about their marketing. They completely threw away the rules of rock 'n' roll marketing and started from scratch. We did a webinar where we talked about the lessons learned from the Grateful Dead in marketing and it was super well-attended. So we said, "Screw it, let's write a book."

Billboard: What sorts of lessons can the music industry learn from the band's experience?

David Meerman Scott: They were very early adopters of communication technology and found ways to go around the record company to stay in touch with their fans. That's very applicable today.

Halligan: The Dead didn't make most of their money from album sales, (but) through their concerts. They were very aggressive in letting people "download" their content for free, (allowing them to record) their concerts -- the idea being that the more people who had that music, the more they'd play it, and the more other people will hear it and show up. I think they'd be very liberal in the use of new technology to spread the word and get more fans and sell more concert tickets.

Billboard: What about emerging artists who have access to those tools but are still trying to establish themselves?

Halligan: The Internet disproportionately benefits the little guy over the big guy. You don't have to be the Rolling Stones to get found online. It used to be this hierarchy, but today you can do a lot of it on the cheap yourself. If you give away some compelling content and your music's good, people will start discussing you and linking to you.

Scott: It's really about creating remarkable, free content. It's a really well-produced concert video. It's a snippet of the band backstage. People want to feel involved with the band, and these tools allow for bands to create the sorts of things that let fans get close to them in a way the Grateful Dead could not. I could only imagine the things they could have done given those tools.

Billboard: If the Grateful Dead got its start today, which social media tools do you think it would have used?

Scott: We saw a little bit of it when the surviving members toured in 2009 as the Dead. They did a few things that were particularly interesting. They had an iPhone application that included live streaming video and streaming audio directly from the concerts. They also had photographs from the tour in the app. And they tweeted the set list as the songs were being played onstage.

Billboard: Were there any big mistakes that the band made in terms of managing its business affairs?

Scott: Roadies were making $100,000 a year in the '70s and '80s. They paid their people a lot of money, they got health insurance -- it was a great gig. But the payroll got really big. They were now running a corporation with dozens and dozens of employees, front-office staff, roadies, truck drivers. What this meant was that they basically had to continually tour in order to just make payroll. They created a fairly unwieldy machine that was difficult to maintain.

Billboard: You've both written books on marketing and PR. How does the Grateful Dead compare with other topics you've written about?

Halligan: What's really interesting about the Grateful Dead is that they created their own category. I think it's more important than ever for companies to do the same: to think across industry boundaries and create their own category and get people to follow them. The nice thing about the Internet is that there are lots of potential customers out there, but the bad thing is that there are lots of potential competitors. So if you can create a very niche category, it's a very good time.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67C4WM20100813





Aspiro Claims Legal Streaming is Killing Filesharing
Eamonn Forde

Aspiro Music has published new research it claims shows legal streaming music services are luring users away from filesharing sites.

The Scandinavian company operates the subscription WiMP service in Norway and Denmark and commissioned Norstat to conduct the research in June this year.

It found that one in three Norwegians are now streaming music, with 68% of them saying they are playing more music as a result and 72% claiming they find new music this way.

The biggest claim of the research is that over half of all respondents (54%) said that since using streaming music services, they no longer download illegally.

There is still a gender imbalance in streaming according to the research figures, with only 19% of females using such services compared to 43% of males.

Aspiro Music CEO Per Einar Dybvik says, “We believe that efficient and payment-based streaming services will lead to a better economy for artists, record labels and rights holder's long term, and that it will turn around recent years' descending revenue trends.”
http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?s...de=1042232&c=1





Hearing Loss on the Increase Among U.S. Teens
Frederik Joelving

As many as one in five U.S. teenagers have some degree of hearing loss, according to researchers who said the problem is growing.

"Teenagers really underestimate how much noise they are exposed to," Dr. Josef Shargorodsky of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston told Reuters Health.

"Often the individual won't notice it, but even slight hearing loss may lead to differences in language development and learning," said Shargorodsky, who led the new research.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, compared national surveys from the early 1990s and the mid-2000s. Each included only a few thousand adolescents, but was carefully designed to represent the whole country.

In the first survey, about 15 percent of teenagers had some degree of hearing loss, as measured by trained staff. Some 15 years later, that number had risen by a third, to nearly 20 percent.

"That's a few kids per classroom who will have hearing problems," said Shargorodsky.

Most of the hearing loss was in one ear only. While it was usually slight, one in 20 adolescents had more pronounced problems -- up 50 percent since the first survey.

"This certainly is big news," said Alison Grimes, who manages the audiology clinic at Ronald Reagan-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. "It has some potential implications in terms of children's learning."

Hearing loss is very common in the elderly, Grimes said, but she added that it was concerning to see it creep into the younger age brackets.

In babies and young children, hearing problems are known to delay language development, which in turn influences performance in other areas. Slight hearing loss, for instance, makes it difficult to distinguish between high-frequency consonants like "s" and "f."

The science is less clear for adolescents, but it is easy to imagine how being hard of hearing could hamper learning, said Grimes, past president of the American Academy of Audiology.

"What is the primary job of a kid or teenager? It is to sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher lecturing," she told Reuters Health. "We know from a lot of data that noisy classrooms are one of the biggest challenges to learning."

Grimes often puts hearing aids on children with slight to mild impairments, although the decision depends on how much the child's life is being affected.

Shargorodsky said he was surprised by the new findings. Better medical care for ear infections -- one of the usual suspects in hearing damage -- should in theory have decreased the numbers, he said.

The reasons for the rise are still murky. When asked about noise exposure -- on the job, from firearms or recreational activities, for instance -- the teenagers didn't indicate any change.

But Shargorodsky said that might not necessarily be true. "We knew from before that it is difficult to ask this age group about noise exposure -- they underestimate it."

Few people would call it noise when they listen to music on their MP3 player, for instance.

"There is a difference between what we consider to be loud and what is physically intense and could be hazardous to the ear," said Grimes. Although it's not clear that these devices are to blame, Grimes said it was still a good idea to turn down the volume and take frequent breaks from listening.

But, having been the mother of two teenagers, she pointed out the advice would likely fall on deaf ears. She said the American Academy of Audiology had also contacted Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, about adding a volume limiter on iPods. But they never heard back.

For now, said Shargorodsky, "it is important to try to learn why there has been this increase in hearing problems."
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67G4Y320100817





Court OKs Covert iPhone Audio Recording
David Kravets

Using an iPhone to secretly record a conversation is not a violation of the Wiretap Act if done for legitimate purposes, a federal appeals court has ruled.

“The defendant must have the intent to use the illicit recording to commit a tort of crime beyond the act of recording itself,” (.pdf) the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.

Friday’s decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which involves a civil lawsuit over a secret audio recording produced from the 99-cent Recorder app, mirrors decisions in at least three other federal appeals courts.

The lawsuit concerns a family dispute over the making of a dying mother’s will. Days before the Connecticut woman died, her son secretly recorded a kitchen conversation between the son, mother, stepfather and others over how to handle her estate after her death.

The son, in a probate dispute, turned over the audio file to the court in 2008 to bolster his position concerning the estate of his late mother, who died without a will. The stepfather sued him, alleging a privacy breach under the Wiretap Act. A federal judge dismissed the case, and the stepfather appealed.

The appeals court ruled that, even if the son consented to his own taping, he could be sued for money damages for a breach of the Wiretap Act if and only if he did so with a nefarious intent.

“We affirm, and, in so doing, hold that the exception to the one-party consent provision of 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d) requires that a communication be intercepted for the purpose of a tortious or criminal act that is independent of the intentional act of recording,” the New York-based federal appeals court said.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...dio-recording/





Suit alleges Disney, Other Top Sites Spied on Users
Greg Sandoval

A lawsuit filed in federal court last week alleges that a group of well-known Web sites, including those owned by Disney, Warner Bros. Records, and Demand Media, broke the law by secretly tracking the Web movements of their users, including children.

Attorneys representing a group of minors and their parents filed the suit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, records show. The suit alleges that Clearspring Technologies, a software company that creates widgets and also offers a way to serve ads via widgets, is at the center of the wrongdoing.

Web site operators such as Disney, Playlist.com, and SodaHead are "Clearspring Flash Cookie Affiliates," the plaintiffs allege in their suit. Clearspring set "Flash cookies on (affiliate site) users' computers...online tracking device(s) which would allow access to and disclosure of Internet users' online activities."

The Web sites working with Clearspring knew users weren't just tracked at sites owned by affiliates, but were followed without their knowledge wherever they went online, the defendants wrote in their suit.

Clearspring and Disney representatives were not immediately available for comment Saturday. A representative for Warner Music Group, parent company of Warner Bros. Records, declined to comment.

A similar lawsuit was filed last month against Clearspring rival Quantcast, as well as a host of that company's clients, including ABC and NBC. The same law firms that filed that suit--Parisi & Havens, and the Law Office of Joseph Malley--were responsible for filing the recent complaint.

All the news lately about Web privacy--or the lack thereof--is enough to make anyone paranoid about logging on. The Wall Street Journal recently published an expose on Web privacy and concluded that "one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet...is the business of spying on Internet users." And we've seen controversies over privacy at Google and at Facebook. While Congress is looking into improving privacy protections for Web users, it would seem some people are going to take up the issue in court.

The suit against Clearspring was filed one year after researchers from UC Berkeley issued a report on how more than half of the Internet's best known Web sites use Adobe's Flash technology to surreptitiously gather information about their users, according to a story in Wired.com.

"Flash Cookies" are not affected when users try to remove traditional cookies with their browser's privacy controls.

"What's even sneakier," Wired.com reporter Ryan Singel wrote then, is "several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called 're-spawning,'" This means that a user may kill a cookie, but some technologies will bring it back to life by assigning that cookie's unique ID to a new cookie.

The report from the Berkeley researchers named two companies that reinstate cookies: QuantCast and Clearspring.

Clearspring makes the ubiquitous AddThis tool, which enables users to share links via e-mail or social-networking sites. According to the report from Berkeley, Clearspring has resurrected cookies for AOL.com, Answers.com, and Mapquest.com.

The kind of information Clearspring and its affiliates gathered was personal and far reaching, the plaintiffs wrote in their complaint. They allege the data was obtained by tracking users as they moved "across numerous Web sites, even spotting and tracking users when they accessed the Web from different computers, at home and at work.

"The sensitive information may include such things as users' video-viewing choices and personal characteristics," the plaintiffs continued, "such as gender, age, race, number of children, education level, geographic location, and household income."

In addition, the information Clearspring and its affiliates obtained may have included the materials a user viewed, purchased, or read, according to the filing. The data could reveal details about a person's financial situation, sexual preference, name, home, and e-mail addresses and telephone numbers. Perhaps one of the most disturbing charges that plaintiffs make is that health information could also be acquired by these companies.

Below, plaintiff's lawyers describe how information was allegedly taken from a person suffering from depression.

Among the laws that were allegedly violated by Clearspring and the other defendants are the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, California's Computer Crime law, and that state's Invasion of Privacy Act.

The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status and have asked for unspecified damages.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20013672-261.html





Feds: No Charges in Philadelphia School Laptop-Spying Case
AP

Federal prosecutors will not file charges against a school district or its employees over the use of software to remotely monitor students.

U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger says investigators have found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of webcam and screenshot images on school-provided laptops.

A student and his family sued the district in February, claiming officials invaded his privacy by activating the software. That case continues.

The district has acknowledged capturing 56,000 screen shots and webcam images so it could locate missing laptops.

Memeger says he decided to make Tuesday's announcement to close the matter before the start of the school year.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/educati...p-spying_N.htm





Aisle by Aisle, an App That Pushes Bargains
Stephanie Clifford

It’s like the most persistent sales clerk you’ve ever encountered.

Major retailers are working with a new smartphone application that tracks and offers promotions to shoppers as they move from outside the store, to counters, to cash registers — even inside the dressing room (now that’s persistence).

The app, called Shopkick, will be available on Tuesday for the iPhone and in the fall for Android phones. And with five major companies supporting it — Macy’s, Best Buy, Sports Authority and American Eagle Outfitters, along with the Simon Property Group, the prominent mall operator — it is getting a big introduction.

Customers with the Shopkick app will get points (called kickbucks) for entering a store. Pick up a putter at Sports Authority, and points drop into the app. Stop in the dressing room at American Eagle, and more points arrive.

The points are redeemable for gift cards at the retailers, along with music downloads or credits toward Facebook games. It takes a lot of points, however, to earn even a $5 gift card, although the stores say they may adjust the point system to make points more valuable.

Whether shoppers will get a kick, so to speak, out of being followed — and pinged from one floor of a store to the next — remains debatable. What retailers see as sophisticated marketing, privacy advocates see as intrusive. Shopkick knows “where you are, what you buy, your spending habits, passions, excesses,” Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said via e-mail.

Unlike apps like Foursquare, Shopkick tells retailers when users are inside, not just near, a store.

“That’s unusual,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Will it lift sales? That remains to be seen, but everyone is eager to experiment.”

The app lets stores “influence their behavior,” said Mikael Thygesen, who is the chief marketing officer at the Simon Property Group and the president of its Simon Brand Ventures division. Simon, along with the other companies using Shopkick, will install it in stores in and around New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles initially, with Chicago to follow next week.

Before introducing Shopkick, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, Cyriac Roeding, tested how willing consumers would be to “check in” to a location in exchange for a reward — in that case, money for charities. That app, called CauseWorld, was introduced in December 2009 and was downloaded more than 550,000 times in its first five months, with almost $1 million going to charities so far. Ms. Mulpuru called it “a success story of the retail-app world.”

Shopkick goes further.

On Monday, Mr. Roeding stood on a slim strip of sidewalk on 46th Street in Manhattan, trying to avoid Times Square tourists as he demonstrated the app. As he stood a few yards from the entrance to an American Eagle Outfitters store, the app showed him all the nearby stores where he could check in — including American Eagle or the tiny candy store nearby. For each check-in — which did not require him to actually go inside — he could receive 0 to 2 points.

