Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 16th, '09

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"In the year 4,000 A.D., when Pluto is hollowed out and millions of people are living inside, the name of Venetia Burney may be the only thing that Great Britain is remembered for." – Alan M. MacRobert


"Record label abuse of artists from Count Basie to Prince is well documented, as evidenced by scores of lawsuits filed by musicians cheated out of royalties. Moving forward, the fundamental question is this: If the debate is about 'fairness to artists,' why should the record labels get one penny from a performance tax on radio stations?" – Dennis Wharton


"The only way Intel can win this appeal is if the commission is wrong about the facts." – Thomas Vinje


"The only people likely to be offended by 'Angels & Demons' are those who persist in their adherence to the fading dogma that popular entertainment should earn its acclaim through excellence and originality." – A. O. Scott


"I really feel like my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity." – Cory Doctorow


"We’re in the last days of copyright, if you want to be grim about it….Stop it. I dare you." – Nora Ephron



































May 16th, 2009




Jamais deux sans trois

France Approves Crackdown on Internet Piracy
Eric Pfanner

The French National Assembly on Tuesday approved a plan by President Nicolas Sarkozy to punish digital pirates with the possible suspension of their Internet connections, a little more than a month after the same body had rejected the proposal in a surprise vote.

The assembly, the lower house of Parliament, voted 296 to 233 in favor of the bill, the furthest-reaching legislative initiative yet in the global battle by the music and movie industries against unauthorized copying of their works. The bill would create a new agency that would send warning letters to copyright violators; those who ignored two warnings would lose their Internet service.

Passage was expected because Mr. Sarkozy’s government closed ranks after losing the previous vote in April, when insufficient members of his party, U.M.P., appeared for the vote. The Culture Ministry hailed the outcome Tuesday as an important step toward “preserving cultural diversity and the industries threatened by piracy.”

Approval in the upper house, the Senate, is expected Wednesday. The sponsor of the bill in the National Assembly, Franck Riester, has said that the first penalties could occur next year.

Opponents say, however, that the plan is saddled with provisions that would make the system difficult, if not impossible, to enforce.

Before the measure goes into effect, it also faces several potential hurdles. Assuming it is passed by the Senate, it would be reviewed by the Constitutional Council, which has the power to reject proposed legislation, something that happens relatively infrequently.

Groups that favor an unfettered Internet are also vowing to challenge the measure through the courts, citing a recent declaration by the European Parliament that it is illegal for a European Union country to sever Internet access without the approval of a court.

Opponents of the so-called three strikes plan say their cause will be aided by the fact that the vote was relatively close, even though Mr. Sarkozy has a substantial majority in the National Assembly.

“The law has a very low political legitimacy because of this,” said Jérémie Zimmermann, director of La Quadrature du Net, an advocacy group based in Paris.

Mr. Zimmermann and other opponents of the bill say it would be overly intrusive and could undermine the development of the Internet in France.

Unusually in the French parliamentary system of government, the proposal also split both Mr. Sarkozy’s party and the main opposition group, the Socialists. A number of U.M.P. members risked the president’s wrath to vote against the plan, while the proposal tested the traditional loyalty of the Socialists for the French content industries; in the end, many found a stronger affinity with the populist cause of Internet freedom.

A mini-scandal that unfolded in the days leading up to the vote showed how politically charged the debate over the proposal has become. It involved the dismissal of an executive of TF1, the leading French television broadcaster, who had criticized the proposed law in a private e-mail message to his representative in the National Assembly.

The e-mail from the executive, Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, who was in charge of Web innovation at TF1, found its way to the Culture Ministry, where a staff member forwarded it back to the bosses of Mr. Bourreau-Guggenheim at TF1. The broadcaster said his “radical position” on the issue required him to be dismissed. The culture minister, Christine Albanel, suspended an unidentified employee for one month for sending the e-mail to TF1 executives.

The three-strikes measure has been actively supported by music and movie industry trade organizations; groups like the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry have called it an example for other countries to follow.

But the prospects for similar legislation are unclear. In the United States, the House of Representatives recently held hearings on what to do about piracy, but so far there have been no concrete proposals. In Britain, meanwhile, the government has ruled out a French-style approach, saying that London preferred to have the entertainment industries and Internet service providers work together on an anti-piracy plan.

Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research, said the French plan was unlikely to result in a large number of suspensions because technology will move on. Already, many people share music on the Internet through other means than peer-to-peer services, the main target of the French legislation.

But he said it could encourage media companies to make music and movies available in more attractive ways on the Internet, something that he said was needed if they were to have any hope of curbing piracy.

“It doesn’t matter how big a stick you’ve got,” he said. “If you don’t have a big fat carrot in front of the horse’s nose it’s not going to move.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/te...net/13net.html





Web Designer Opposes France's "3 Strikes" Law, Loses Job

An employee of French broadcaster TF1 was fired after privately expressing opposition to the new "graduated response" bill moving through the National Assembly. He e-mailed his MP, who forwarded the message to the Ministry of Culture, which passed it to TF1.
Nate Anderson

He's already being called "le premier martyr d'Hadopi." Who is he? He's a 31-year old Frenchman named Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, and he works in the Internet innovation division of French TV broadcaster TF1. After sending a private note to his MP opposing the proposed "three strikes" law currently being debated in France, Bourreau-Guggenheim found himself hauled into his boss' office. He was shown a copy of his e-mail, and he was fired for "strategic differences" with his employer.

The case is all over French newspapers today. Libération reported the story, which began back on February 19th when Bourreau-Guggenheim decided to write his MP. He did so from a private e-mail address and told Françoise de Panafieu (a member of the majority UMP party) what he thought of the "Création et Internet" bill.

The bill is sometimes referred to as "HADOPI," after the French acronym for the new administrative authority that the bill would create; HADOPI would be responsible for overseeing warnings and Internet disconnections for those who repeatedly infringe online copyrights. The idea is so unpopular that 88 percent of the European Parliament this week voted to ban the practice unless overseen by a judge.

After Bourreau-Guggenheim expressed his opposition to the law, he thought no more about it until he was called into his boss' office and shown... an exact copy of his e-mail to Panafieu. According to his boss, the e-mail had been provided by the Ministry of Culture, where Minister Christine Albanel is the French government's key backer of the Création et Internet law (and also a UMP member).

But why did the Ministry of Culture have Bourreau-Guggenheim's e-mail? Because Panafieu's office had passed the message from its constituent on to the Ministry, which then passed it to TF1, which also supports the new bill.

Bourreau-Guggenheim could hardly believe it when, on April 16, he was fired from his job for "divergence forte avec la stratégie" (strong disagreement with the strategy) of TF1.

When contacted by Le Point magazine, Albanel's advisors said that they were "très choqués et alarmés" by what had happened, even blaming TF1 for an overreaction.

"On n'a jamais réclamé la tête de ce salarié. La réaction de TF1 est très exagérée!" said the unnamed source. "Cette décision est vraiment regrettable." (Rough translation: "We never asked for his job. TF1's reaction was way out of proportion! The decision is truly regrettable.")

Apparently, the Albanel people were just passing the e-mail along for informational purposes—though if that were true, one wonders why the identifying information wasn't stripped out of the message. "Truly regrettable" is certainly an understatement here, but it's the same sentiment offered by Panafieu's office, which says it merely passed the e-mail along to the Ministry of Culture because it was an "interesting argument."

No one "meant" for this to happen—but happened it has, and it's another huge black eye for UMP, which couldn't even get the bill passed on its first reading because it was outmaneuvered by the minority Socialists. Création et Internet comes up for a second vote in the National Assembly next week and looks set to pass, though the European Parliament may have other ideas when it comes to implementation.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-loses-job.ars





Call to 'Disconnect File-Sharers'
Darren Waters

Persistent illegal file-sharers should be cut off from the net, an alliance of UK creative industries will tell the government later.