That was fine, but “foot traffic is so important,” Mr. Roeding said. “Why does no one ever reward anyone for visiting a store?” By actually going inside the American Eagle store, the app told him, he could earn 35 kickbucks. The app knows someone is in a store by listening for an audio transmitter placed in each participating store; the phone’s microphone picks up the signal, which people cannot hear.

Once inside, Mr. Roeding swiped through offers: a 15 percent discount, a sale on jeans. Enter a dressing room — once a shopper tries on clothes, sales rise, retailers know — and posters on the walls offer points for scanning the bar code.

“It’s the first reward programs for desired behaviors,” Mr. Roeding said.

Shopkick earns a small fee for each kickbuck a customer earns. If a customer buys something after using the app, Shopkick gets a percentage of the price.

Right now, it takes a lot of kickbucks to earn anything — a $5 gift card at American Eagle requires 1,250 kickbucks. And retailers limit the number of eligible visits each day, so someone cannot sprint in and out of Best Buy all afternoon.

Soon, the retailers say, they hope to become more sophisticated, giving points or promoting items based on sex or age, where people live, how frequently they shop or their buying history.

The companies can even weave in rewards-card numbers, as Best Buy is already doing. With that, “we have the ability to target down to even an individual level,” said Mike Dupuis, the vice president for marketing and operations at American Eagle Outfitters Direct, the Web and mobile division of American Eagle.

Privacy advocates like Mr. Chester said that was problematic, especially given how that data could be combined with other available information about consumers, and that Shopkick’s privacy policy was too broad.

“What appears to be a relatively harmless trade-off of your information for rewards or discounts is really misleading,” he said.

Mr. Roeding said he believed that because consumers had to turn on the app, the privacy problems were minimal. “The device does not detect your phone, the phone detects your device,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/technology/17app.html





Facebook Feels Unfriendly Toward Film It Inspired
Michael Cieply and Miguel Helft

At the New York Film Festival next month, Hollywood will unleash “The Social Network,” a biting tale of the Silicon Valley giant Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Now Facebook must decide whether to bite back.

After fretting for months over how to respond, the company appears to have decided that its best bet is to largely ignore the movie and hope that audiences do the same — that “The Social Network” will be another failed attempt to bottle a generation, like “Less Than Zero,” and not culturally defining, as it aspires to be, in the way of “Wall Street” or “The Big Chill.”

Behind the scenes, however, Mr. Zuckerberg and his colleagues have been locked in a tense standoff with the filmmakers, who portray Facebook as founded on a series of betrayals, then fueled by the unappeasable craving of almost everyone for “friends” — the Facebook term for those who connect on its online pages — that they will never really have.

Mr. Zuckerberg, at 26 a billionaire, and his associates are wary of damage from a picture whose story begins with the intimacy of a date night at Harvard seven years ago and depicts the birth of a Web phenomenon in his dorm room.

By his account, and that of many others, much in the film is simply not true. It is based on a fictionalized book once described by its publicist not as “reportage” but as “big juicy fun.”

“It’s crazy because all of a sudden Mark becomes this person who created Facebook to get girls or to gain power,” said Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder who left in 2007 to join the Obama presidential campaign. “That’s not what was going on. It was a little more boring and quotidian than that.”

Scott Rudin, a producer of “The Social Network,” said two top Facebook executives, Elliot Schrage, the vice president of communications, and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, “saw the movie a while ago, and they do not like it.”

Mr. Rudin described months of backdoor contacts during which he tried to ease relations with Mr. Zuckerberg by letting colleagues of the Facebook chief read the script, and even by accommodating them with small changes. Facebook had insisted on bigger changes, which the producers declined to make. In the end, Mr. Rudin said, “We made exactly the movie we wanted to make.”

Mr. Zuckerberg declined to be interviewed for this article. In a recent onstage interview, he said, “Honestly, I wish that when people try to do journalism or write stuff about Facebook that they at least try to get it right.” He later added, “The movie is fiction.”

But Mr. Rudin said the movie was about conflicting truths, as recalled by Mr. Zuckerberg and his associates, largely in a pair of court cases that ended in settlements. “There is no such thing as the truth,” Mr. Rudin said.

In a statement, Facebook acknowledged that “it’s a sign of Facebook’s impact that we’re the subject of a movie — even one that’s fiction.”

“The Social Network” is being rushed into awards contention by a pair of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers, the director David Fincher and the writer Aaron Sorkin. The two worked without acquiring the rights from Mr. Zuckerberg and other subjects, relying instead on the journalist Ben Mezrich’s book, “The Accidental Billionaires,” and on the legal protection provided to free speech, along with Mr. Rudin’s diplomacy. The book drew heavily on interviews with Eduardo Saverin, a co-founder of Facebook and a former friend of Mr. Zuckerberg’s, who later felt that he was unfairly sidelined.

For months, Mr. Rudin said, he talked with Mr. Schrage and others about a collaboration that would have involved incorporating work from David Kirkpatrick, who was writing a separate book about Facebook. Eventually, it became clear “that we were not going to be working together,” Mr. Rudin said, though he maintained contact long enough to screen a nearly finished film for Mr. Schrage and Ms. Sandberg.

Filmmakers often elect not to buy rights for people who figure only marginally in a picture. That is also the case for television movies that adhere closely to the public record. But studios like to lock down the rights to their principal living subjects, if only so they will not be bound to literal truth in their portrayals.

Mr. Rudin said rights were unnecessary in this case, partly because of the extensive legal record.

Among the undisputed facts in Mr. Sorkin’s script, a version of which has long been posted online, is that Mr. Zuckerberg, as a 19-year-old college student, became deeply involved in the creation of an online social network that grew from a few hundred users in 2004 to perhaps half a billion today.

The film, which is set for release by Sony Pictures on Oct. 1, clearly aspires to importance. “Want a perfect body, want a perfect soul,” chants a chorus of voices over the part of the movie trailer that shows Mr. Zuckerberg, portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, rising to prominence like an Internet Sammy Glick.

In Mr. Sorkin’s telling, Mr. Zuckerberg is not so much villain as antihero, a flawed human being whose deep need for acceptance becomes the driving force behind a Web site that offers the illusion of it.

If “The Godfather” was about family and “Network” about rage, “The Social Network” appears to be mostly about emptiness.

“I’m talking about taking the entire social structure of college and putting it online,” Mr. Eisenberg sputters in his eureka moment.

The movie deals heavily with themes familiar to Hollywood, like friendship and betrayal, but makes little effort to explain Silicon Valley or the Facebook phenomenon. Indeed, much of the story borrows from depositions taken in cases pressed by former associates — Mr. Saverin, Divya Narendra and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss — over the founding and subsequent ownership and control of Facebook.

The film is also sprinkled with scenes of extravagant parties, and it is not clear how authentic they are. As of this week, Mr. Rudin said, one remaining question was to what extent the finished film would include a scene that depicted Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who was heavily involved with Facebook’s early history, delivering his dialogue while a pair of teenage girls offer partygoers lines of cocaine from bared breasts.

Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for Mr. Parker, declined to comment. But a person who was involved with research for the film, and spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with the producers, said that sequence was one of several that were mostly made up.

Mr. Rudin said his main concern about the scene involved how much could be shown without compromising the movie’s hoped-for PG-13 rating.

As for the portrayal of Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Rudin offers no apologies.

Mr. Zuckerberg is “simultaneously a builder and a destroyer,” Mr. Rudin said. “It’s a big subject. It’s a big American subject.”

Mr. Kirkpatrick, whose book, “The Facebook Effect,” is a reported account of the company’s history, says much of the film, including many of the details of Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal life, are made up and “horrifically unfair.” He said that Facebook might be forced to deliver a forceful rebuttal once the film has its premiere, especially if it turned out to be a hit.

“They are going to try to ignore it but are going to be unable to,” he said.

Michael Cieply reported from Los Angeles and Miguel Helft from Palo Alto, Calif. Brooks Barnes contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/bu...1facebook.html





Facebook ‘Dislike’ Button Is a Scam
Riva Richmond

If only we could register our “dislike” of scams on Facebook.

A “Dislike” button is the latest in a string of cons circulating on the social-networking site. It purports to offer users a way to express their aversion to links, videos and other annoying content posted by friends on Facebook, as an alternative to giving a thumbs up with Facebook’s “Like” button. To get it, they supposedly have to fill out a survey – at which point they unwittingly agree to recurring cellphone charges.

According to a blog post by security-software maker Sophos, tens of thousands of people have clicked on links leading to the scam, perhaps because many Facebook users have clamored for a dislike button.

The hook comes in a status update from a friend reading “I just got the Dislike button, so now I can dislike all of your dumb posts lol!!” or “Get the official DISLIKE button NOW!”, which includes a link to a rogue Facebook application. If you install the app – which involves handing the scammers permission to access your public information, post to your wall and retrieve your data at any time they like – it automatically posts a status update from you in the hopes of ensnaring your Facebook friends, too.

To actually get the button, you have to fill out one of six online market surveys. One called “How AWESOME Are You?” — sugar coated as a fun quiz — asks questions like “What do you do for fun?” The multiple-choice answers are: party with my friends, go shopping or watch cartoons by myself. Sounds innocuous enough, but you’re also asked for your cellphone number and the fine print shows you are agreeing to a pay a wireless-service charge of $5 a month (that may be hard to stop).

After all this, you’re pointed to a place where you can download a “Dislike” button that is freely available as a browser add-on from FaceMod. Ron Sharpp, chief executive of FaceMod, said his company is “in no way a part of” the survey scam, though he said he has received and turned down requests by survey companies to work with them on promotions. Mr. Sharpp says that to date about 600,000 people have downloaded FaceMod’s free add-on.

Fred Wolens, a Facebook spokesman, says the company is “working hard to block and remove malicious applications that claim to provide dislike functionality and inadvertently update people’s statuses.” He noted that there is no official “Dislike” button provided by Facebook and warned users not to click on strange links, even if they are from friends. On Monday, Facebook warned users about the scam on its security page.

The warning follows an upswing in scams on Facebook, which has become attractive to con artists looking to exploit a culture of sharing and trust on a site frequented by half a billion people.

So-called rogue applications have been appearing with some frequency recently. Users should take note that apps are made by third parties and, though subject to rules set by Facebook, are not vetted in advance. Always be careful what apps you add to your profile and weigh whether it makes sense to provide access to the information they seek to access.

Getting people to answer marketing surveys appears to be a major goal of recent rogue-app scams. Just this month, Sophos has warned of two others that are trying to lure people with a “shocking” video of an Anaconda coughing up a hippo (of all things) and of the pop star Justin Bieber being “naughty” on his webcam with a female fan.

Remove these apps — or other apps that you don’t use — by clicking “Account” at the top right of any Facebook page and then “Application Settings.” From there, you can check and change the permissions you’ve given any apps you have added or delete them altogether.
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/...-is-a-scam/?hp





New Firefox iFrame Bug Bypasses URL Protections
Dennis Fisher

There is a newly discovered vulnerability in Mozilla's flagship Firefox browser that could enable an attacker to trick a user into providing his login credentials for a given site by using an obfuscated URL. In most cases, Firefox will display an alert when a URL has been obfuscated, but by using an iFrame, an attacker can evade this layer of protection, possibly leading to a compromise of the user's sensitive information.

The problem of URL obfuscation is not a new one, and neither is it novel for attackers to use iFrames as an infection vector for visitors to a compromised Web site. Web-based attacks have been employing various forms of URL obfuscation for years now, and iFrames are a favorite of attackers because of their ability to perform malicious actions in the background of a victim's Web session. The new bug in Firefox could allow an attacker to combine these two techniques to prevent the browser from warning the victim that a URL has been modified, removing a key protection mechanism from the equation.

The new flaw, which already is in the Mozilla Bugzilla system, is in all of the current versions of Firefox, according to researchers at Web application security firm Armorize. URL obfuscation often is used by attackers to hide the true address of a malicious site that they're directing users to, typically as part of a phishing or drive-by download attack. But browsers now check for this behavior and will warn users when a URL appears to have been tampered with, explaining that this may not be the site they're looking for.

The Firefox bug defeats this protection, the Armorize researchers say.

"On performing analysis of various malware, a bug has been noticed in all version of Firefox which fails to generate an alert when obfuscated URL is being placed in Iframes. In certain cases, it can be used effectively in spreading malware and stealing sensitive information. While discussions on BugZilla, it is noticed that Firefox behavior is completely different in these two scenarios which should not happen," Aditya Sood of Armorize said in a blog post on the bug.

Many of the mass SQL injection attacks and other large-scale Web-site compromises that have cropped up in the last couple of years have used iFrames as part of their attack vector. The iFrames open in the background when users hit a given compromised page and often are used to deliver the actual malicious payload to the target machines.
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/ne...ections-081710





Pirate Party Strikes Hosting Deal With Wikileaks
Ernesto


Assange and Falkvinge

During his visit to the the Swedish capital Stockholm, Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange struck a deal with the local Pirate Party. The Party, which participates in the national elections next month, will host several new Wikileaks servers to protect the freedom of the press and help the whistleblower site to carry out its operation.

After releasing more than 90,000 government documents last month related to the war in Afghanistan, Wikileaks was labeled a serious threat by the U.S. Government. With more leaks coming up, Wikileaks can use all the support it can get, especially from political movements around the globe.

One of the political parties that has shown interest in helping Wikileaks is the Swedish Pirate Party. Two weeks ago they offered to host the whistleblower site, and during a visit to Sweden Wikileaks’ Julian Assange accepted this offer and signed a deal.
“I’m delighted that we’re able to help WikiLeaks,” Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak in a response to the news that was made public today.

“I love opportunities to demonstrate that one of the biggest differences between us and the other parties is that we positively leap at any and all changes to take real responsibility for changing the world, rather than just commission reports and avoiding blame like the archetypal politician,” Falkvinge added.