The alliance wants the government to force internet service providers (ISPs) to disconnect users who ignore repeated warnings about sharing illegal content.

John Woodward, head of the UK Film Council, said illegal file-sharing was hurting film-making and risking jobs.

The coalition says more than 50% of net traffic in the UK is illegal content.

Mr Woodward said: "The growing threat of illegal P2P (peer to peer) file-sharing threatens [the creative industries], as films go unmade, DVD sales deteriorate and jobs are lost in production and distribution of content."

Nine creative bodies and five trade unions have signed a joint statement asking the government to force ISPs into banning users caught sharing illegally. It marks a significant hardening of their stance on the role of ISPs, which in the past has focused on education and awareness.

The creative industries, including the British Phonographic Industry and the Federation Against Copyright Theft, have issued a set of "urgent recommendations" that they want to be included in the government's Digital Britain manifesto.

They argue that many jobs in the 800,000-strong sectors of film, TV, music, and software are threatened by illegal file-sharing.

However, the Internet Services Providers' Association (Ispa) - a trade body that represents ISP's - said that users could challenge disconnections through the courts and, at present, the technology available for monitoring and detecting illegal sharers was not of a standard "where they would be admissible as evidence in court".

Instead, Ispa said that rights holders needed to rewrite their licensing agreements, to take account of "new models of online content distribution".

In a statement, Ispa's secretary general, Nicholas Lansman, said: "Ispa recognises that there is a problem with unlawful P2P file sharing, but it is important to recognise that a major part of the solution lies in licensing reform and the availability of legal content online."

Last year, the UK government told ISPs to take concrete steps to curb illegal downloads or face legal sanctions, but shied away from legislation that would force ISPs to ban repeat offenders.

No-one from the Internet Service Providers Association was available for comment on the alliance's statement.

Content gatekeepers

Earlier this year, the UK's Intellectual Property minister, David Lammy, said: "We can't have a system where we're talking about arresting teenagers in their bedrooms."

The government has set a target of reducing illegal file-sharing by 70 to 80% within two to three years.

ISPs have long resisted becoming "gatekeepers of content" and have pointed out that any change to their role would require a change in UK legislation, which currently classifies them as mere "conduits" of data.

Last year, some of the UK's biggest internet providers signed up to a voluntary scheme that saw letters sent out to thousands of users suspected of illegally sharing music.

The European Union has also signalled its interest in the debate, with MEPs saying users need to have better protection from being disconnected. MEPs stressed the need for a ruling from a court before a user's connection was cut.

The alliance warned that illegal file-sharing could have a devastating impact on creativity and the British economy, if it goes unchecked.

Secure delivery

In an "unprecedented joint statement", the alliance predicted a "lawless free-for-all" unless the government ensured the "safe and secure delivery of legal content".

It reports that in 2007 an estimated 98 million illegal downloads of films and more than a billion illegal downloads of music tracks took place in the UK. It says more than six million people in the country regularly file-share copyright content without permission.

The previous tactic of pursuing individual file-sharers in the courts appear to have been abandoned.

"Suggestions for rights-owners to take many thousands of legal actions seeking damages against individual file-sharers in court are neither practicable nor proportionate and would create a drain on public resources," the joint statement reads.

The statement stops short of calling on the government to introduce legislation with detailed technical measures to prevent illegal file-sharing.

"Instead, [the government] should provide enabling legislation, for the specific measures to be identified and implemented in an Industry Code of Practice," it recommends.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/8044251.stm





UK ISPs Refuse to Play Internet Copyright Cops

The UK government is finalizing its approach to dealing with online copyright infringement. Internet disconnections have been publicly taken off the table, but UK creative industries are now lobbying hard for disconnection as the report nears completion. ISPs argue that better licensing and business models would do a better job of solving the problem.
Nate Anderson

Warnings just aren't good enough. That was the message delivered at a London conference today by a group of UK creative industries, which are demanding that ISPs start disconnecting users accused of repeated online copyright infringement. But the response from ISPs was clear: the creative industries can just shut their collective pie-hole until they do a better job of licensing legal content.

Hey, Digital Britain, start disconnecting people!

Today's push for tougher "graduated response" penalties is politically timed to put pressure on the government's soon-to-be-released Digital Britain report (read our coverage of the report's interim conclusions). That report will shape government policy on issues like graduated response, and early drafts have so far been in keeping with the government's current approach—Internet disconnection is off the table as a penalty.

It is our view that legislation on enforcement should only be introduced on the condition that the rights holder industry commits to significant licensing reform.
Previous UK studies have shown that a mere warning (which strips away the veil of anonymity that many Internet users believe they enjoy) is sufficient to stop the vast majority of illicit file-sharing. The UK music business has essentially endorsed this approach in the past, signing a memorandum of understanding with the UK's largest ISPs which saw warning letters sent to suspected infringers. But, with the government poised to set policy in this area soon, the music and movie businesses have decided that there's no harm in aiming for what they really want: mandated disconnections, like those just passed in France.

The thinking here seems to be that warnings would have an effect if backed by the threat of disconnection, but once every file-swapper in the UK knows that no penalties would follow the letters, effectiveness would plummet.

Revolt of the ISPs

But the ISPs aren't going quietly into that dark night. In a statement, the Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) said that it agreed with creative industry calls for "the safe and secure delivery of legal content." Getting access to this content remains difficult, though, and ISPA notes that "Internet companies remain extremely frustrated by the ongoing difficulties in securing licensing that is needed to offer consumers legal alternatives through new models of online content distribution. It is our view that legislation on enforcement should only be introduced on the condition that the rights holder industry commits to significant licensing reform."

Despite the apocalyptic figures released today by the creative industries (800,000 jobs could be lost! Half the UK's Internet traffic is piratical!), the industry's own data shows that the situation is improving. Last week, the RIAA's research department sent Ars new research showing that legal music services now exceed illegal ones in popularity for the first time.

"An increasingly entrenched group of hardcore file sharers continue to trade even more files," says the RIAA. "That’s predictable, and probably an audience that's nearly impenetrable. A more relevant barometer is the number of people using P2P as a share of Internet users, and that number, despite significant growth in both broadband penetration and legal downloading, has remained essentially flat for the past three years."

This is obviously not an argument for doing nothing about the problem, but it does suggest that deeply controversial measures might not be necessary. And, with the European Parliament adamantly opposed to nonjudicial Internet disconnections, tough graduated response penalties certainly qualify as "controversial."

The movie and music industries deserve full credit for finally getting their act together and licensing new services that are hugely popular with consumers. In the US, we have DRM-free iTunes, the Amazon store, Hulu, Netflix online streaming, Last.fm, eMusic, and others. Europe has its own set of butt-kicking services, including the BBC iPlayer and Spotify. Despite the work that has been done, though, the ISPs continue to insist that streamlined licensing and better business models will succeed better than turning Internet providers into cops.

And then there's that pesky "evidence" that people get so hung up on. "ISPA members have consistently explained that significant technological advances would be required if these measures are to reach a standard where they would be admissible as evidence in court," said the group.

Given the problems with disconnection, the burgeoning growth of legal services, the European Parliament's obvious intention to restrict the practice, and the UK government's own resistance to disconnection, there's a good chance that Digital Britain author Lord Carter won't be swayed by the latest round of lobbying. On the other hand, the creative industries in Europe just pushed a 20-year copyright term extension through the European Parliament in defiance of all academic evidence, so anything is still possible.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...right-cops.ars





Popular Torrents Start to Disappear From Mininova
Ernesto

Those hunting for the latest episodes of Lost, Heroes and Prison Break on Mininova may have already noticed that they are hard to find. With the recently implemented copyright filter, many of the popular TV-show releases and blockbuster movies have been removed and put on a ban list.