For Wikileaks, support from the Swedish Pirate Party is a significant win. If the Party is voted into Parliament next month it could use Parliamentary immunity to run the site from inside the Swedish Government, making it impossible to take it offline through legal procedures.

“We welcome the help provided by the Pirate Party,” Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange said commenting on the agreement. “Our organisations share many values and I am looking forward to future ways we can help each other improve the world.”

Aside from hosting, Assange also hopes that the new Swedish Parliament will assist the site in other ways. Passing legislation that guarantees press freedom so Wikileaks and similar operations can do their work freely, is high on his wish list.

“We hope that the new Parliament will give serious consideration to further strengthening Sweden’s press protection legislation. Western democracies are not always as free as one might think, and freedom of the press needs constant vigilance,” Assange said.

“In particular, we would welcome Sweden copying Iceland’s Modern Media Initiative, something that the Pirate Party also desires.”

Pirate Party leader Falkvinge further stressed the importance of Wikileaks’ work, which has been sabotaged by corrupt or abusive organizations that try to conceal the truth from the public. “We desire to contribute to any effort that increases transparency and accountability of power in the world,” he said.

Assange on his turn recognized that his organization is fighting for much of the same ideals as the Pirate Party, and said that there might be more joint projects between the two outfits in the future. “We see more opportunities down the road in cooperating with the Pirate Party and look forward to exploring those options,” Assange noted.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party...ileaks-100817/





WikiLeaks Founder Suspected of Rape in Sweden
AP

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is suspected of rape in Sweden, where authorities have issued a warrant for his arrest, officials said Saturday.

The 39-year-old Australian denied the allegations on WikiLeaks' Twitter page, saying they ''are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing.''

Assange, who has sought Swedish legal protection for the whistle-blower website, is suspected of molestation and rape in two separate cases, said Karin Rosander, a spokeswoman for the Swedish Prosecution Authority.

''He should get in contact with police so that he can be confronted with the suspicions,'' Rosander told The Associated Press.

She said a prosecutor in Stockholm issued the arrest warrant on Friday. The move means police are ordered to seek his arrest as part of an investigation but doesn't necessarily mean that criminal charges will be filed.

''The next step is that we interrogate him,'' Rosander said. ''Then we'll see what happens.''

WikiLeaks has angered the Obama administration by publishing thousands of leaked documents about U.S. military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange said Wednesday that WikiLeaks plans to release a new batch of 15,000 documents from the Afghan war within weeks.

He was in Sweden last week partly to apply for a publishing certificate to make sure the website, which has servers in Sweden, can take full advantage of Swedish laws protecting whistle-blowers.

He also spoke at a seminar hosted by the Christian faction of the opposition Social Democratic party and announced he would write bimonthly columns for a left-wing Swedish newspaper.

WikiLeaks commented on the rape allegations on its Twitter page. Apart from the comment from Assange, the page had a link to an article in Swedish tabloid Expressen, which first reported the allegations.

''We were warned to expect 'dirty tricks.' Now we have the first one,'' one Tweet said.

''Expressen is a tabloid; No one here has been contacted by Swedish police. Needless to say this will prove hugely distracting,'' said another.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010...WikiLeaks.html





Swedish Rape Warrant for Wikileaks' Assange Cancelled

Sweden has cancelled an arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on accusations of rape and molestation.

The Swedish Prosecution Authority website said the chief prosecutor had come to the decision that Mr Assange was not suspected of rape but did not give any further explanation.

The warrant was issued late on Friday.

Wikileaks, which has been criticised for leaking Afghan war documents, had quoted Mr Assange as saying the charges were "without basis".

That message, which appeared on Twitter and was attributed directly to Mr Assange, said the appearance of the allegations "at this moment is deeply disturbing".

In a series of other messages posted on the Wikileaks Twitter feed, the whistle-blowing website said: "No-one here has been contacted by Swedish police", and that it had been warned to expect "dirty tricks".

In its "official blog" on Saturday before the warrant was cancelled, Wikileaks said it was "deeply concerned about the seriousness of these allegations. We the people behind Wikileaks think highly of Julian and and he has our full support".

The current whereabouts of Mr Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, are unclear.

The Swedish Prosecution Authority website said chief prosecutor Eva Finne had come to the decision that Julian Assange was not subject to arrest.

In a brief statement Eva Finne said: "I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape."

The website said there would be no further immediate comment.

Earlier, Karin Rosander, communications head at Sweden's prosecutors' office, said there were two separate allegations against Mr Assange, one of rape and the other of molestation. She gave no details of the accusations. She said that as far as she knew they related to alleged incidents that took place in Sweden.

Media reports say Mr Assange was in Sweden last week to talk about his work and defend the decision by Wikileaks to publish the Afghan war logs.

Last month, Wikileaks published more than 75,000 secret US military documents on the war in Afghanistan.

US authorities criticised the leak, saying it could put the lives of coalition soldiers and Afghans, especially informers, at risk.

Mr Assange has said that Wikileaks is intending to release a further 15,000 documents in the coming weeks.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11049316





WikiLeaks Lawyer Says Pentagon Given Access to Unpublished Secret Documents
Mark Hosenball

A lawyer representing the whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks says U.S. government officials have been given codes and passwords granting them online access to official U.S. government documents that WikiLeaks so far has not published.

Timothy Matusheski, a lawyer from Hattiesburg, Miss., who says he represents whistle-blowers and has been in touch with both WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and at least one government official involved in investigations of WikiLeaks, said the site had set up a “secure channel” through which authorized users could access the unpublished material. He said credentials for using this channel had been forwarded to representatives of the U.S. government whom he did not identify. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Matusheski indicated that the reason WikiLeaks had taken these steps was to make good on its offer to try to work with U.S. authorities to remove from reports, published in the future by the Web site, sensitive information that could put innocent lives in jeopardy.

Matusheski said U.S. officials had even been given access to an online mechanism through which they would be able to redact what they consider potentially sensitive information. Matusheski says he himself has been given only a portion of the codes needed to access the unpublished material. So, he says, the U.S. government now has wider and more complete access to the material than he did.

Matusheski did not explain how WikiLeaks allegedly passed this information on to government representatives, and he said he has no knowledge of whether anyone in the government has actually used the codes to take a look at unpublished material in WikiLeaks' hands.

Earlier this week, Assange and Pentagon spokesmen indulged in a bout of long-distance name-calling, with Pentagon spokesmen denying that U.S. defense officials had “any direct contact with WikiLeaks," and Assange insisting, in an interview with the Associated Press in Stockholm, that the U.S. had expressed a willingness to discuss a request from WikiLeaks that U.S. officials help the Web site redact Afghan war documents that it has in its possession but hasn’t yet published. In an e-mail to Declassified, Assange insisted: “We are correct, the Pentagon lies or misleads, as per usual.”

Not long after the “liar, liar” accusations began flying between Assange and Pentagon spokesmen, WikiLeaks posted, via Twitter, a copy of an Aug. 16 letter that Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, had sent to Matusheski. In the letter—which was sent out before the Pentagon spokesman gave us their denials of any “direct” contact with WikiLeaks—Johnson claimed that Matusheski, on behalf of WikiLeaks, had sought a conversation with someone in the U.S. government to discuss “harm minimization” with regard to 15,000 official Pentagon reports on the Afghan war that WikiLeaks has been threatening to make public.

In the letter, however, Johnson reiterates the Defense Department’s position as it was stated by official spokesmen to Declassified: “The Department of Defense will not negotiate some ‘minimized’ or ‘sanitized’ version of a release by WikiLeaks of additional U.S. Government classified documents. The Department demands that nothing further be released by WikiLeaks, that all of the U.S. Government classified documents that WikiLeaks has obtained be returned immediately, and that WikiLeaks remove and destroy all of these records from its databases.”

The disclosure that the Pentagon had sent its letter to Matusheski before its spokesmen issued denials to Declassified of “direct” contacts with WikiLeaks attracted a certain amount of commentary in the blogosphere (see this item by Salon's Glenn Greenwald) questioning the credibility of the official Pentagon story and the sincerity of assertions by Pentagon reps that WikiLeaks alone is putting innocent lives in jeopardy.

A second WikiLeaks lawyer, Julie Turner of Palo Alto, Calif., told Declassified on Friday that earlier this summer—after news stories began to appear about the arrest of a U.S. soldier alleged to be a WikiLeaks source, but before WikiLeaks published the first tranche of its trove of Pentagon documents on the Afghan war—she had engaged in an after-hours call with State Department officials in which she gave them reliable contact information for WikiLeaks, whose leading figure, Assange, is notorious for being hard to reach.

However, neither Turner nor Matusheski said they ever had an indication from any official representative of the U.S. government that authorities were in any way willing to engage or cooperate with WikiLeaks in prepublication review of any official reports in the Web site’s possession. Hence, while both WikiLeaks and government officials sometimes appear to have tried spinning the facts to their advantage, both parties appear to have at least been consistent in stating their respective positions on cooperation with each other—or lack thereof.

Matusheski added that on Friday, an Army investigator working on the case of Bradley Manning, an Army soldier linked to WikiLeaks who has been charged with unauthorized handling of classified reports, had contacted him about a possible meeting next week. Matusheski said the Army investigator, Chuck Ames, said he expected to bring along three colleagues, including a lawyer—presumably a federal prosecutor—from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Matusheski said Ames did not explain the purpose of the meeting, but that the Army investigator did advise Matusheski that his party intended to respect any attorney-client privilege he wished to assert.
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/declas...documents.html





No Clear Winner in Australian Voting
Meraiah Foley

Australia’s Parliament faced the rare prospect of a stalemate on Saturday after voters apparently failed to deliver a clear majority to either the governing center-left Labor Party or a conservative opposition coalition in the tightest race seen here in decades.

With about three-quarters of the votes counted late Saturday, lawmakers from both major parties conceded they were unlikely to get enough votes to form a majority in the House of Representatives, where the government is formed.

Disgruntled with the two major opponents, voters turned in record numbers to independent candidates and the Greens party, which captured its first seat in the House and a potentially tie-breaking bloc of votes in the Senate.

Support for the Greens was seen as a repudiation by some traditional Labor voters of that party’s decision to shelve its proposed cap-and-trade energy plan until after 2012.

Shortly before midnight Saturday, Labor had 60 seats in the 150-member House and the conservative coalition of the Liberal and National Parties, led by Representative Tony Abbott, had 61 seats, according to the Australian Electoral Commission.

Unofficially, the Labor Party was claiming 70 seats, and the conservatives 72.

The close results, and the unusually strong showing by the independents and the Greens, raised the possibility that neither party would be able to secure the 76 seats needed to form a majority government in its own right, an event not seen in Australia for 70 years.

If the two parties remained locked in a dead heat, as many analysts and senior lawmakers predict, the winner of Saturday’s election would be determined through a process of intense negotiation by both Labor and the conservative coalition with the Greens and at least three independent House members, who come from mainly conservative, rural constituencies.

“There are anxious days ahead,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard told a subdued gathering of Labor Party supporters in her home city of Melbourne.

“Obviously this is too close to call,” she said. “There are many of seats where the result is undecided and where it will take a number of days of counting to determine the result.”

Mr. Abbott said Labor’s inability to gain a clear majority after sweeping to power in 2007 with a 13-seat advantage meant that the government had “lost its legitimacy.” He said he would start immediate talks with the three independents.

“This is no time for premature triumphalism,” Mr. Abbott said. But he added, “There should be an appreciation that this has been a great night for the Australian people.”

Ms. Gillard, 48, a former lawyer and labor union advocate, became the country’s first female prime minister in June after she ousted the once popular Kevin Rudd in a sudden mutiny that shocked the country. Mr. Rudd’s approval ratings had been declining for some weeks, and many Labor officials were convinced that the election could not be won with him as party leader.

But Ms. Gillard’s campaign has been marred by internal party bickering and a lingering sense of resentment among some voters — particularly in Mr. Rudd’s home state of Queensland — over the former leader’s abrupt removal.

Mr. Abbott, a 52-year-old Rhodes scholar who trained briefly for the priesthood before turning to politics, has sought to capitalize on that sentiment, telling supporters that Saturday’s vote was a “referendum on the political execution of a prime minister.”

The cliffhanger results Saturday are a stunning reversal for Labor, which, for much of Mr. Rudd’s tenure, enjoyed some of the highest approval ratings of any Australian government.

Yet despite claiming credit for keeping Australia out of recession during the global financial crisis, Labor has come under sustained criticism in recent months for its decision not to press forward with its cap-and-trade plan for carbon emissions and a battle with the powerful resources sector over a proposed tax on iron ore, coal and other commodities that form the backbone of Australia’s resource-driven economy.

If Labor were to lose, it would be the first government since 1931 to be turned out of power after just one three-year term.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/wo...australia.html





Needles in a Haystack

A 20-something named Austin Heap has found the perfect disguise for dissidents in their cyberwar against the world’s dictators.
William J. Dobson

For Austin Heap, there was nothing particularly remarkable about June 14, 2009. The 25-year-old computer programmer was home in his San Francisco apartment, spending his evening the same way he spent much of his free time: playing videogames. “I was sitting at my computer, as I usually do, playing Warcraft,” recalls Heap. “My boyfriend asked if I was following what was going on in Iran, and I said no. I was busy killing dragons.”

Later that night, Heap logged on to his Twitter account. He read about the growing number of Iranians claiming that their votes had been stolen in the presidential election, and he saw people complaining that the government was censoring their cries of fraud and election rigging. For Heap—who says, “I am for human rights, the Internet, and I check out from there”—something clicked. At that moment, he decided to become involved in a battle more than 7,000 miles away in a country he admits he knew next to nothing about. “I remember literally saying, 'OK, game on.'”

Since the Internet came into its own, there has been no shortage of breathless expectation about what technology would do for the world’s least-free places. Put simply, democratizing technologies were supposed to lead to democracy. They didn’t. Only later did people realize that the technology was just a tool; what mattered was how it was used. And authoritarian regimes initially proved to be more sophisticated than their opponents at wielding these new weapons.

Now a new generation of hacktivists like Heap is fighting back. They are not seeking silver-bullet solutions but scalable technologies that will unlock the one advantage the people always had—the sheer power of their numbers. “The technology variable doesn’t matter the most,” says Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping for Ushahidi, a group of digital activists doing cutting-edge work in open-source interactive mapping. “It is the organizational structure that will matter the most. Rigid structures are unable to adapt as quickly to a rapidly changing environment as a decentralized system. Ultimately, it is a battle of organizational theory.”

That’s one of the first lessons Heap learned when he took on the Iranians. In many authoritarian countries with a closely monitored Internet, citizens evade the state by using proxy servers that mask their identity as they surf the Web. So, at first, Heap thought it would be helpful to create safe proxies that people in Iran could use. He posted advice on his blog about how people could run proxies from home. He soon had nearly 10,000 people following his instructions. But his efforts were almost pointless; Heap was taking on the Islamic Republic in a game of one on one, and he was no match. The regime’s censors apparently read his blog, too, and simply trailed behind him, closing proxies as he pronounced them ready to use. “We could watch Iran respond,” says Heap. “We would do something, and they would block it.”

But then he had a stroke of luck. Someone with the online handle Quotemstr asked Heap to join a specific chatroom. Quotemstr wasn’t interested in making idle conversation. He was a disaffected Iranian official with information to share. He provided Heap with a copy of the internal operating procedures for Iran’s filtering software. The 96-page document was in Farsi, but the diagrams told Heap what he needed to know. (A computer savant, Heap learned his first programming language in fourth grade; he was programming in 18 languages by his senior year in high school.) “Four days ago I was killing dragons with my firepower,” he recalls, “and now I was getting leaks from inside the Iranian government.”

Less than a month and many all-nighters later, Heap and a friend had created Haystack. The anti-censorship software is built on a sophisticated mathematical formula that conceals someone’s real online destinations inside a stream of innocuous traffic. You may be browsing an opposition Web site, but to the censors it will appear you are visiting, say, weather.com. Heap tends to hide users in content that is popular in Tehran, sometimes the regime’s own government mouthpieces. Haystack is a step forward for activists working in repressive environments. Other anti-censorship programs—such as Tor, Psiphon, or Freegate—can successfully hide someone’s identity, but censors are able to detect that these programs are being run and then work to disable the communication. With Haystack, the censors aren’t even aware the software is in use. “Haystack captures all outgoing connections, encrypts them, and then masquerades the data as something else,” explains Heap. “If you want to block Haystack, you are gonna block yourself.”

The biggest hurdle Heap had to clear was, surprisingly, his own government. Because of the United States’ strict sanctions laws barring trade with Iran, it was actually illegal for Heap to distribute a software program in Iran, even if it was aimed at promoting freedom. But his innovation caught the attention of the State Department, and it was fast-tracked for speedy approval. In the past year, he has also cofounded the Censorship Research Center, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting censorship everywhere. When I first met Heap in January, he was regularly shuttling to Washington, D.C., for meetings at State and Treasury and with senior lawmakers. “Tomorrow I meet with [Sens. John] McCain, [Bob] Casey, maybe [Carl] Levin, but I don’t know if I will have enough time,” he told me, wearing jeans and a well-worn T shirt that said SUPER CHEVROLET SERVICE.

With his U.S. government waivers in hand, Heap is now deploying Haystack in Iran. His one-word mantra is “scalable.” Heap intends to gradually develop Haystack’s presence in the country. He has started to share it with select activists and trusted individuals on an invitation-only basis. They will then be asked to share it with their friends. It is the same model that was originally followed by Google’s Gmail. The targeted approach is smarter from a security standpoint. Also, he doesn’t want the software to collapse from low-value demand. “It is better to focus on people who are active than people pirating music,” says Heap. “Organic growth is going to be much more successful than trying to blanket the country.”

Of course, Iran will use any method—sophisticated or not—to counter such efforts. The Iranian regime has long made its presence felt online, blocking sites or redirecting traffic to government-run Web sites. Tehran frequently throttles the country’s bandwidth, especially when protests are planned, to make uploading video or images painfully slow, if not impossible. And, just as the Revolutionary Guards have taken a greater role in most areas of the country’s political, social, and economic life, so too have they become the dominant force policing Iran’s virtual world. In May, a senior member of the Revolutionary Guards bragged that the regime has built the world’s second-largest cyberarmy, after China’s. Created last year and known as the Cyber Defense Command, this unit is believed to be behind most of the hacking and infiltration of opposition Web sites and e-mail accounts. Heap says it would be naive to think the regime won’t target Haystack, and he claims to have thought through not only the countermeasures “one, two, and three … but also four, five, and six.”

The only way to stay ahead in this cyberwar, though, is to play offense, not defense. “If it is a cat-and-mouse game,” says Meier of Ushahidi, “by definition, the cat will adopt the mouse’s technology, and vice versa.” His view is that activists will have to get better at adopting some of the same tactics states use. Just as authoritarian governments try to block Voice of America broadcasts, so protest movements could use newer technology to jam state propaganda on radio or TV. In Iran, activists are experimenting with ways to use new tech tools to cripple the government’s surveillance cameras, effectively blinding its eyes in the sky. The hacktivists will also have to reappraise their technology constantly, to see how else it might be used. Meier’s own organization began as a Web platform to map violence erupting in Kenya after that country’s elections in 2007. As a tool, Ushahidi—which means “testimony” in Swahili—works in near real time to create crisis maps by integrating reports from people on the ground via e-mail, text, or the Web. The technology proved critical in shaping the disaster response to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and is credited with saving hundreds of lives. Although Ushahidi is best known today for aiding humanitarian missions, opposition groups are now using this scalable open-source technology to expose election tampering or voter intimidation in places like Burma and Sudan. It has also been downloaded in Iran.

The gradual, go-slow approach of Heap and others shouldn’t mask their ambition. After such an extraordinary year, I asked him where he hoped his organization would be a year from now. “I hope we are ready to take on the next country,” he replied. “We will systematically take on each repressive country that censors its people. We have a list. Don’t piss off hackers who will have their way with you. A mischievous kid will show you how the Internet works.” The world’s dictators should consider themselves on notice.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/06/n...-haystack.html





Whitewash in Wartime
Ari Karpel

WHEN information about a war comes from a government eager to promote and justify it, how can we know which parts to believe and which to reject as propaganda?

Two new documentaries tease apart that question in relation to two very different wars and two very different governments. “The Tillman Story,” opening Friday in New York and Los Angeles, pokes holes in the narrative surrounding Pat Tillman, the National Football League player who died fighting for his country in Afghanistan and was posthumously promoted to corporal. And “A Film Unfinished,” a re-examination of the only moving images in existence of the World War II-era Warsaw Ghetto, which opens Wednesday in New York and Friday in Los Angeles, presents an hour of never-before-seen footage — all of it shot by the Nazis and much of it staged.

The driving force in “The Tillman Story” is Mary Tillman, Pat’s mother, as the director Amir Bar-Lev follows her and her family’s quest to learn the facts surrounding the 2004 death of her son. Hailed by the Bush administration as a hero, Corporal Tillman was said to have died saving the lives of his fellow soldiers in a blaze of Taliban gunfire.

But that description turned out to be false. The family’s suspicions and their insistence that Corporal Tillman not be used as a publicity pawn for the war pushed the Army to revise its account, revealing that Corporal Tillman was probably killed by “friendly fire.”

“His death should have been criminally investigated from the very beginning,” insisted Ms. Tillman, known as Dannie, in a phone interview. “By making up the story they didn’t try to find out what really happened.”

It’s unlikely we’ll ever know what really happened. Stop-and-start investigations, politicians’ disingenuous declarations, even the dogged determination of a mother poring over reams of redacted investigative interviews did not lead to clear answers. As the film describes, it has led to more suspicions of a cover-up.

A 2007 Congressional hearing held no one accountable but a retired three-star general, Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr.; and the news media reported that the government had apologized for the “accident” of Corporal Tillman’s death. The tragic-but-inspiring narrative, about a square-jawed patriot who had walked away from a multimillion dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals post-9/11 to fight terrorism abroad, persisted.

Mr. Bar-Lev, who watched hundreds of segments of television footage about Corporal Tillman, said in a phone interview that electronic news outlets took a simplistic tack: “You see Pat’s face, it’s superimposed with the twin towers, then there’s a silhouette of a soldier on a high ground.” Ms. Tillman said, “We wanted him to be portrayed as a person and not as some kind of icon.” The film, narrated by Josh Brolin, attempts to depict a more complex man who would not publicly reveal his reasons for enlisting.

Such ambiguity may be too nuanced for the push to war. Art Herbig, an assistant professor of communications at Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne, said that people naturally crave clear-cut answers, especially now. “We all have to condense and manage the amount of information we’re bombarded with,” said Mr. Herbig, who recently completed a dissertation on the fragmented public discourse about Corporal Tillman, his childhood friend. “But we’re talking about the agency to take advantage of that impulse. There are people who found a way to condense the information about Pat Tillman that would make it the most beneficial to them.”

Initially uninterested in cooperating on a documentary, the Tillmans decided to work with Mr. Bar-Lev when they learned that the filmmaker, who had made the 2007 documentary “My Kid Could Paint That,” was very much on their side. “People are shocked by what they see,” Mr. Bar-Lev said of his film. “They should be doubly shocked to know that all this material was very easy to find.”

The 62-minute reel of Warsaw ghetto footage that is the basis for Yael Hersonski’s “Film Unfinished” was also surprisingly easy to find.

When Ms. Hersonski’s grandmother — a survivor of the three-square-mile area where nearly half a million Jews lived before being sent to concentration camps (and most to their deaths) — died in 2005, Ms. Hersonski, then an editor of Israeli television documentaries, resolved to learn what she could of the period.

When she started exploring the holdings at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, she was told of this footage, which had only been viewed by film archivists.

For decades one- to two-minute bits have been shown again and again at museums and in documentaries and educational materials about World War II, tagged as something like “Jewish Life in the Ghetto,” and always presented as historical fact. But the reel that Ms. Hersonski found showed Nazi cameramen entering the frame and takes being redone. Never-before-seen images include lavish dinner parties with fine crystal and flowers — things not known to be found in the ghetto.

“I started to reflect about the time when no witnesses are left to remember — a time which is now,” she said in a phone interview from Melbourne, Australia, where her film was showing at a festival. “Nearly all of them are dead. Then what happens? The archives are our only source.”

Ms. Hersonski does not condemn the historians, documentarians and museum curators who have presented the footage unquestioned for decades. “For sure, they were aware that they were using Nazi propaganda footage,” she said, explaining that no one else had cameras in the ghetto. “They had to ignore it in fact because they had no other cinematic footage to use.”

Stephen Smith, executive director of the Shoah Foundation, is someone who has used the fragments of images in projects at museums. “I just assumed that I was looking at the full clips available, because that was all that was in the archives where I was working,” he said. “I never did question this, as obviously the filmmaker did here. Where did all this come from? What was it a part of? She’s put it all into a more rigorous context, and that’s truly important.”

It’s unclear what the Nazis had intended for the footage. The film does not solve that mystery or others, like where the footage was for decades (Ms. Hersonski said it was found in an Air Force base in Ohio in the 1990s) and why no one else has brought it to public attention. “It was one moment, a decision to tell what is interesting to me and not try to tell everything, or it will collapse,” she explained.

“Graphic nudity” and “disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities” included in the documentary earned “A Film Unfinished” an R rating from the Classification and Rating Administration of the Motion Picture Association of America, a decision the director appealed and lost. “It limits our possibilities” for using the film as an educational tool in schools and libraries, Ms. Hersonski lamented. (It is also a more restrictive rating than the PG-13 given the 1998 Holocaust documentary “The Last Days,” which had Steven Spielberg as an executive producer, for similar images.)

Nevertheless Ms. Hersonski said she hopes her discovery deepens a collective understanding of life in the ghetto. “When we show the whole sequence and not just bits and pieces,” she said, “we can learn more about what’s happened rather than cut out things that don’t match the simple narrative.”

Both “A Film Unfinished” and “The Tillman Story” probe beneath those easily constructed narratives. “Truth is a loaded word,” Mr. Herbig said. “What these two films are doing is contributing to our understanding. As long as people keep contributing to our understanding, then we keep moving forward to something that is, for lack of a better turn of phrase, less false.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/movies/15tillman.html





File-Sharing Bill Could Extend Surveillance Culture – Bott

Lawyer dubs bill “the secret deal with business”
Stephen Bell

Civil liberties lawyer Michael Bott thinks the crack opened in access to personal computer activities by the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Bill might be the first of several consensual arrangements between ISPs and agents of law enforcement to allow access to such data at the ISP level without the subject being aware a search has been conducted.

Such access could erode the “no hacking” reassurance contained in the Justice and Electoral Select Committee’s interim report on the Search and Surveillance Bill, Bott suggests.

What he calls “the secret deal with big business” over the file-sharing bill establishes a process that could be used for other purposes but, more importantly, puts in place “a culture of acceptance” of covert surveillance on the basis of inconclusive evidence, he says.

If police or another agency search your premises physically in your absence, “they have to leave a copy of the warrant on your mantelpiece”, he says. An equivalent provision should apply to an electronic search; the exercise of a search right should be “technologically neutral”.

Bott is still concerned about the degree of surveillance permitted without a warrant under the bill – including surveillance through covertly installed video or audio devices for up to three days. Police could use the warrantless provisions to embark on “fishing expeditions” until they find enough evidence of a particular subject’s suspicious activities to obtain a warrant, he says.

The select committee’s latest suggested amendments require an Order in Council before those powers can be extended to agencies other than the police – but this could become “just a rubber stamp”, Bott fears.

If there is reasonable suspicion of an offence, the body concerned should report it, with their evidence, to the police, who would obtain a warrant, he says.