A few days ago the owners of BitTorrent’s largest torrent indexer announced that they would start experimenting with a new content removal tool that enables copyright holders to easily remove and ban torrents from the site. The system seems to be pretty effective, as searches for TV-shows such as Lost, Heroes and Prison Break only return a handful of results, and not even those you’d expect.

Mininova lost most Prison Break torrents

Those who try to upload a ‘possibly infringing’ torrent to Mininova get the following message; “Your torrent has been uploaded successfully. It will not appear immediately on the site, as the content will be downloaded first by a third party to check for infringing content. If the content is found to be non-infringing, the torrent will be posted on the site right away.”

Mininova has announced that they are currently testing the removal system with only a few titles, among these are most of the torrents uploaded by the popular scene and release groups. It looks like the removal system checks the info hashes to see if the torrents are on the ban list. If this is indeed the case, the easiest way to get around the filter would be to modify the torrent by adding a small file to the original release and create a new torrent. This new torrent will have an unique info hash and will be accepted by Mininova, until it is blacklisted of course.

This could be the death of scene releases and torrents from popular release groups, since these will be the prime targets of the copyright holders simply because they are downloaded more often than others. This will mean that more exotic and home brewed torrents could remain on Mininova, and will likely be incompatible with the popular releases offered elsewhere, resulting in smaller swarm sizes for Mininova users.

One of the TV release groups that has seen most of its torrents banned from Mininova is EZTV. However, NovaKing, one of the admins at EZTV, is sympathetic towards Mininova, despite the filter. “I can understand why Mininova is going down this path. It is wiser for them to push the initiative and show the content distributors that they are not the bad guys instead of being forced by a judge to more than likely do the same thing in their upcoming court case,” he told us.

“We are not sure how much this affects the TV shows that we release as the filter has only been in effect for a short period of time. But to cater for the users out there that do not know we actually have our own website and only get their shows via Mininova, we have changed how we post our torrents to Mininova,” NovaKing added.

Since Mininova’s content removal tool checks for the info hash of the torrent, they circumvent the system by linking to the ‘infringing’ torrents indirectly. “Now when you see a show from us it will contain a text file which contains a link to a valid torrent file, this will keep us from being filtered as the torrent we post does not contain any copyrighted content.” Of course, the latest torrents and news about EZTV are also posted on Twitter, EZTV’s own website and on many other torrent sites.

Only time will tell how effective the removal system will be, and whether the Mininova team will continue to use it in the future. It is likely that it is a compromise that they were forced to make, as a sign of goodwill towards the copyright holders who they are set to face in court next week. If successful, this test case might be used to pressure other torrent site owners to do the same. We hope, however, that the copyright holders will invest their time and money in serving their customers instead. Opening Hulu up to everyone outside the US might be a good start. Or they perhaps they could license content to Mininova.
http://torrentfreak.com/popular-torr...ninova-090511/





Apple Rejects iPhone BitTorrent App
David Kravets

Citing copyright infringement concerns, Apple won’t include a BitTorrent client in the App Store.

The Cupertino-based electronics company rejected Maza Digital’s Drivetrain, saying “this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third-party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store.”

Apple is well known for banning porn-related apps or those it deems culturally unworthy. That said, the latest rejection is rather ironic: iPhones, iPods, even Apple computers and those produced by its competitors are routinely used “for the purpose of infringing third-party rights.” And there already is at least one app available, called trackr, which is described as “an RSS reader with the unique ability to queue to torrent downloads diectly from an RSS feed.”

Clearly, there are legitimate uses for the BitTorrent protocol . Still, Apple is obviously wary of authorizing BitTorrent downloading apps because it could hinder its iTunes market for videos and music by turning the iPhone into a pocket-sized venue for ripping off pirated content. It is also fighting to retain control of its App Store as the Copyright Office is considering authorizing iPhone users to jailbreak the device and run unauthorized apps.

Aaron Scott, the developer of Drivetrain, said via an e-mail interview from Australia that Apple’s decision was “ridiculous.”

“I do think that some people might choose to download pirated works. But they can not outlaw a program because of a few who choose to do the wrong thing. The BitTorrent protocol and client apps are not illegal,” he said.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/200...nt-iphone-app/





RealNetworks Ordered to Pay Sanctions in Studio Lawsuit

Company destroyed evidence
Jennifer Netherby

The presiding judge in the lawsuit between RealNetworks and the Hollywood studios over DVD ripping software RealDVD has ordered RealNetworks to pay monetary sanctions for destroying evidence in the case.

In granting part of the motion filed by the major studios, Marilyn Hall Patel on Tuesday ordered RealNetworks to pay studio legal fees related to its claims that RealNetworks destroyed the notebooks of one of its former program managers. The notebooks contain a timeline and details of RealNetworks' plans for the DVD-ripping software and Facets, a DVD player that would allow consumers to rip movies from discs and save them to the player’s hard drive for later playback.

In the ruling, Patel noted that RealNetworks has told the studios it plans to introduce the player to market soon and had asked the court in a December hearing to include the Facets player as part of the RealDVD lawsuit, a motion she granted.

Patel ordered both parties to come up with a policy for preserving evidence going forward. Patel dismissed a studio request to impose monetary sanctions on RealNetworks for circumventing ARccOS and Ripguard DVD copy protections in addition to CSS copy protection.

RealNetworks and the major studios are due back in court today for the hearing over the legality of DVD-ripping software RealDVD. A decision isn’t immediately expected.
http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6656952.html





Pirate Bay Attorney Outlines Arguments for Appeal
Erik Palm

The judge had a conflict of interest--that's one argument that will be used in appealing the Pirate Bay verdict, an attorney of one of the defendants told CNET News on Friday.

Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström were all found guilty last month of having assisted in making 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site.The four were sentenced to one year in jail and ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages to copyright holders.

Now all four are appealing the decision in separate cases, according to Swedish technology weekly Ny Teknik (in Swedish).

"The first thing the high court of justice Svea Hovrätt must decide is if the judge has had a conflict of interest, Peter Althin, Peter Sunde's defense attorney, said in an phone interview from Sweden.

As CNET has reported, Judge Tomas Norström, who ruled against the Pirate Bay defendants, is a member of two copyright organizations. Some allege his membership is a conflict of interest.

CNET was unable to reach Norström on Friday to comment for this story. In a previous interview with Swedish daily Dagens nyheter (in Swedish), he said the accusations were wrong and that he was only sharing his competence.

"To spread knowledge about a legal area is one thing, to promote is something different," Norström said.

But Althin said he does not accept this argument. "If you are a member of an organization whose purpose is to strengthen the copyright holders' interest together with the accusing companies in the trial, then the trust is broken, considering impartiality," Althin said.

Peter Althin is Sunde's defense attorney.

Althin stressed that each defendant has filed his own appeal.

In Sunde's appeal, Althin is asking the high court of justice to grant a retrial in the district court of Stockholm. In addition to the alleged conflict of interest, Sunde's appeal objects to the verdict's conclusion that his company helped develop The Pirate Bay. Rather, he has only admitted being a spokesman for the site. Sunde also says the damages to copyright holders were too high and calculated in an unreasonable way, according to Althin.

Also, Althin says that even if his client's company was found to have had a development role, Pirate Bay is not responsible for the crime of assisting copyright violation.

"Pirate Bay does not encourage anybody to commit a crime. Cars can be used for speeding and drunk driving, but no car manufacturer is held responsible for that," Althin said.

The appeals are now to be evaluated by the high court of justice, Svea Hovrätt.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10236624-93.html





Usenet Community Takes Anti-Piracy Group to Court
enigmax

A Usenet discussion community is taking notorious anti-piracy outfit BREIN to court. BREIN, which has taken action against many Usenet and BitTorrent sites including Demonoid and Mininova, has declared the activities of FTD illegal. Angered by these claims, FTD is now taking BREIN to court to force it to eat its words.