In summary, the recommended changes are largely a matter of presenting an acceptable face rather than substantive reduction of powers over the original version of the bill, says Bott. “The wolf has now donned sheepskin; but it’s still a wolf underneath.”

The select committee is well-intentioned and “doing its best”, he says; “but they could do better.”
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...e-culture-bott





Hiding Files in Flickr Pics Will Fool Web Censors
Jim Giles

Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr.

Collage relies on a well-established technique known as digital steganography, in which an image file is changed to encode the hidden message without obviously affecting the appearance of the image. A prototype version is due to be unveiled on Friday, 13 August.

Steganography normally requires specialist software, but Collage is designed so that anti-censorship activists and readers can publish and download the hidden stories without any specialist skills. A publisher or activist can, for example, use Collage to copy news stories from a website and embed the articles into Flickr images in a process that is almost entirely automated.

In the prototype, stories from the BBC news site are used, but in principle any web content could be hidden. Collage can hide as many as 15 news articles in just seven medium-sized Flickr images.

News feeds

Once the material is embedded in a Flickr image, anyone with Collage can download it and extract the stories. A censor attempting to monitor traffic from a prohibited site would only see the reader visiting Flickr, which is not generally blocked by web censors.

Collage is able to identify which images have been used to hide material. All the would-be reader has to do is click on the date they are interested in; the stories appear a few minutes later. "It all happens in the background," says Sam Burnett at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, part of the team behind Collage.

Burnett has designed a Flickr upload tool that links with Collage and embeds content that publishers or activists want to make available.

Collage can also be easily extended so that stories are embedded in other photo-sharing sites. The idea is to spread material across numerous sites that host user-generated content so that the activity of someone running Collage appears much like that of any internet user and the censors cannot just block access to Flickr. Collage does, however, rely on the goodwill of Flickr users, who will have to provide access to the images where the articles are to be hidden.

Burnett is relying on opposition to censorship to motivate people to use Collage. "We're betting on people getting a warm fuzzy feeling because they are beating censorship," he says.

To coincide with the launch of the prototype, Burnett will present a paper on the system at the USENIX Security Symposium in Washington DC.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...b-censors.html





The End of Privacy: Entire City to Track People With Public Eye Scanners
Jesus Diaz

Imagine a public eye scanner that can identify 50 people per minute, in motion. Now imagine that the government install these scanner systems all across an entire city. Or don't imagine it, because it's already happening, right now.

The City of Leon, Mexico, is doing exactly that, installing real time iris scanners from biometrics R&D firm Global Rainmakers Inc. These scanners don't require people to stop and put their eyes in front of a camera. They work in real time, as people walk.

There are different kinds of machines being installed across Leon, from large scanners—capable of identifying 50 people per minute in motion— to smaller ones—like the EyeSwipe in the video above—that range from 15 to 30 people per minute. These devices are being installed in public places, like train and bus stations, and connected to a database that will track people across the city.

City officials and proponents of the system are hoping that public retinal scans will stop crime and fraud. According to Jeff Carter, CDO of Global Rainmakers:

If you've been convicted of a crime, in essence, this will act as a digital scarlet letter. If you're a known shoplifter, for example, you won't be able to go into a store without being flagged. Certainly for others, boarding a plane will be impossible.

The retinal scanning of Leon's one million population has started already with its convicted criminals. Citizens with no criminal records have been offered the opportunity to "voluntarily" scan their eyes. This, however, is just the beginning. According to Carter, everyone in the planet should be connected to the iris tracking system in 10 years:

In the future, whether it's entering your home, opening your car, entering your workspace, getting a pharmacy prescription refilled, or having your medical records pulled up, everything will come off that unique key that is your iris. Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected within the next 10 years.

Of course, that would be good for Carter's business. For the best of the rest of us, I hope this never happens.
http://gizmodo.com/5615901/the-end-o...e-city-of-leon





Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record
Marshall Kirkpatrick

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has a great way of making public statements that are at once frank, unorthodox, thought provoking - and a little frightening. This weekend The Wall St. Journal ran an interview with Schmidt that offered tidbits like that on a wide range of topics. One statement in particular, that Schmidt thinks teenagers should be entitled to change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to separate themselves from the Google record of their youthful indiscretions, is something worth stopping to take note of.

Earlier this month we ran our own original coverage of Schmidt statements at a conference where he said that "people aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them" and that absolute privacy would prove too-unsafe in the future. His latest comments seem both more and less reasonable.

On What Comes After the Search Era

First, Schmidt believes that the dominance of search will give way to recommendation technology. That's something we've argued for years as well: that recommendation has the potential to outgrow search because it's like the search you didn't even know you wanted to perform, offered to you automatically. That requires a lot of targeting and artificial intelligence, both Google sweet spots.

"We're still happy to be in search, believe me," Schmidt told the Journal. "But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type....I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

Google and Your Permanent Record

"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," Schmidt said again in this interview.

Holman Jenkins, Jr., a member of The Wall St. Journal editorial board and the author of a strong opinion piece last week in support of Google's alleged backing away from Net Neutrality, summarizes the key Schmidt statement in this week's write-up:

He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.

That's Schmidt's proposed solution to the increasingly online lives we live and the dwindling of our privacy, embodied more by his company than any other in history? That seems... crazy. Maybe he was simply observing that such policies were likely to take shape in the future. But if they do, the company he runs will be the primary cause of it.

Perhaps parents should start giving their children short-term names then, which they'll be less attached to. Save your favorite name for adulthood, kids, because you'll need to change it. Google says so.

Perhaps it's a good idea, even. But it's probably far more a fantasy scenario to chew on than anything tied to reality. It demonstrates an unusual understanding of privacy, freedom, indiscretion and consequences: as tied to the line between youth and adulthood more than the basic human experience. You could call it a cop-out by the CEO of history's greatest privacy-killing machine.

I have long contended that people who are concerned about convincing young people to consider the long-term consequences of their actions and expect Internet companies to solve that timeless problem - are being unfair. But I still can't help but shake my head at a suggestion like Schmidt's.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._to_escape.php





Why Android Developers are Losing Money, and it’s Not Due to Piracy
Pingdom

Google has made great strides with Android, and a ton of developers have flocked to the growing mobile platform. Not everything is rosy, though. One major concern among developers is that piracy levels are very high on the platform.

Google are of course not oblivious to this and recently announced plans to combat piracy with DRM methods that app developers can include in their apps. But there is one problem that is arguably much more problematic for Android developers when it comes to getting paid for their apps, and it isn’t getting nearly as much attention as we think it should.

The big problem with selling Android apps

Google is talking about fighting piracy, but perhaps the first thing they should focus on is actually making it possible for users to buy apps. All users. Sounds rather logical, doesn’t it? So what are we talking about? The problem lies with Android Market.

You can only pay for apps in 13 out of the 46 or so countries where Android phones are available. For those of you who like stats, 13 in 46 works out to less than 30%. Contrast this with Apple’s App Store, which supports paid apps in 90 countries. This is a huge advantage iPhone developers currently have over Android developers.

This is, in our opinion, one of the main reasons why piracy is running rampant on the Android platform. If a large portion of the world’s Android users can’t even pay for apps, is it so strange that some of them turn to piracy?

In other words, piracy isn’t the root of the problem, the inability to pay is.

This is of course bad news for Android app developers because:

* It will result in fewer sold apps (obviously).
* It may also get customers used to not paying for apps.

Let’s expand upon that second point, because it’s important.

Fostering a culture of free

We all like free, right? But the reality is that it can be bad news for developers if that mentality goes too far.

If Google doesn’t quickly make it possible for users in more countries to easily pay for apps, the company may create a long-term problem. People in those countries will simply get used to pirating their apps. They will get used to all Android apps being “free.”

So what happens once these users finally have proper access to paid apps? Sure, some of them will be paying, if nothing else because it’s more convenient, but the risk is that a significant portion of users will not like the idea of suddenly paying for something that so far has been available at no cost. Google will effectively have created “pirates” out of people who may otherwise not have gone down that route.

To say that this would severely hinder Android developers from making a living is an understatement.

The situation today

Paid Android apps are available in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.

This means that big parts of Europe (for example all Scandinavian countries) are left without paid apps, all of Asia with the exception of Japan, and Latin America. Those are some pretty large markets to leave out.

We’re based in Sweden, one of the countries currently left out. Android is becoming a pretty popular platform here, but there is also widespread frustration among users that paid apps are not readily available. These are people who actually want to pay for apps, but have to jump through hoops to do it or turn to piracy. NOT good for business.
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/08/16/...-losing-money/





Rupert Murdoch 'to Launch US Digital Newspaper'

News Corp to target young people with paid-for service for iPads and mobile phones, according to report
Ed Pilkington

Rupert Murdoch Rupert Murdoch sees the iPad as a 'game-changer'. Photograph: Hyungwon Kang/Reuters

Rupert Murdoch is planning to test his belief in the transformative power of the iPad to bring news to the younger generation by launching a new digital newspaper for America.

The new operation, disclosed by the Los Angeles Times, will be geared specifically to younger readers and to digital outlets such as the iPad and mobile phones. It will pool the huge editorial muscle of Murdoch's combined holdings within News Corporation, which include the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the financial wire service Dow Jones, as well as his newspapers in the UK and Australia.

But according to the LA Times, it will publish customised content that will be tailored both to the digital medium and the tastes of the target readership. Stories will be short and snappy, the Times's source said.

As a generalist news outlet, the operation, which has yet to find a name, would take on such rivals as USA Today, the newspaper circulated in hotels and airports across the US, and Murdoch's favourite enemy, the New York Times.

The creation of a custom-built digital product helps make sense of Murdoch's strategy as he struggles to drag his enormous newspaper empire into the digital world. It will sit alongside his radical attempt to build a paywall around his newspapers including the Times and Sunday Times in the UK.

Murdoch sees the iPad as a potential lifesaver in terms of its reach among the young and its ability to attract subscriptions. The Wall Street Journal already charges $4 a week for delivery through the iPad.

Earlier this month, Murdoch said of the iPad: "It's a real game-changer in the presentation of news," adding "We'll have young people reading newspapers."

Eric Alterman, the Nation magazine's media columnist, said the idea of pooling resources across News Corporation and recalibrating them for the iPad was for Murdoch a "no-brainer". "This makes perfect sense. He's got all this content that's of interest to people from different localities across America. It will be like a global New York Post without any of the legacy costs."

But Murdoch biographer and co-founder of the website Newser, Michael Wolff, was less confident that the new venture would work. "Murdoch is a man who has tried over and over again over almost 40 years to create a successful, financially viable newspaper in the US, and he's failed every time," he said.

The LA Times source said that the new operation would be based within the New York Post, though it would have its own newsroom and own staff of reporters and editors. It would fall under the control of the Post managing editor, Jesse Angelo.

No launch date has been set, though it is understood Murdoch is keen to have the project up and running by the end of this year.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010...ital-newspaper





People Magazine iPad App Delayed by Paparazzi
Andrew Wallenstein

The publishing world's headlong rush to Apple's iPad has hit a big hitch.

More than a dozen of the photo agencies that supply celebrity snapshots from the paparazzi are banding together to withhold their prized product unless it can get additional compensation from People magazine, resulting in the postponement of its iPad app.
While the standoff centers on one publication for now, just about any other brand that makes photos of the rich and famous their stock in trade is watching nervously from the sidelines. Whatever deal they strike could set the terms of trade for the industry going forward.

And while talks have been civil, there could be trouble ahead if progress isn't made at negotiations scheduled for Thursday at the Time-Life building in New York.

"I do think it's an important moment as far as the photo-agency business model," said Jill Stempel, New York bureau chief for World Entertainment News Network, which on Tuesday was considering joining the agency alliance. "We need to take a stand."

A People spokeswoman refused to comment beyond offering the following statement: "The People iPad application launch date has absolutely nothing to do with photo agencies."

Executives at People's parent company, Time Inc., had made known their intent to launch the brand's iPad extension in early August. Time has been one of the more aggressive publishing companies looking to make its mark on iPad and has already deployed other major brands including Sports Illustrated and Fortune.

Time insiders acknowledged that reaching agreement with the agencies is a pressing issue. But one exec familiar with People's iPad development blamed the delay on continued fine-tuning of the product, not the agency negotiations, and that early August was always a "soft" deadline.

Time hasn't specified what exactly People's iPad will offer, but those in the know say photos will be a core component of what is expected to be a $4.99 product.

Photo agencies are taking a keen interest in the iPad because while online usage of their snapshots commands a fraction of what their fees earn from print usage, they recognize the potential for the tablet market to be a game-changer.

"They realized that in most cases People.com was not making ad revenue or subscription money off extended use of their photos," said Brandy Navarre, vp at X17, a photo agency that plans to negotiate separately from its unified front of competitors. "But when you're talking about paid apps supplemented by advertisements, that's something different altogether."

Those familiar with discussions say People wants to use photos on the iPad for free, arguing that the app essentially replicates the print product. That negotiation stance has led to the inevitable escalation of posturing: If you don't pay us extra for iPad, agencies argue, you can't use our pictures, which spurs threats of keeping rogue agencies out of the print edition on which the lion's share of revenue is gleaned.

The iPad standoff is no isolated conflict between the photo agencies and publishers. The agencies already are resentful of steep cuts in photo fees the magazines demanded when the recession hit and drained their advertising revenue, which in turn shrunk the number of pages on which they could place photos.

People also is arguing that photo use on the iPad is essentially a marketing tool because there's a clause in overall licensing agreements that allows for promotional repurposing. That's what People argued when it turned around and sold photos in an affiliate deal with MySpace several years ago, further enraging some agencies.

As power struggles go, it's a juicy one considering photo agencies have quite a bit of leverage given how dependent even the biggest publishing brands are on them. The agencies find themselves in a predicament not unlike the various unions that took a tough stand against the studios to maximize the revenue their content derived from still-untested digital platforms. They didn't anticipate how huge a price they would pay for not negotiating a cut of DVD revenue; photo agencies want to avoid a similar miscalculation.

"They don't want to cede ground on this because this is the future," said an editor at a rival publication to People who wished to remain anonymous. "If they don't take a stand now, they're screwed."

Among the agencies ganging up on People are Bauer-Griffin, Startraks, Pacific Coast News, Splash News, Flynet Pictures, Star Max, INF and Fame Pictures.

While there's some unease among the agencies about coming together to form what is essentially a team of rivals, it's a tactic that's worked for this industry before. In 2006, many of the major agencies came together to sue Perez Hilton for posting their pictures on his website, a move that paved the way for generating meaningful revenue from the Internet.

X17's Navarre argues that the photo agencies can't afford to be as casual in defining usage parameters on digital platforms.

"When you license for online use, that's where it's become a little nebulous," she said. "That's where certain websites have taken liberties with images, trying to do what I perceive as pulling a fast one on the copyright holder."

To wit, People likely will pay a separate but modest fee for any material it uses for iPad-based galleries featuring photos that don't appear in print.

It's no coincidence that People has become the focal point. It's not only the celebrity magazine with the highest circulation -- 3.5 million in the first half of 2010 -- but the one with the most diversified base of agency partners, paying the most for exclusive snapshots. Depending on size and placement, such photos can cost People anywhere from three to six figures, according to outside estimates, and in those rarest of instances, seven or eight (People forked over $14 million for photos of Angelina Jolie's newborn twins in 2008).

But agencies have noted that other publishers are approaching them about iPad pricing as well, and the one that can cut a fair deal for the new platform will find itself with a competitive edge.

People will likely argue that the photo agencies' price pressures will only end up hobbling the evolution of a medium they have a mutual vested interest in getting on its feet, which could make a grace period worthwhile.

For all the newfangledness of the iPad, there's a precedent for cross-platform deals. Entertainment-news TV shows, for instance, pay a small, additional percentage of the original cost of a photo that they want to repurpose on a mobile extension.

But the increasing multiplicity of platforms is proving to a be a logistical nightmare for tracking usage, which is why publishers are likely looking to steer negotiations to a subscription model, whereas photo agencies prefer a la carte deals that recognize the widely varying value of each individual photo.

While iPad's reach is nowhere near that of preceding mediums, its growth rate is frightening: Apple has sold more than 3 million in just four months. Next Issue Media projects the marketplace for "interactive periodicals" via iPad and its ilk could hit $3 billion by 2014.

Regardless of how the People standoff plays out, it's only a matter of time before the next major bidding war over a must-have photo like, say, the ever-elusive Kristin Stewart-Robert Pattinson public snogfest, will include haggling over iPad rights as well.

Not too many major magazine brands have tested their iPad appeal since the platform's launch. It's been a mixed bag at Conde Nast, where GQ managed a paltry 365 downloads sold of its December issue while Wired likely exceeded sales of its print edition on iPad, generating nearly 80,000 in little over a week in May.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67H0W320100818





Pay Up

Got a Blog That Makes No Money? The City Wants $300, Thank You Very Much.
Valerie Rubinsky

For the past three years, Marilyn Bess has operated MS Philly Organic, a small, low-traffic blog that features occasional posts about green living, out of her Manayunk home. Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she's made about $50. To Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it's a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.

In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.

"The real kick in the pants is that I don't even have a full-time job, so for the city to tell me to pony up $300 for a business privilege license, pay wage tax, business privilege tax, net profits tax on a handful of money is outrageous," Bess says.

It would be one thing if Bess' website were, well, an actual business, or if the amount of money the city wanted didn't outpace her earnings six-fold. Sure, the city has its rules; and yes, cash-strapped cities can't very well ignore potential sources of income. But at the same time, there must be some room for discretion and common sense.

When Bess pressed her case to officials with the city's now-closed tax amnesty program, she says, "I was told to hire an accountant."

She's not alone. After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made.

Even if, as with Sean Barry, that profit is $11 over two years.

Barry's music-oriented blog, Circle of Fits, is hosted on Blogspot; as of this writing, its home page has two ads on it, but because he gets only a fraction of the already low ad revenue — the rest goes to Blogspot — it's far from lucrative.

"Personally, I don't think Circle of Fits is a business," says Barry. "It might be someday if I start selling coffee mugs, key chains or locks of my hair to my fans. I don't think blogs should be taxed unless they are making an immense profit."

The city disagrees. Even though small-time bloggers aren't exactly raking in the dough, the city requires privilege licenses for any business engaged in any "activity for profit," says tax attorney Michael Mandale of Center City law firm Mandale Kaufmann. This applies "whether or not they earned a profit during the preceding year," he adds.

So even if your blog collects a handful of hits a day, as long as there's the potential for it to be lucrative — and, as Mandale points out, most hosting sites set aside space for bloggers to sell advertising — the city thinks you should cut it a check. According to Andrea Mannino of the Philadelphia Department of Revenue, in fact, simply choosing the option to make money from ads — regardless of how much or little money is actually generated — qualifies a blog as a business. The same rules apply to freelance writers. As former City Paper news editor Doron Taussig once lamented [Slant, "Taxed Out," April 28, 2005], the city considers freelancers — which both Bess and Barry are, in addition to their blog work — "businesses," and requires them to pay for a license and pay taxes on their profits, on top of their state and federal taxes.

Mannino says the city doesn't keep track of how many bloggers and small-website owners are affected. But bloggers aren't the only ones upset with the city's tax structure. In June, City Council members Bill Green and Maria Quiñones-Sánchez unveiled a proposal to reform the city's business privilege tax in an effort to make Philly a more attractive place for small businesses. If their bill passes, bloggers will still have to get a privilege license if their sites are designed to make money, but they would no longer have to pay taxes on their first $100,000 in profit. (If bloggers don't want to fork over $300 for a lifetime license, Green suggests they take the city's $50-a-year plan.)

Their bill will be officially introduced in September. "There's a lot of support and interest in this idea," Green says.

Perhaps, but it doesn't change the fact that the city wants some people to pay more in taxes than they earn. "I definitely don't want to see people paying more in taxes and fees than what [we] earn," says Bess. "But I do think the city needs to establish a minimal amount of money that they won't tax, whether you're a bike messenger, microblogger or a freelance typist."
http://citypaper.net/articles/2010/0...x-philadelphia





Now Playing: Night of the Living Tech
Steve Lohr

Life in the media and communications terrarium, it seems, is getting increasingly perilous. The predictions of demise are piling up. Phone calls, e-mail, blogs and Facebook, according to digerati pundits recently, are speeding toward the grave. Last week, Wired magazine proclaimed, “The Web Is Dead.”

Yet evolution — not extinction — has always been the primary rule of media ecology. New media predators rise up, but other media species typically adapt rather than perish. That is the message of both history and leading media theorists, like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. Television, for example, was seen as a threat to radio and movies, though both evolved and survived.

Still, if the evolutionary pattern remains intact, there are some fundamental differences in today’s media ecology, experts say.

Strip away the headline hyperbole of the “death of” predictions, they note, and what remains is mainly commentary on the impact of the accelerated pace of change and accumulated innovations in the Internet-era media and communications environment. A result has been a proliferation of digital media forms and fast-shifting patterns of media consumption.

So the evolutionary engine runs faster than ever before, opening the door to new and often unforeseen possibilities. “Change has changed qualitatively,” says Janet Sternberg, an assistant professor at Fordham University and president of the Media Ecology Association, a research organization.

Up, for example, sprout social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and others — that are hybrids of communication, media distribution and unvarnished self-expression. New versatile digital devices — whether iPhone or Android smartphones, iPod players and iPad tablets — nurture more innovation and experimentation.

Adaptations follow. College freshman don’t wear watches — cellphones are their timepieces — and seldom use e-mail, notes the Beloit College Mindset List, which was released last week. (The yearly list, created by two faculty members in 1998, is intended as a glimpse at the attitudes and behavior of new college students.) Instead of e-mail, young people prefer to communicate through social networks, or instant-messaging or cellphone text messages, to which their friends are more likely to reply quickly.

Americans are talking less on their cellphones. When they do talk, the conversations are shorter, according to industry data. Partly, this reflects the shift in use of cellphones more as mobile computers that communicate via written messages. But this also reflects a subtle shift in etiquette, experts say. People increasingly use text messages and e-mail to arrange telephone calls, which are reserved for more important, complicated dialogues. An unscheduled call from people other than family members, they say, is often regarded as a rude intrusion.

Broad swaths of the blogosphere lie fallow, abandoned. But again, this is a sign of adaptive behavior. Much of the communication on personal blogs, where people wrote and posted pictures of themselves, their children and their pets, was about “sociability” and has shifted to social networks like Facebook, says John Kelly, lead scientist at Morningside Analytics, a research firm. But professional blogs, meant for public consumption, and focused on subjects like politics, economics and news, are thriving, Mr. Kelly notes.

The spread of mobile media devices, whether smartphones or iPads or Nooks, has led to tailored software applications that make reading text and watching video easier on screens smaller than those on personal computers. So people are not viewing this mobile media through a Web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox, a central point in the Wired “Web Is Dead” article. But the books, magazines and movies viewed on an iPad, for example, are downloaded over the Internet. Indeed, Wired added the headline declaration, “Long Live the Internet.” Similarly, the case for Facebook’s fall someday is that it is a cluttered Web creation when mobile devices demand sleek, simple designs.

Adaptive innovation and experimentation, experts say, is the rule in a period of rapid change that can be seen as the digital-age equivalent of the ferment after the introduction of the printing press. “We’re experiencing the biggest media petri dish in four centuries,” observes Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford University who specializes in technology’s effect on society.

Media evolution, of course, does claim casualties. But most often, these are means of distribution or storage, especially physical ones that can be transformed into digital bits. Photographic film is supplanted, but people take more pictures than ever. CD’s no longer dominate, as music is more and more distributed online. “Books, magazines and newspapers are next,” predicts Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the M.I.T. Media Lab. “Text is not going away, nor is reading. Paper is going away.”

Technology is by no means the only agent of change. Cultural tastes have a big influence, sometimes bringing quirky turns in the evolutionary dance. Record turntables and vinyl records did appear all but extinct — only to be revived by audiophiles, including D.J.’s who created new sounds and rhythms — the art of turntablism. Today, the analog devices are often linked to computers for editing and adding sound tracks, and many people mix tracks at home. Turntables have made a niche revival, and vinyl record sales have increased 62 percent over the last decade to 2.4 million last year, reports Nielsen, a market research firm.

“No one would have predicted that — the unexpected happens,” says Lisa Gitelman, a media historian at New York University. “When we look at how media evolves, it is clear there is no single arrow forward.”

Radio is a classic evolutionary survivor. In the 1930s and 1940s, radio was the entertainment hearth of American households, as depicted in the Woody Allen film “Radio Days.” By the 1950s, television wrested that role from radio. But the older media adapted by moving to shorter programming formats and becoming the background music and chat while people ride in cars and do other things at home. Later, digital satellite distribution breathed new life and diversity into radio offerings, by allowing almost unlimited channels.

“Radio is a supple and durable technology that has outlived quite a few predictions of its demise,” says John Staudenmaier, editor of the journal Technology and Culture, who regards podcasts as the long-lived medium’s latest incarnation. “It’s the country cousin of radio, still the transmission of audio only,” he says.

Movies, too, have proved remarkably resilient. The television threat in the 1950s set off Hollywood’s early, brief foray into 3-D (only recently revived). Movies like “Bwana Devil,” “House of Wax” and even Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 “Dial M for Murder” were shot in 3-D, though the latter played in most theaters as a conventional film. Yet the ultimate solution for Hollywood back then was not a technical gimmick, but a richer art form, though one assisted by wide-screen, vivid-color technologies like Cinerama and CinemaScope. Studios began turning out fewer films, but ones intended to give viewers a more vibrant, immersive experience than television could offer — movies like “Ben-Hur” in 1959 and “How the West Was Won” in 1962.

Today, traditional media companies face the adaptive challenge posed by the Internet. That challenge is not just the technology itself, but how it has altered people’s habits of media consumption. Multitasking, in the sense of truly being able to focus on more than one cognitively taxing task at a time, may well be a myth, experts say. But it does seem to be an accurate description of people’s behavior — watching television, while surfing the Internet or answering text messages. “Consumers are getting much more adept at engaging two or three forms of media at a time,” says Steve Hasker, head of Nielsen’s media unit.

Attention spans evolve and shorten, as even the most skilled media jugglers can attest. “I love the iPad,” admits Mr. Negroponte, “but my ability to read any long-form narrative has more or less disappeared, as I am constantly tempted to check e-mail, look up words or click through.” And people, every bit as much as technology, shape the churning media ecology.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/we...ew/22lohr.html





Storied Trove of 1930s Jazz Is Acquired by Museum
Larry Rohter

For decades jazz cognoscenti have talked reverently of “the Savory Collection.” Recorded from radio broadcasts in the late 1930s by an audio engineer named William Savory, it was known to include extended live performances by some of the most honored names in jazz — but only a handful of people had ever heard even the smallest fraction of that music, adding to its mystique.

After 70 years that wait has now ended. This year the National Jazz Museum in Harlem acquired the entire set of nearly 1,000 discs, made at the height of the swing era, and has begun digitizing recordings of inspired performances by Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Bunny Berigan, Harry James and others that had been thought to be lost forever. Some of these remarkable long-form performances simply could not be captured by the standard recording technology of the time. (Mr. Savory used a different format.) The Savory collection also contains examples of underappreciated musicians playing at peak creative levels not heard anywhere else, putting them in a new light for jazz fans and scholars.

“Some of us were aware Savory had recorded all this stuff, and we were really waiting with bated breath to see what would be there,” said Dan Morgenstern, the Grammy-winning jazz historian and critic who is also director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. “Even though I’ve heard only a small sampling, it’s turning out to be the treasure trove we had hoped it would be, with some truly wonderful, remarkable sessions. None of what I’ve heard has been heard before. It’s all new.”