Back in January 2009, Dutch publication Volkskrant published an article about Usenet titled “You do not pay for it, it’s unlawful”. In it, Tim Kuik, head of anti-piracy outfit BREIN made some aggressive comments about Netherlands-based discussion site, FTD. “Although they [FTD] are not carrying illegal content on their servers, what FTD does is simply criminal,” he said.

Founded in 2001, FTD is the largest Usenet community in The Netherlands with a massive 450,000 members. The site and its software allows FTD’s users to report the location of material they find on Usenet, which could include the usual movies, music and TV shows. Of course, once other members know where to find the material, the downloading can begin. Since much of the material downloaded is copyrighted, BREIN went on to claim the site is illegal, but the picture in The Netherlands is not necessarily how BREIN paints it.

Downloading movies, TV shows and music from the Internet for your own personal use is completely legal in Holland. Making copies of original material you own for your own use is also completely legal. Even making copies of pirated material you don’t own is legal, provided it is exclusively for your own use. Although certain torrent sites can exist in a murky semi-gray area, FTD doesn’t even link to copyright works hosted by someone else - there is no so-called “structural infringement” which BREIN claims some BitTorrent sites demonstrate.

Considering the above, FTD are pretty annoyed that Tim Kuik of BREIN called them criminals, since his claims have no basis in law. Unlike many sites threatened by copyright groups, FTD aren’t sitting back and taking this, they are fighting back.

“FTD is a perfectly legal activity,” said FTD director Ronald Sievers, a point on which his legal team agrees.

“BREIN’s claims are built on legal quicksand,” says FTD lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet. “They speak of ‘facilitation’ and the structural use of the availability of unauthorized downloads, as if it were a foregone conclusion that this is prohibited. Nothing could be further from the truth. Furthermore, FTD only facilitates communication between people who quite legally download from Usenet. FTD does not facilitate or carry out any upload and therefore can not be held liable.”

So, supported by two Dutch copyright lawyers and IT experts, FTD have filed a lawsuit against BREIN in which they request the court clarifies these points;

1. That downloading is legal in the Netherlands, even if the uploader committed copyright infringement when he uploaded the material.
2. That directing users to content on Usenet via FTD is legal, even if the material was put there without permission of the copyright holders.
3. That FTD is acting within the law, considering the above.
4. That there is no need for FTD to filter any of the reports its users create which refer to the location of content on the Internet
5. That FTD does not have to remove any of these reports, unless BREIN makes a correct and formal complaint.

Of course, FTD also want a retraction of BREIN’s statement that FTD is illegal. “FTD require a public statement correcting this and wants a declaration from the court that they were simply acting legally,” it said in a statement.

Additionally, Kuik also quipped that “what FTD do clearly constitutes a crime,” to which Arnoud Engelfriet, one of FTD’s lawyers responded, “A correction of this should be published on BREIN’s homepage too.”

A copy of the subpoena can be found here. (pdf)
http://torrentfreak.com/usenet-commu...-court-090515/





A Cautionary Video About America’s ‘Stuff’
Leslie Kaufman

The thick-lined drawings of the Earth, a factory and a house, meant to convey the cycle of human consumption, are straightforward and child-friendly. So are the pictures of dark puffs of factory smoke and an outlined skull and crossbones, representing polluting chemicals floating in the air.

Which is one reason “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.

The video is a cheerful but brutal assessment of how much Americans waste, and it has its detractors. But it has been embraced by teachers eager to supplement textbooks that lag behind scientific findings on climate change and pollution. And many children who watch it take it to heart: riding in the car one day with his parents in Tacoma, Wash., Rafael de la Torre Batker, 9, was worried about whether it would be bad for the planet if he got a new set of Legos.

“When driving by a big-box store, you could see he was struggling with it,” his father, David Batker, said. But then Rafael said, “It’s O.K. if I have Legos because I’m going to keep them for a very long time,” Mr. Batker recalled.

The video was created by Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace employee and an independent lecturer who paints a picture of how American habits result in forests being felled, mountaintops being destroyed, water being polluted and people and animals being poisoned. Ms. Leonard, who describes herself as an “unapologetic activist,” is also critical of corporations and the federal government, which she says spends too much on the military.

Ms. Leonard put the video on the Internet in December 2007. Word quickly spread among teachers, who recommended it to one another as a brief, provocative way of drawing students into a dialogue about how buying a cellphone or jeans could contribute to environmental devastation.

So far, six million people have viewed the film at its site, storyofstuff.com, and millions more have seen it on YouTube. More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web.

It has also won support from independent groups that advise teachers on curriculum choices. Facing the Future, a curriculum developer for schools in all 50 states, is drafting lesson plans based on the video. And Ms. Leonard has a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a book based on the video.

The enthusiasm is not universal. In January, a school board in Missoula County, Mont., decided that screening the video treaded on academic freedom after a parent complained that its message was anticapitalist.

But many educators say the video is a boon to teachers as they struggle to address the gap in what textbooks say about the environment and what science has revealed in recent years.

“Frankly, a lot of the textbooks are awful on the subject of the environment,” said Bill Bigelow, the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools, a quarterly magazine that has promoted “The Story of Stuff” to its subscribers and on its Web site, which reaches about 600,000 educators a month. “The one used out here in Oregon for global studies — it’s required — has only three paragraphs on climate change. So, yes, teachers are looking for alternative resources.”

Environmental education is still a young and variable field, according to Frank Niepold, the climate education coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There are few state or local school mandates on how to teach the subject.

The agency is seeking to change that, but in the interim many teachers are developing their own lesson plans on climate change, taking some elements from established sources like the National Wildlife Federation and others from less conventional ones like “The Story of Stuff.”

Ms. Leonard is self-educated on where waste goes and worked for Greenpeace to prevent richer nations from dumping their trash in poorer ones. She produced the video, with the Free Range Studios company, and with money from numerous nonprofit groups; the largest single giver was the Tides Foundation. She did so, she said, after tiring of traveling often to present her views at philanthropic and environmental conferences. She attributes the response to the video’s simplicity.

“A lot of what’s in the film was already out there,” Ms. Leonard said, “but the style of the animation makes it easy to watch. It is a nice counterbalance to the starkness of the facts.”

The video certainly makes the facts stark and at times very political: “We’ll start with extraction, which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planet,” she says at one point. “What this looks like is we chop down the trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.”

Mark Lukach, who teaches global studies at Woodside Priory, a Catholic college-preparatory school in Portola Valley, Calif., acknowledged that the film is edgy, but said the 20-minute length gives students time to challenge it in class after viewing it.

“Compared to ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ ” he said, referring to Al Gore’s one-and-a-half-hour documentary on climate change, “it is much shorter and easier to compact into a class segment. You can watch it and then segue into a discussion.”

Mr. Lukach’s students made a response video and posted it on YouTube, asking Ms. Leonard to scare them less and give them ideas on how to make things better. That in turn inspired high school students in Mendocino, Calif., to post an answer to Woodside, with suggested activities.

Dawn Zweig, who teaches environmental studies at the Putney School, a private academy in Vermont, said that the very reason the video appealed to teachers — it shows students how their own behavior is linked to what is happening across the globe — could also raise sensitive issues. She said students, particularly affluent ones, might take the critique personally. “If you offend a student, they turn off the learning button and then you won’t get anywhere,” Ms. Zweig said.

Sometimes teachers observe the opposite: children who become environmental advocates at home after seeing the video. After Jasmine Madavi, 18, saw it last year in Mr. Lukach’s class at Woodside Priory, she began nagging her parents to stop buying bottled water. Her mother resisted, saying that filtered tap water, Jasmine’s suggested alternative, would not taste as good. But Jasmine bought the filter on her own, and the household is now converted.

“You just have to be persistent,” said Ms. Madavi, who is now a community college student. “When you use a water bottle, it just doesn’t disappear. That’s Annie’s message.”

Most parents take such needling with humor. But Mark Zuber, a parent of a child at Big Sky High School in Missoula, had a stronger reaction when a teacher showed the video to his daughter last year. “There was not one positive thing about capitalism in the whole thing,” Mr. Zuber said.

Corporations, for example, are portrayed as a bloated person sporting a top hat and with a dollar sign etched on its front.

He described the video as one-sided. “It was very well done, very effective advocacy, but it was just that,” he said.

Mr. Zuber argued before the Missoula County School Board that the way in which “The Story of Stuff” was presented, without an alternative point of view, violated its standards on bias, and the board agreed in a 4-to-3 vote.

Still, Ms. Leonard is hoping the video will circle the globe. “I’ve heard from teachers in Palestine and Papua New Guinea,” she said. “It is just spreading and spreading.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/ed...n/11stuff.html





Cadets Trade the Trenches for Firewalls
Corey Kilgannon and Noam Cohen

The Army forces were under attack. Communications were down, and the chain of command was broken.

Pacing a makeshift bunker whose entrance was camouflaged with netting, the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.”

These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use. The N.S.A. made the cadets’ task more difficult by planting viruses on some of the equipment, just as real-world hackers have done on millions of computers around the world.

The competition was a final exam of sorts for a senior elective class. The cadets, who were computer science and information technology majors, competed against teams from the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine as well as the Naval Postgraduate Academy and the Air Force Institute of Technology. Each team was judged on how well it subdued the threats from the N.S.A.

The cyberwar games at West Point are just one example of a heightened awareness across the military that it must treat the threat of a computer attack as seriously as it does an attack carried out by a bomber or combat brigade. There is hardly an American military unit or headquarters that has not been ordered to analyze the risk of cyberattacks to its mission — and to train to counter them. If the hackers were to succeed, they could change information on the network and cripple Internet communications.

In the desert outside Las Vegas, in a series of inconspicuous trailers, some of the most highly motivated hackers in the United States spend their days and nights probing the military’s vast computer networks for weaknesses to exploit.

These hackers — many of whom got their start as teenagers devoted to computer screens in their basements — have access to the latest in attack software. Some of it was developed by cryptologists at the N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, where most of the government’s talent for breaking and making computer codes resides.

The hackers have an official name — the 57th Information Aggressor Squadron — and a real home, Nellis Air Force Base.

The Army last year created its own destination for computer experts, the Network Warfare Battalion, where many of the cadets in the cyberwar games hope to be assigned. But even so, the ranks are still small.

The Defense Department today graduates only 80 students a year from its cyberwar schools, causing Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to complain that the Pentagon is “desperately short of people who have capabilities in this area in all the services, and we have to address it.” Under current Pentagon budget proposals, the number of students cycled through the schools will be quadrupled in the next two years.

Part of the Pentagon’s effort to increase the military’s capabilities are the annual cyberwar games played at the nation’s military academies, including West Point, where young cadets in combat boots and buzz cuts talk megabytes instead of megatons on a campus dotted with statues of generals, historic armaments and old stone buildings.

While the Pentagon has embraced the need for offensive cyberwarfare, there were no offensive maneuvers in the games last month, said Col. Joe Adams, who teaches Information Assurance and stood at the head of the classroom during the April exercise.

Cadet Joshua Ewing said he and his fellow Blue Team members “learn all the techniques that a hacker would do, and we try to beat a hacker.”

These strategies are not just theoretical. Most of these cadets will soon be sent to Afghanistan to carry out such work, Cadet Ewing said.

When the military deploys in a combat zone or during a domestic emergency, establishing a secure Internet connection is an early priority. To keep things humming, the military’s experts must fend off the ordinary chaos of the Internet as well as attacks devised to disable the communications system, like flooding e-mail servers with so many junk messages that they collapse.

Underscoring how seriously the cadets were taking the April games, the sign above the darkened entranceway in Thayer Hall read “Information Warfare Live Fire Range” and the area was draped with camouflage netting.

One group had to retrieve crucial information from a partly erased hard drive. One common method of hiding text, said Cadet Sean Storey, is to embed it in digital photographs; he had managed to find secret documents hidden this way. He was seeking a password needed to read encrypted e-mail he had located on the hard drive.

Other cadets worked in tandem, as if plugging a leaky dam, to keep the entire system working as the N.S.A. hackers attacked the engine that runs a crucial database as well as the e-mail server.

They shouted out various Internet addresses to inspect — and usually block — after getting clearance from referees. And there was that awkward moment when the cadet in charge, Salvatore Messina, had to act without clearance because the attack was so severe he couldn’t even send an e-mail message.

The cadets in this room do get their share of ribbing. But one cadet, Derek Taylor, said today’s soldiers recognize that technological expertise can be as vital as brute force in saving lives. West Point takes the competition seriously. The cadets who helped install and secure the operating system spent a week setting it up. The dean gives a pep talk; professors bring food.

Brian McCord, part of the team that installed the operating system, said he was chosen because his senior project was deeply reliant on Linux. The West Point team used this open-source operating system, freely available on the Internet, instead of relying on proprietary products from big-name companies like Microsoft or Sun Microsystems.

“It seems weird for the Army with its large contracts to be using Linux, but it’s very cheap and very customizable,” Cadet McCord said. It is also much easier to secure because “you can tweak it for everything you need” and there are not as many known ways to attack it, he said.

West Point emerged victorious in the games last month. That means the academy, which has won five of the last nine competitions, can keep the Director’s Cup trophy, which is displayed near a German Enigma encoding machine from World War II. Cracking the Enigma code helped the Allies win the war, and the machine is a stark reminder of the pivotal role of technology in warfare.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/te...ybergames.html





Judge Tosses Claims Following Data Breach
AP

A federal judge says only those who weren't reimbursed for fraudulent charges may sue the Hannaford Bros. supermarket chain over a data breach that exposed 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers to computer hackers.
District Judge D. Brock Hornby on Tuesday dismissed all but one of the civil claims filed after the data breach was revealed in March 2008.

Between Dec. 7, 2007, and March 10, 2008, hackers accessed card numbers used at 165 Hannaford stores in the Northeast and 106 Sweetbay stores in Florida. At least 1,800 numbers were stolen and used for unauthorized purchases.

Hornby's decision tosses all complaints except one, from a Vermont woman who was not reimbursed for fraudulent charges.
http://www.newstimes.com/ci_12358232





Holy Mystery! Mayhem at the Vatican
A. O. Scott

Since “Angels & Demons” takes place mainly in the Vatican, and is festooned with the rites and ornaments of Roman Catholicism, I might as well begin with a confession. I have not read the novel by Dan Brown on which this film (directed, like its predecessor, “The Da Vinci Code,” by Ron Howard) is based. I have come to believe that to do so would be a sin against my faith, not in the Church of Rome but in the English language, a noble and beleaguered institution against which Mr. Brown practices vile and unspeakable blasphemy.

And it was partly, perhaps, because I chose to remain innocent of the book that I was able to enjoy “Angels & Demons” more than “The Da Vinci Code,” which opened almost exactly three years ago to an international critical hissy fit and global box office rapture. (The novel “Angels & Demons “was published three years before “The Da Vinci Code.”)

This movie, without being particularly good, is nonetheless far less hysterical than “Da Vinci.” Its preposterous narrative, efficiently rendered by the blue-chip screenwriting team of Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, unfolds with the locomotive elegance of a Tintin comic or an episode of “Murder, She Wrote.” Mr. Howard’s direction combines the visual charm of mass-produced postcards with the mental stimulation of an easy Monday crossword puzzle. It could be worse.

The only people likely to be offended by “Angels & Demons” are those who persist in their adherence to the fading dogma that popular entertainment should earn its acclaim through excellence and originality. It is therefore not surprising that the public reaction so far has been notably calm. Theological hyperventilation has been minimal, and Columbia Pictures has not been accused of falsifying the history or corrupting the morals of Western civilization.