After making the recordings, Mr. Savory, who had an eccentric, secretive streak, zealously guarded access to his collection, allowing only a few select tracks by his friend Benny Goodman to be released commercially. When he died in 2004, Eugene Desavouret, a son who lives in Illinois, salvaged the discs, which were moldering in crates; this year he sold the collection to the museum, whose executive director, Loren Schoenberg, transported the boxes to New York City in a rental truck.

Part of what makes the Savory collection so alluring and historically important is its unusual format. At the time Savory was recording radio broadcasts for his own pleasure, which was before the introduction of tape, most studio performances were issued on 10-inch 78 r.p.m. shellac discs, which, with their limited capacity, could capture only about three minutes of music.

But Mr. Savory had access to 12- or even 16-inch discs, made of aluminum or acetate, and sometimes recorded at speeds of 33 1/3 r.p.m. That combination of bigger discs, slower speeds and more durable material allowed Mr. Savory to record longer performances in their entirety, including jam sessions at which musicians could stretch out and play extended solos that tested their creative mettle.

“Most of what exists from this era was done at home by young musicians or fans, and so you get really bad-sounding recordings,” Mr. Schoenberg said. “The difference with Bill Savory is that he was both a musician and a technical genius. You hear some of this stuff and you say, ‘This can’t be 70 years old.’ ”

As a result, many of the broadcasts from nightclubs and ballrooms that Mr. Savory recorded contain more relaxed and free-flowing versions of hit songs originally recorded in the studio. One notable example is a stunning six-minute Coleman Hawkins performance of “Body and Soul” from the spring of 1940; in it this saxophonist plays a five-chorus solo even more adventurous than the renowned two-chorus foray on his original version of the song, recorded in the fall of 1939. By the last chorus, he has drifted into uncharted territory, playing in a modal style that would become popular only when Miles Davis recorded “Kind of Blue” in 1959.

Asked if the Savory recordings were likely to prompt a critical reassessment of some jazz musicians or a reordering of the informal hierarchy by which fans rank instrumentalists, Mr. Morgenstern responded by citing the case of Herschel Evans, a saxophonist who played in the Count Basie Orchestra but who died early in 1939, just before his 30th birthday. Evans played alongside Lester Young, who was one of the giants of the saxophone and constantly overshadowed Evans on the Basie group’s studio recordings.

“There can never be too much Lester Young, and there is some wonderful new Lester Young on these discs,” Mr. Morgenstern said. “But there are also some things where you can really hear Herschel, who is woefully under-represented on record and who, until now, we hardly ever got to hear stretched out. What I’ve heard really gives us a much better picture of what he was all about.”

The collection has already shed new light on what is considered the first outdoor jazz festival, the 1938 Carnival of Swing on Randalls Island. More than 20 groups played at the event, including the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras, and though newsreel footage exists, no audio of the festival was believed to have survived — until part of performances by Count Basie and Stuff Smith turned up on Mr. Savory’s discs.

Other material consists of some of the most acclaimed names in jazz playing in unusual settings or impromptu ensembles. Goodman, for example, performs a duet version of the Gershwins’ “Lady Be Good” with Teddy Wilson on harpsichord (instead of his usual piano), while Billie Holiday is heard, accompanied only by a piano, singing a rubato version of her anti-lynching anthem, “Strange Fruit,” barely a month after her original recording was released.

“The record is more like a dance tempo, whereas this version is how she would have done it in clubs,” Mr. Schoenberg, a saxophonist and pianist who is also the author of “The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Jazz,” said of the live Holiday recording. “You have the most inane scripted introduction ever, but then Billie comes in, and she drives a stake right through your heart.”

Because Mr. Savory liked classical music, the discs also include a few performances by the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, taken from one of her very early tours of the United States, and several by Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra. There are even speeches, by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII, and a broadcast of James Joyce reading from his work.

The collection also provides a glimpse into the history of broadcasting, thanks to the presence of Martin Block, a WNEW announcer who hosted a show called “Make Believe Ballroom,” on many discs. Walter Winchell coined the term “disc jockey” to describe Block, whose citation when he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame gives him credit for being “the first radio disc jockey to become a star in his own right.”

According to his son Eugene, Mr. Savory was born William Desavouret in June 1916 aboard the ocean liner Mauritania, where his parents were passengers immigrating to the United States from France. He grew up in New Jersey and Southern California and showed an early fascination with technology, which led, while he was still a teenager, to his entry into the recording business.

As best as can be reconstructed, Mr. Savory went into a Manhattan recording studio to make a demo for a group he played in, found that the equipment was not working and offered to repair it. That led to his being hired to maintain the gear and eventually to a contract with a studio that specialized in transcribing live performances off the air for radio networks and advertisers.

“He was doing these air checks, he told me, to get the balance in the recording, and recorded the shows on his own,” said Susan Schmidt Horning, a historian of technology and culture who teaches at St. John’s University in Queens and who interviewed Mr. Savory several times. “I think he was just interested in recording and loved music. He did it because he could do it. He knew the value of these recordings, artistically and commercially, and wasn’t going to let them go.”

The recordings that the museum acquired end around 1940, when Mr. Savory moved to Chicago to work for Columbia Records and CBS. During World War II he was initially assigned to the Naval Research Laboratory, where, his son said, he helped develop radar for all-weather fighter aircraft, but later also served as a test and combat pilot.

At war’s end, Mr. Savory went back to work for Columbia, where he was part of the team that invented the 33 1/3-r.p.m. long-playing record. In the 1950s he moved to Angel Records, EMI’s classical label; engineered or produced numerous albums there under the name W. A. Desavouret; married Helen Ward, a former singer in the Goodman band; and eventually moved to Falls Church, Va.

“As an engineer, Bill was remarkable, the guy who developed the technique for cutting the masters” of 78-r.p.m. recordings that were being transferred to the new format, said the jazz record producer George Avakian, 91, who worked with Mr. Savory at Columbia in the 1940s. “He was an all-round character, a humorous, delightful guy who never got as much credit as he deserved, and he did so much.”

Mr. Avakian said he remembered hearing a few songs from the collection in the late 1950s, when he visited the Savory home, and still recalled the excitement he felt then about the quality of the music on the discs. “I asked him once, ‘How much more have you got?,’ and he said, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Mr. Avakian said. “He was really vague about it.”

When he moved to suburban Washington, Mr. Savory took a job with a defense contractor, working, his son said, on electronic communications and surveillance devices designed to pick up audio and data signals. His son also said his father told him that he was “a spook, connected with the C.I.A.,” an assertion he is inclined to believe because “when I’d come for Thanksgiving, we’d go out with six retired C.I.A. guys,” and because, on retirement, his father was given a memento calling him “the master of mysterious projects.”

After Mr. Savory’s death, his lawyer and heirs were not sure what to do with the meticulously annotated collection. Some of the boxes with discs had been sealed in 1940 and never opened again, and others had been damaged by exposure to water or were covered with “50 years of mold and gunk,” as Mr. Schoenberg put it.

Eugene Desavouret, a musician and retired computer scientist who lives northwest of Chicago, said, “When he died, I felt overwhelmed,” because “there was a danger it was all going to be thrown away.” In fact, he added, “Dad’s lawyer hired a couple of people to clean things up, and they dug through everything and threw away some stuff that they thought was not useful. So I had to issue instructions to preserve all the recordings and writings until we found out what the hell it is.”

Eventually, Eugene Desavouret had the recordings shipped to his home in Malta, Ill., where Mr. Schoenberg, who had been trying to track him down, finally heard them this spring and immediately realized that “we have struck gold.”

“This has been on my mind for 30 years,” Mr. Schoenberg said. “I cultivated and pestered Bill Savory, who never let me hear a damn thing and wouldn’t even tell me what was in the collection besides Benny Goodman,” for whom Mr. Schoenberg, 52, used to work.

But because of deterioration, converting the 975 surviving discs to digital form and making them playable is a challenge. Mr. Schoenberg estimates that “25 percent are in excellent shape,” he said, “half are compromised but salvageable, and 25 percent are in really bad condition,” of which perhaps 5 percent are “in such a state that they will tolerate only one play” before starting to flake.

The transfer of the Savory collection from disc to digital form is being done by Doug Pomeroy, a recording engineer in Brooklyn who specializes in audio restorations and has worked on more than 100 CD reissues, among them projects involving music by Louis Armstrong and Woody Guthrie. The process involves numerous steps, beginning with cleaning the discs by hand and proceeding through pitch correction, noise removal, playback equalization, mixing and mastering.

“As fate would have it, a couple of the most interesting Count Basie things are so badly corroded that it took me two afternoons and 47 splices just to put one of them back together again,” Mr. Pomeroy said while working on yet another Basie tune, a shuffle featuring Lester Young on clarinet rather than saxophone, his main instrument. “In almost every case I’ve been able to get a complete performance, but it can be very fatiguing to hear the same skip over and over again and have to close the gap digitally.”

Initially, Mr. Pomeroy was reluctant to take on the project, saying he had too much of a backlog to accept new work. But as Mr. Schoenberg recalled their initial conversation, standing in Mr. Pomeroy’s studio one morning last month, “when I said ‘It’s Bill Savory,’ he said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’ ”

Mr. Schoenberg said the museum planned to make as much as possible of the Savory collection publicly available at the museum and eventually online. But the copyright status of the recorded material is complicated, which could inhibit plans to share the music. While the museum has title to Mr. Savory’s discs as physical objects, it does not possess rights to the music on the discs.

“The short answer is that ownership is unclear,” said June M. Besek, executive director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at the Columbia University School of Law. “There was never any arrangement for distribution of copies” in contracts between performers and radio stations in the 1930s, she explained, “because it was never envisioned that there would be such a distribution, so somewhere between the radio station and the band is where the ownership would lay.”

At 70 years’ remove, however, the bands, and even some of the radio networks that broadcast the performances, no longer exist, and tracking down all the heirs of the individual musicians who played in the orchestras is nearly impossible.

In the meantime Mr. Pomeroy is plunging ahead. He has digitized just over 100 of the discs so far, and knows that additional challenges — and delights — await him.

“Every one of these discs is an unexpected discovery,” he said. “It’s an education for me. I can hardly wait to transfer some of this stuff because I am so eager to hear it, to find out what’s there and solve all the mysteries that are there.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/ar...ic/17jazz.html





Cult of Less: Living Out of a Hard Drive
Matthew Danzico

Many have begun trading in CD, DVD, and book collections for digital music, movies, and e-books. But this trend in digital technology is now influencing some to get rid of nearly all of their physical possessions - from photographs to furniture to homes altogether.

Let's face it - digital files, applications and web services are replacing the need for many of the physical goods that pepper our homes, crowd our desks and fill our closets.

From online photo albums to virtual filing cabinets to digital musical instruments, hi-tech replacements are becoming ubiquitous.

But as goods continue to make the leap from the bookshelf to the hard drive, some individuals are taking the opportunity to radically change their lifestyles.

'21st-Century minimalist'

Meet Kelly Sutton, a spiky-haired 22-year-old software engineer with thick-rimmed glasses and an empty apartment in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighbourhood - a hotbed for New York's young, early adopters of new technology.

Mr Sutton is the founder of CultofLess.com, a website which has helped him sell or give away his possessions - apart from his laptop, an iPad, an Amazon Kindle, two external hard drives, a "few" articles of clothing and bed sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment.

This 21st-Century minimalist says he got rid of much of his clutter because he felt the ever-increasing number of available digital goods have provided adequate replacements for his former physical possessions.

"I think cutting down on physical commodities in general might be a trend of my generation - cutting down on physical commodities that can be replaced by digital counterparts will be a fact," said Mr Sutton.

The tech-savvy Los Angeles "transplant" credits his external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps for allowing him to lead a minimalist life.

"I think the shift to all digital formats in all methods and forms of media consumption is inevitable and coming very quickly," said Mr Sutton.

And Mr Sutton may be right.

Consumer electronic book sales tripled between 2008 and 2009, while the growth of physical book sales slowed, according to the Association of American Publishers.

Meanwhile, compact disc sales have declined by roughly 50% from their 2005 levels worldwide, while global revenue from digital music has nearly quadrupled in the same period, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Virtual homelessness

Chris Yurista, a DJ from Washington, DC, cites this trend in digital music as one reason he was able to hand over the keys to his basement apartment over a year ago.

"It's always nice to have a personal sense of home, but that aside - the internet has replaced my need for an address," the 27-year-old said.

Since boxing up his physical possessions and getting rid of his home, Mr Yurista has taken to the streets with a backpack full of designer clothing, a laptop, an external hard drive, a small piano keyboard and a bicycle - an armful of goods that totals over $3,000 (£1,890) in value.

The American University graduate, who spends much of his time basking in the glow emanating from his Macbook, earns a significant income at his full-time job as a travel agent and believes his new life on the digital grid is less cluttered than his old life on the physical one.

"I don't feel a void living the way I'm living because I've figured out a way to use digital technology to my advantage," Mr Yurista explained.

Mr Yurista feels by digitising his life, he no longer has to worry about dusting, organising and cleaning his possessions. And he says his new intangible goods can continue to live on indefinitely with little maintenance.

"Things like records snap and wear down over time. It's upsetting. MP3s don't," he said.

The DJ has now replaced his bed with friends' couches, paper bills with online banking, and a record collection containing nearly 2,000 albums with an external hard drive with DJ software and nearly 13,000 MP3s.

But Mr Yurista is not the only digital vagabond.

Joshua Klein, a New York City-based technology innovation consultant, also set out on the road with his hard drive.

He and his wife digitised their possessions, got rid of two-thirds of what they owned and headed to the streets of New York for nine months with their laptops.

But Mr Klein and Mr Yurista both admit there are risks involved.

Mr Klein says the lifestyle can become loathsome because "you never know where you will sleep". And Mr Yurista says he frequently worries he may lose his new digital life to a hard drive crash or downed server.

"You have to really make sure you have back-ups of your digital goods everywhere," he said.