L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, has found nothing worthy of rebuke, and who can quarrel with that judgment? In the busy, bloody course of the picture a few hot topical buttons are gently grazed, but in the end (sorry if I’m spoiling anything) “Angels & Demons” boldly insists that science and religion must coexist, an empirical observation elevated to a statement of principle. Both the persecution of Galileo by the 17th-century church and the more recent (apparently fictional) practice of murdering priests in popular tourist locations in the name of reason are roundly condemned.

It is such killing — undertaken by an anxious grad-student type in the service of an obscure cause — that naturally preoccupies the film’s scholarly hero, the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon. Langdon, no favorite of the Holy See and long denied access to the Vatican archives, is summoned to Rome to assess, and then defuse, a deadly threat involving antimatter, papal succession and the ancient pro-science terrorist underground known as the Illuminati. You didn’t suspect the Illuminati? Nobody suspects the Illuminati. Except Robert Langdon of course.

Played by Tom Hanks in his high minimalist mode, his face stroboscopically snapping from wry smirk to worried squint and back again, Langdon is something of a cipher in his own right, a walking embodiment of skeptical intellect who seems, most of the time, not to have a thought in his head. Once again Mr. Hanks is accompanied by a ravishing international movie star, in this case the Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer (“Munich,” “Vantage Point”). She plays Vittoria Vetra, an Italian scientist — specializing in “bioentanglement physics” — whose role is to serve not as a romantic foil for the sexless professor but rather as his sidekick sleuth and fellow panelist in a high-velocity interdisciplinary seminar.

The high-minded shop talk, half buttressed by real historical information, half floating in the ether of cocktail party nonsense, seems to be a crucial feature of a Robert Langdon adventure, and you can only be charmed when the symbologist says things like: “An obelisk! A kind of pyramid adopted by the Illuminati! If he’s going to kill, he’ll do it here.”

And as an exercise in extreme mass-market tourism “Angels & Demons” gives pretty good value. Unable to shoot in the Vatican itself, Mr. Howard and his team have deftly blended actual Roman locations with Hollywood stage sets and C.G.I. confections to make a dreamy, ephemeral Eternal City.

The costume and production design — all those red cardinals’ robes swirling dervishlike in the incense-tinted light, those sensuous Bernini sculptures and soundless library stacks — nearly steal the movie from the bland, dogged heroes. Luckily an international squad of potential villains and victims — you’ll figure out who is which soon enough, since Mr. Brown tends to let the wiring show when he rigs his surprise twists — has already carried out the larceny.

Just as “The Da Vinci Code” was rescued, or at least mitigated, by the twinkling nonsense of Ian McKellen, so is “Angels & Demons” kicked into something like life by the histrionic professionalism of Armin Mueller-Stahl, Stellan Skarsgard and Ewan McGregor. The three of them are players in a Vatican power struggle that takes shape after the death of a beloved pope.

His likely successors have vanished, and in trying to find them and prevent Vatican City from being blasted into oblivion, Langdon and Vittoria find themselves in a mare’s nest of hidden agendas and competing jurisdictions. Mr. Skarsgard, commander of the Swiss Guards, and Mr. Mueller-Stahl, a powerful cardinal, are obvious heavies, while Mr. McGregor has a fine time playing a wide-eyed Irish Obi-Wan with a wee bit of a messiah complex.

The utter silliness of “Angels & Demons” is either its fatal flaw or its saving grace, and in the spirit of compassion I suppose I’d be inclined to go with the second option. The movie all but begs for such treatment.

“When you write about us,” an erstwhile nemesis says to Langdon near the end, “and you will write about us, do so gently.” It was as if he were looking right into my soul. And how could I refuse such a humble, earnest petition? Go in peace.

“Angels and Demons” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some fairly gruesome deaths.

ANGELS & DEMONS

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Ron Howard; written by David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Dan Brown; director of photography, Salvatore Totino; edited by Dan Hanley and Mike Hill; music by Hans Zimmer; production designer, Allan Cameron; produced by Brian Grazer, Mr. Howard and John Calley; released by Columbia Pictures and Imagine Entertainment. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

WITH: Tom Hanks (Prof. Robert Langdon), Ewan McGregor (Camerlengo Patrick McKenna), Ayelet Zurer (Dr. Vittoria Vetra), Stellan Skarsgard (Commander Richter), Pierfrancesco Favino (Inspector Ernesto Olivetti), Nikolaj Lie Kaas (Assassin/Mr. Gray) and Armin Mueller-Stahl (Cardinal Strauss).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/movies/15ange.html





"Star Trek" Beams Up $72.5 Million in First Weekend
Steve Gorman

The new "Star Trek" movie beamed up an estimated $72.5 million in North American ticket sales its first weekend in theaters, dominating the box office and re-energizing a 40-year-old science-fiction franchise.

That figure far surpassed the opening grosses posted by any of the previous 10 "Star Trek" films, even when adjusted for inflation, and kept up a robust pace for the second week of Hollywood's summer moviegoing season.

Combined with $4 million grossed from Thursday evening's preview screenings, "Star Trek" tallied $76.5 million in U.S. and Canadian receipts through Sunday, according to its distributor, Viacom Inc's Paramount Pictures studio.

Last weekend's top box office entry, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," still ranks as the biggest film opening so far this year, with $85 million in its first Friday-through-Sunday tally.

But the launch of "Star Trek" slashed deeply into "Wolverine's" second weekend of business, sending the superhero adventure from News Corp's NWSA.0 20th Century Fox to a second-ranked $27 million.

By comparison, "Star Trek" seems poised to hold fairly steady next weekend given that its ticket sales rose from Friday to Saturday, a sign of strong word-of-mouth buzz, said Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst for Hollywood.com.

The $130 million film ranks among the best reviewed movies of the year, and one of the most well-received by critics of all the "Star Trek" pictures.

"Play Long and Prosper"

Directed by J.J. Abrams, the latest film is intended as a "reboot" of the original 1960s television series, with updated special effects and a story line that explains how the crew of the galaxy-hopping Starship Enterprise, including Captain James T. Kirk and his half-Vulcan first officer, Spock, first met.

Leonard Nimoy, who originated the Spock character on TV, dons pointy ears again and even recites the Vulcan salutation, "Live long and prosper," for a featured appearance in the new movie as an elder Spock.

Despite early pre-release tracking data showing weak anticipation levels, the film seems to have won over both older "Trekkie" fans of the franchise and younger moviegoers on whom financial success depends, Paramount executive Don Harris said.

"The way this film is being received ... it looks like the movie will play long and prosper," he said.

"Wolverine," which stars Hugh Jackman reprising his role as the ferocious but conflicted superhero with steel claws, has received far-less glowing reviews than "Star Trek." Marking the fourth title in the "X-Men" series, its 10-day tally stands at $130 million.

Although ticket sales for its second weekend dropped 68 percent from its opening three-day stretch, Fox executive Chris Aronson said the studio was pleased. "It's what franchise movies do, and given the competition in the marketplace, it's right in line with expectations," he said.

The 12 highest-grossing movies this weekend collectively amassed nearly $141 million in North America, up almost 20 percent from the same weekend a year ago, while year-to-date revenues and attendance are also up by double-digits.

Rounding out this weekend's top five films were the romantic comedy "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past," with $10.5 million, the thriller "Obsessed," at $6.6 million, and the comedy "17 Again," with $4.4 million. The only other new wide release, the comic crime yarn "Next Day Air," opened at No. 6 with $4 million.

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...5491IW20090511





Rant of the week

WARNING: AMC Theaters are Running FAKE IMAX's and Charging $5 Extra for a Slightly Bigger Screen.

Boycott IMAX, AMC, and Regal. Don't let them fool you.
Aziz Ansari

I went with a friend of mine to see Star Trek: The IMAX Experience at the AMC Theatre in Burbank today. I drove out of my way to see the film on the large IMAX screen and paid an extra $5 for the ticket, which felt worth it at the time.

HOWEVER, we get in the theatre and its just a slightly bigger than normal screen and NOT the usual standard huge 72 ft IMAX screen. I was very upset and apparently this problem is happening all over at Regal and AMC theatres.

If you don’t want the whole long story, I did some research online and found this article that explains it. Basically IMAX is whoring out their brand name and trying to trick people. These new “IMAX” theatres are really just nice digital screens with good sound, but they ARE NOT IMAX, in that they don’t have the huge 72 ft gigantic screen which people would expect. However, they still charge $5 more for tickets as they would for the regular IMAX.

REGAL, AMC, AND IMAX - YOU ARE LIARS!

Boycott them. Fuck them for taking advantage of people and charging them $5 extra. If you’re in LA, go to the Arclight from now on, and fuck the IMAX screens (fake and real).

Some people at Regal and AMC both wanted to call these screens IMAX Digital so as to differentiate it somehow from the giant IMAX screens people are used to associating with the name IMAX. Apparently IMAX doesn’t see anything wrong with duping customers like this and insisted on simply keeping it as IMAX. Well, I have a better term how about - “BULLSHIT IMAX.” Cause that’s what it is.

According to this piece, IMAX CEO, Richard Gelfond said the company only puts IMAX digital systems into multiplex auditoriums that meet certain criteria. He jokingly said, “It’s a very scientific test. It’s called the ‘wow’ factor. So if you don’t go in and go ‘wow,’ we won’t do it.” HAHAHA! REALLY FUNNY RICHARD!!!! What happens if I go in the theatre and go “This isn’t a fucking IMAX screen, I just got ripped off for $5!!” Do I get my money back?

At the AMC theatre this was my experience at guest services:

Aziz: Yes, I’d like my $5 back. I paid $5 extra for an IMAX screen and that’s not nearly as big as what I have known IMAX to be.
Guest Services: I can’t sir. Its IMAX quality picture and sound.
Aziz: But the screen isn’t big, that’s the whole reason I pay $5 more for IMAX.
Guest Services: Well sir, you watched the whole movie, you could have come out and we could have given you tickets to a different one.
Aziz: Why would I do that? I’d leave Star Trek, the movie I wanted to see and you’d give me a ticket for Ghosts of Girlfriends Past? Oh yeah that’s fair! No, you need to give me the $5 back, its the principle of it. Can I see a manager?

Manager: Sir, we can’t refund the money, you saw the whole film.
Aziz: I don’t want $15, I just want $5 cause AMC lied about IMAX.
Manager: Sir, I can give you popcorn and a drink.
Aziz: I don’t want to go home and drink a nasty soda and eat nasty ass popcorn. I want my $5 back. Its not about the money, its the principle of the matter, ITS NOT IMAX.
Manager: Sorry, I can’t do anything.
Aziz: You know what Twitter is? I have 25,000 followers, I’m tell 25,000 people you run fake IMAX’s and that they should boycott AMC.
Manager: I don’t really care sir.
Aziz: Yeah, I wouldn’t care either if I worked here, but you know you are in the wrong! You should give me $5!!
Manager: SIR, I CAN GIVE YOU POPCORN AND A SODA.
Aziz: I DON’T LIKE POPCORN AND I DON’T LIKE SODA, I WANT MY $5!!!
Manager: Ok here’s two free passes.

UPDATE: In addition to this terrible tragedy, there are also terrible things going on in Darfur. Please Google around for more info on how to help there.
http://azizisbored.tumblr.com/post/1...c-theaters-are





VFX Engineer on Why Star Trek Ain't IMAX
Joel Johnson

My friend, a VFX engineer, shares this frustration with the IMAX version of Star Trek (which she otherwise dug):

Just for future reference, ST was not shot in IMAX, and therefore is not a true imax film. imax is 65mm, 15-perf film, with an aspect ratio of 1:1.37 and a MASSIVE amount of image area, approximately 4x the size of VistaVision (VV is also the same format 35mm still cameras shoot, imagine a negative almost four times the surface area of one that was shot in your still camera.)

Star Trek was shot in cinemascope, an anamorphic format that squeezes the image on the film, but projects it through lenses that stretch it back out horizontally to its 1:2.35 aspect ratio. C-scope is run through a normal movie camera vertically, (90 degrees to a still camera) and exposes a frame taking up four perfs of film - about half the film area of a 35mm still camera.

What Star Trek has done for their imax projection is just stretch their anamorphic cinemascope (1828x1556) image to 3656x1556 and then blow it up by 12% to 4096x1746 where it only takes up 60% of the height of the half-resolution imax - 4096x2988.

(that is, unless they have cropped in at the sides to literally do a pan&scan on the 1:2.35 cinemascope image, ugh!)

The end result of all this unsqueezing and blowing up is that at the very best, you will get an image that has 1/8th the information of a standard imax image. What you see will be much softer, although it may not be noticed by the general public unless they see a side-by-side comparison with a true imax print. Full-resolution imax is 10240x7470 (10k by 8k), btw, but it isn't often used in visual effects because of the sheer amount of data required for each frame.

Other films will be shot in imax and c-scope, with some sequences being full imax, so in the theater the screen will jump to a taller picture for some sequences. I think Batman did it last summer. Normal theaters will only see a c-scope extraction (trimming top and bottom) during the imax sequences.
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/0...er-on-why.html





IMAX vs. LIEMAX

Green means go.

The Google Maps green arrows point to actual full-sized IMAX immersive screens. Red arrows warn of theaters carrying the brand - and price premium – but not the size.





Despite Lower Ratings, Cash Flow Rises for ‘Idol’
Edward Wyatt

Can a television show with a shrinking audience actually increase its revenue?

In the case of “American Idol,” the answer is yes, and the manner that the show’s creators are going about it could change the way that producers and broadcast networks think about the longevity of reality television programs.

Despite losing viewers in each of the last three years, “American Idol,” still the top-rated series on television, is generating ever-growing profits for its creators and, it appears, for Fox Broadcasting through brand extensions, marketing arrangements and licensing fees.

The deals, which include products as disparate as ice cream and trading cards, as well as the more familiar partnerships with iTunes and AT&T, have driven tremendous growth in the profitability of “American Idol,” according to the public financial statements of the parent of 19 Entertainment, the company founded by Simon Fuller, the creator of the show.

Those financial statements include documents that break down how revenue is split among Fox, 19 Entertainment and FremantleMedia, the production company behind the show.

“They are just raking in the money, hand over fist,” said Brad Adgate, a senior vice president for research at Horizon Media. “There are certain things that ‘American Idol’ does not do well, like selling DVDs. But the whole industry is moving toward a different model where deciding whether something is a hit or not is not just based on how much you charge for 30 seconds of advertising.”

While everyone in television, from Ben Silverman, the co-chairman of NBC, to the youth-centric programmers at MTV, is trying to find ways to increase profits as television audiences decline, “American Idol” is taking its cues not from the traditional broadcasting playbook but from the National Football League.

“We have learned the lessons of the sports leagues in that they have all these ancillary revenue streams,” said Robert F. X. Sillerman, chief executive of CKX Inc., the parent of 19 Entertainment. “And frankly, we’re just beginning.”

David Lunar, a senior vice president for interactive and consumer products at FremantleMedia, which produces the program in partnership with 19 Entertainment, said this year that the company had experienced “eight straight years of growth” in licensing and merchandising.

That is particularly noteworthy given that, according to Nielsen Media Research, the average audience for “American Idol” peaked three years ago, at more than 30 million viewers an episode. This season, each episode is attracting about 25 million viewers an episode.

Advertising revenue, which primarily benefits Fox Broadcasting, has grown in each of the last three years, according to TNS Media Intelligence, to $903 million last year. That is nearly double the level of three years earlier. Those figures do not include Fox’s ancillary sponsorship deals and other income, like royalties it receives from the sale of music performances by “Idol” contestants.