Data crisis counsellor

Data recovery engineer Chris Bross agrees and says if individuals backed up their digital lives "they wouldn't need us when a failure occurs, and they wouldn't be in crisis".

As digital possessions shrink the need for physical property, data recovery companies like Drive Savers, DTI Recovery and Eco Data Recovery may become the emergency response teams of the future.

Mr Bross, a Drive Savers employee, believes as individuals grow increasingly dependent on "digital storage technology for holding all these assets that they used to hold more tangibly", data recovery services will become rather like the firefighters of the 21st Century - responders who save your valuables.

And like a house fire that rips through a family's prized possessions, when someone loses their digital goods to a computer crash, they can be devastated.

Kelly Chessen, a 36-year-old former suicide hotline counsellor with a soothing voice and reassuring personality, is Drive Savers official "data crisis counsellor".

Part-psychiatrist and part-tech enthusiast, Ms Chessen's role is to try to calm people down when they lose their digital possessions to failed drives.

Ms Chessen says some people have gone as far as to threaten suicide over their lost digital possessions and data.

"It's usually indirect threats like, 'I'm not sure what I'm going to do if I can't get the data back,' but sometimes it will be a direct threat such as, 'I may just have to end it if I can't get to the information'," said Ms Chessen.

And Ms Chessen says she is receiving an increasing number of calls as the shelf life of our physical possessions draws to a close.

The 'ultimate replacement'

Research Fellow Anders Sandberg, at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, warns Ms Chessen may soon be dealing with larger problems than lost photos and video footage.

He says our hard drives may one day contain the most important digital replacement of all - digitised replicas of our own brains.

Dr Sandberg believes we could be living on hard drives along with our digital possessions in the not too distant future, which would allow us to shed the trouble of owning a body.

The concept is called "mind uploading", and it suggests that when our bodies age and begin to fail like a worn or snapped record, we may be able to continue living consciously inside a computer as our own virtual substitutes.

"It's the idea that we can copy or transfer the information inside the brain into a form that can be run on the computer," said Dr Sandberg.

He added: "That would mean that your consciousness or a combination of that would continue in the computer."

Dr Sandberg says although it's just a theory now, researchers and engineers are working on super computers that could one day handle a map of all the networks of neurons and synapses in our brains - and that map could produce human consciousness outside of the body.

He says if a complete map of our brains was uploaded to a computer and a conscious, digital replica of ourselves was created, we could, in theory, continue to live forever on a hard drive along with our MP3s and e-books.

When asked, Mr Yurista says mind uploading sounds like a very hard concept to grasp but admits getting rid of one's body and living inside a computer "truly sounds like the ultimate form of minimalism".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10928032





Step 1: Post Elusive Proof. Step 2: Watch Fireworks.
John Markoff

The potential of Internet-based collaboration was vividly demonstrated this month when complexity theorists used blogs and wikis to pounce on a claimed proof for one of the most profound and difficult problems facing mathematicians and computer scientists.

Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician and electrical engineer at Hewlett-Packard, posted a proposed proof of what is known as the “P versus NP” problem on a Web site, and quietly notified a number of the key researchers in a field of study that focuses on problems that are solvable only with the application of immense amounts of computing power.

The researcher asserted that he had demonstrated that P (the set of problems that can be easily solved) does not equal NP (those problems that are difficult to solve, but easy to verify once a solution is found). As with earlier grand math challenges — for example, Fermat’s last theorem — there is a lot at stake, not the least of which is a $1 million prize.

In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute picked seven of the greatest unsolved problems in the field, named them “Millennium Problems” and offered $1 million for the solution of each of them. P versus NP is one of those problems. (In March, the first prize was awarded to a reclusive Russian mathematician, Grigory Perelman, for the solution to the century-old Poincaré conjecture. A few months later he refused the prize.)

P versus NP has enormous practical and economic importance, because modern cryptography is based on the assumption, which is workable so far, that P does not equal NP. In other words, there are problems that are impossible for computers to solve, but for which the solutions are easily recognizable. If these problems were shown to be solvable, that could undermine modern cryptography, which could paralyze electronic commerce and digital privacy because transactions would no longer be secure.

In a note sent to a small group of researchers on Aug. 6, Dr. Deolalikar wrote: “The proof required the piecing together of principles from multiple areas within mathematics. The major effort in constructing this proof was uncovering a chain of conceptual links between various fields and viewing them through a common lens.”

An outsider to the insular field, Dr. Deolalikar set off shock waves because his work appeared to be a concerted and substantial challenge to a problem that has attracted intense scrutiny since it was first posed in 1971 by Stephen Cook, a mathematician and computer scientist who teaches at the University of Toronto.

“The reason there was such excitement is there have been many alleged proofs,” said Moshe Vardi, a professor of computer science at Rice University and the editor in chief of The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. “This looks like a serious paper. In particular what he has done is bring forward a new idea that is worth exploring.”

In this case, however, the significant breakthrough may not be in the science, but rather in the way science is practiced. By the middle of last week, although Dr. Deolalikar had not backed away from his claim, a consensus had emerged among complexity theorists that the proposed proof had several significant shortcomings.

“At this point the consensus is that there are large holes in the alleged proof — in fact, large enough that people do not consider the alleged proof to be a proof,” Dr. Vardi said. “I think Deolalikar got his 15 minutes of fame, but at this point the excitement has subsided and the skepticism is turning into negative conviction.”

What was highly significant, however, was the pace of discussion and analysis, carried out in real time on blogs and a wiki that had been quickly set up for the purpose of collectively analyzing the paper. This kind of collaboration has emerged only in recent years in the math and computer science communities. In the past, intense discussions like the one that surrounded the proof of the Poincaré conjecture were carried about via private e-mail and distribution lists as well as in the pages of traditional paper-based science journals.

Several of the researchers said that until now such proofs had been hashed out in colloquiums that required participants to be physically present at an appointed time. Now, with the emergence of Web-connected software programs it is possible for such collaborative undertakings to harness the brainpower of the world’s best thinkers on a continuous basis.

In his recently published book “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age” (Penguin Press), Clay Shirky, a professor of interactive telecommunications at New York University, argues that the emergence of these new collaborative tools is paving the way for a second scientific revolution in the same way the printing press created a demarcation between the age of alchemy and the age of chemistry.

“The difference between the alchemists and the chemists was that the printing press was used to coordinate peer review,” he said. “The printing press didn’t cause the scientific revolution, but it wouldn’t have been possible without it.”

Now, he says, the new tools are likely to set off a similar transformation.

“It’s not just, ‘Hey, everybody, look at this,’ ” he said, “but rather a new set of norms is emerging about what it means to do mathematics, assuming coordinated participation.”

The computer science community has long been an innovator in the design of science-collaboration tools. Indeed, the ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet, was initially created in 1969 to make one of the first computerized collaboration tools, Douglas Engelbart’s oNLine System, or NLS, available from remote locations. During the 1980s physicists at the physics research center CERN in Zurich created the World Wide Web to facilitate the sharing of scientific research.

In 2009, a Cambridge mathematician, Timothy Gowers, created the Polymath Project, a blog and wiki-oriented collaboration tool that used the comments section of a blog to pursue mathematics collaboratively. Related efforts like the Web site Mathoverflow help attack unsolved mathematical problems by using new Internet tools to help stimulate collaboration.

In the case of the P versus NP paper, most of the action has taken place in several blogs maintained by researchers in the field, like a computer scientist, Richard Lipton, at Georgia Tech and a theoretical physicist, Dave Bacon, at the University of Washington, as well as in a wiki by a quantum theoretician, Michael Nielsen.

Passions have run high. A computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Scott Aaronson, literally bet his house last week — $200,000 — that the Deolalikar paper would be proved incorrect: “If Vinay Deolalikar is awarded the $1,000,000 Clay Millennium Prize for his proof of P-NP, then I, Scott Aaronson, will personally supplement his prize by the amount of $200,000.”

Despite his skepticism, he acknowledged that this was, to date, one of the most impressive attempts to settle the question.

“So far this is not your typical P versus NP crank solution, which I hear about once a week,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/science/17proof.html





Rocker John Mellencamp Likens Internet to A-bomb

Rocker John Mellencamp said on Tuesday that the Internet was the most dangerous invention since the atomic bomb, although new technology could paradoxically delay the inevitable demise of rock 'n' roll.

But before then, "some smart people, the China-Russians or something" may have already conquered America by hacking into the power grid and financial system, he warned during a public seminar at the Grammy Museum.

Mellencamp, 58, has established a reputation during his career as a bit of a loose cannon disdainful of music industry niceties. He still lives in his home state of Indiana, saying he never fit in elsewhere.

Famed for such hit songs as "Hurts So Good," "Jack and Diane" and "Small Town," he is also a political activist who campaigned for President Barack Obama. He has also helped Live Aid organizer Willie Nelson put on the annual Farm Aid charity concerts for small farmers.

His comments on the Internet coincided with the release -- in stores and at digital retailers -- of his new album, "No Better Than This." While he said the Internet was useful on a personal level for communication, he worried about its destructive potential.

"I think the Internet is the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb," he said. "It's destroyed the music business. It's going to destroy the movie business."

iPod Ruins Beatles

For starters, the popularity of digital downloads, which fans listen to on their MP3 players and computers, has come at the expense of sound quality, he said.

He recalled listening to a Beatles song on a newly remastered CD and then on an iPod, and "you could barely even recognize it as the same song. You could tell it was those guys singing, but the warmth and quality of what the artist intended for us to hear was so vastly different."

At any rate, most rock 'n' roll -- including his own contributions -- will eventually be forgotten, he said, likening its demise to that of big-band music, which was all the rage during the 1930s and '40s.

"After a few generations, it's gone," he said. "Rock 'n' roll -- as important as we think it is, and as big as it was, and as much money as people made on it, and as proud as I am to say that I was part of it -- at the end of the day, they're gonna say: 'Yeah, there was this band called the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, and this guy named Bob Dylan...'

"And the rest of us? We're just gonna be footnotes. And I think that that's OK. I'm happy to have spent my life doing what I wanted to do, playing music, make something out of life, but forgetting about the idea of legacy."

Mellencamp, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, said his first half-dozen albums were "just terrible," while his mid-'80s breakthroughs such as "Scarecrow" and "The Lonesome Jubilee" were "happy accidents."

He actually quit the music business for two years in the late 1980s and did nothing. "We even knew what was on TV at night," he said.

His new album takes the rocker back in time. He recorded it with vintage equipment in three historic locations: Sun Records in Memphis, original home of Elvis and Johnny Cash; in the same San Antonio, Texas, hotel room where bluesman Robert Johnson cut 16 tracks in 1936; and at the First African Baptist church in Savannah, Georgia.

Mellencamp recalled that he and his wife Elaine even got baptized at the church. "For about a half hour I really felt uplifted. It wore off," he said.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by Vicki Allen)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67H0SN20100818





Piracy Is Promotion, Says CEO of Porn Multinational
Ernesto

Adult entertainment and piracy go hand in hand, so to speak. While some players in the industry use legal tools to bring piracy to a halt, others are not bothered about unauthorized sharing. In a recent video interview the CEO of one of the largest porn distributors said that the more people pirate his company’s work, the better.

Private Media Group, one of the largest adult entertainment companies and the first one that’s publicly traded on NASDAQ, has seen many new opportunities appear with the emergence of the Internet. However, it also has to deal with the many streaming and torrent sites where their material is shared freely.

Unlike other adult entertainment companies that sue individual downloaders or site operators, Private Media Group CEO Berth Milton is not going to put up a fight. On the contrary, he believes that piracy is a good thing as it serves as a promotional tool.
“We will be extremely happy the more people are pirating our content and the more they look at it,” Milton said in a recent interview with NewTeeVee.

An unusual comment for someone who heads one of the largest adult entertainment multinationals, but not a complete surprise considering the history of the company. In 2002, Private Media Group was the owner of Napster for a short while, before it was taken over by Roxio which turned it into a legal pay service.

Milton believes that entertainment companies should look beyond piracy, and explore alternatives business models as the battle against piracy is one that can’t be won.

“I think it’s a lost battle,” Milton said, adding: “I look at my own kids, because that’s the best way to know where the market is going. It doesn’t matter if I tell them that it is illegal to download. As soon as they close the door to their room, they download.”

“They are not afraid of someone who’s tracking their IP-address. They just don’t care, Milton said. “It’s a new world and we have to accept it.”

According to Private’s CEO, companies like his should use the enormous amount of traffic piracy generates. Give everything away for free and sell goods to those visitors that are harder to pirate.

In the video Milton says that his company will focus more on selling the ‘private lifestyle’ which includes luxurious vacations with an adult theme, and toys and tools that may come in handy while reenacting pirated videos.

With slow progress on human cloning and the 3D-printer, Milton’s bet on selling the sex ‘experience’ rather than videos seems to be a safe one for now.
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-pr...tional-100818/





Kids In The Hall Admit They 'Pirate' Their Own Shows, Because They Can't Get Them Legally
from the copyright-law-in-action dept

In a TorrentFreak article about a Czech TV station hosting unauthorized copies of the TV show Fringe on their server (the show appears on a competing station, and an employee had missed some episodes so he downloaded -- and then hosted -- them), there's a mention of a recent interview by Keith Olbermann of the famed Canadian comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall, where Dave Foley admits to having downloading "unauthorized" copies of his own shows via BitTorrent due to the difficulty of getting legal copies. He jokes:

"So I eventually just downloaded the whole series on BitTorrent. So I illegally downloaded. So come after me FBI!"

We hear this sort of thing all the time, and it sort of highlights the ridiculousness of some of what's going on today. When the easiest most efficient ways for content creators to get access to their own work is illegal downloading, perhaps it's time to realize that criminalizing this activity is a mistake, and the real problem is trying to force everyone into less efficient mechanisms?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20100813/17071610622.shtml
















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

August 14th, August 7th, July 31st, July 24th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black