Even though “American Idol’s” ratings have declined, Fox has put more hours of the show on the air and has been able to charge a higher rate as its ratings lead over other shows has grown.

The revenue and profits of 19 Entertainment have grown even more quickly, according to the financial statements of CKX. Its revenues from “American Idol” alone grew to $96 million last year from $67 million two years earlier, with gross profit margins expanding to 77 percent from 69 percent in that span.

Including revenue from “Idol” programming in other countries, from music sales related to all the “Idol” shows and from “So You Think You Can Dance,” also on Fox, 19 Entertainment produced revenue of $223 million last year, up from $151 million two years earlier.

Fremantle does not break out its revenue, and a spokesman for the company declined to comment on its financial performance. But contracts included in the CKX financial statements stipulate that Fremantle receive one-third to one-half of the various revenue streams that benefit 19 Entertainment.

Even though the overall audience is declining, “American Idol” appears to be in little danger of losing its crown as the top-rated television series. In the 2003-4 season, the first in which “Idol” was the top-rated prime-time series, its lead over the second place show was about 7 percent. That margin has grown every year since and this year is 66 percent.

Mike Darnell, the president of alternative entertainment for Fox, who oversees “Idol” and other reality shows for the network, said that “Idol” could lose 12 percent of its audience every season and still be among the top 10 shows on television in 2016 — even if every other show on television maintained all of its current audience.

Fox, too, benefits from the brand extensions. Its Fox Reality Channel televises “American Idol Rewind,” which repeats segments from earlier seasons along with previously unseen footage of noteworthy contestants, and it has turned drama series like “House” and “Fringe” into hits by pairing them with “Idol” for a season or two.

While some programs, like “The Simpsons,” generate large revenue from merchandising and marketing deals separate from the broadcast, “they don’t have the audience delivery or all the hoopla of ‘American Idol,’ ” said Mr. Adgate. “I don’t think there are any reality shows that have a similar, off-network shelf life.”

Mr. Darnell declined to comment on just how much Fox benefited from those and similar efforts. “But I can say the brand extension is huge for this company and for all the companies involved with the show,” he said.

There is evidence that the efforts, if not drawing more people to the program, are certainly getting viewers more engaged. Last week, viewers cast 64 million votes, the most ever for a nonfinale episode.

Mr. Sillerman cited that jump as evidence that “American Idol” could run indefinitely.

“If you only had a 10-year-old, you would probably say the impact of ‘Sesame Street’ has diminished, because it’s not on in your house anymore,” Mr. Sillerman said. “But they’re making new 5-year-olds every year.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/bu...ia/11idol.html





Baby Monitors Killing Urban Wi-Fi

Baby monitors and wireless TV transmitters are responsible for slowing down Wi-Fi connections in built-up areas, according to an Ofcom-commissioned report.
The regulator commissioned the report to evaluate the effectiveness of the unlicensed 2.4GHz band that Wi-Fi operates over.

The report smashes the myth that huge congestion on overlapping Wi-Fi networks is responsible for the poor performance of Wi-Fi in urban areas. Instead, it points the finger of blame at the raft of unlicensed equipment operating on the 2.4GHz band.

"There is a view that some domestic users generate excessive amounts of Wi-Fi traffic, denying access to other users," claims the report from wireless specialists, Mass Consutling. "Our research suggests that this is not the case, rather the affected parties are almost certainly seeing interference from non-Wi-Fi devices such as microwave ovens, Audio Video senders, security cameras or baby monitors."

"The greatest concentration of different radio types tends to occur in urban centres, so interference tends to increase with population density.

"However, interference also occurs in low population density areas. It only requires a single device, such as an analogue video sender, to severely affect Wi-Fi services within a short range, such that a single large building or cluster of houses can experience difficulties with using a single Wi-Fi channel."

The report claims that some regulation of devices in the 2.4GHz band will be necessary to prevent the problem getting worse.

"These interference problems are the indirect result of light regulation in the 2.4 GHz band," it states.

"A plethora of radio types, which are not all designed via standardisation processes, means that peaceful co-existence does not arise organically. Co-existence must be enforced by some means if LE bands are to be shared effectively."

Mass Consulting suggests implementing a certification scheme for any equipment operating in the band. "The baby monitor market is one example where this approach has already arisen through market forces, with 'Wi-Fi-friendly' appearing on the datasheets for the new generation of digital video monitors.

"A '2.4 GHz friendly' logo would tap into such market pressures and lead to improved co-existence of all types of radio in this band."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/252595/b...rban-wifi.html





Why You'll Never See 200Mbps from a 200Mbps 'Net Connection

Virgin announced the world's fastest cable modem system this week: a 200Mbps trial it is conducting in the UK. But DSL and fiber providers are angry that cable uses these numbers, saying that they don't reflect the shared reality of a cable network. Ars explains just what can go wrong on the way to 200Mbps.
Nate Anderson

The UK's luckiest Internet users live in Ashford, Kent. Virgin Media announced this week that it is trialing 200Mbps cable connections in Ashford, where 100 "lead adopters" will help Virgin test and evaluate the system. This is a real-world trial that has already escaped from the lab, but it won't be coming to a home near you any time soon; Virgin plans to run its trial for at least six months before looking at the results and considering further deployment.

Virgin used the opportunity to talk a bit of smack about cable operators in other countries, claiming that its 200Mbps service "is believed to be the fastest implementation of DOCSIS 3 technology in the world, running faster than services offered in Japan and the US, which currently reach 160Mbps and 101Mbps respectively."

This is true, except for the bit where Virgin appears to suggest that its 200Mbps service is, you know, actually available to more than 100 residents of Ashford, Kent.

In any event, these numbers (200Mbps, 160Mbps, and 101Mbps) make the DSL and fiber-to-the-home folks livid, because it's not an accurate representation of the speeds that any cable user can achieve in a real-world deployment. (See this post by Verizon's Eric Rabe, for instance, where he calls the cable numbers "a parlor trick.")

Who's right?

A shared architecture

Users seeding .torrent files or uploading photo sets to Flickr will see a slowdown anytime the upstream link is congested, of course, but so will plenty of other users.
Both sides are accurate, when considered from Obi-Wan's "a certain point of view." Cable can deliver these speeds, but it does so over a shared architecture that sees speed drop as more people use the Internet at the same time. Consider the throughput constraints on a cable system:

Total number of users

Each node on a cable system is set up in a loop, with every home on that node (up to several hundred) sharing the total bandwidth. Verizon's FiOS also shares, but it divvies up 2.4Gbps between 32 homes; DOCSIS 3.0 cable systems can share around 160Mbps with up to 400-500 homes. Even during peak periods, the line is filled with data only about 10 percent of the time, so the "oversubscription" model generally works well—but heavy use by many users will cause slowdowns, especially on the upstream link (see below).

Bottleneck speed

A connection to a distant server is only as fast as the slowest link. Even when the connection between home and the central office's CMTS (cable modem termination system) is humming along, upstream choke points in the backhaul network, the public Internet, or at the remote server can all lower perceived network speeds.

The gear in your house

As cable's DOCSIS data architecture continues to mature, the new high speed offerings may be too fast for some customers even to use. As Virgin notes when describing its 200Mbps trial, "there are no wireless routers able to deliver throughput of speeds as high as 200Mb, and computers require very high specification in order to be able handle data at such a high rate.

If a home still has a (not uncommon) 802.11b wireless router, for instance, the device can only move 11Mbps under normal circumstances. 802.11g routers can move around 54Mbps, while some 802.11n routers claim speeds in the 100Mbps+ range. None can hit 200Mbps, however.

200Mbps is also faster than fast ethernet (100Mbps), still common in plenty of home PCs tucked in dens, bedrooms, and basements across the country. These machines can never access 200Mbps speeds—and in fact won't even get 100Mbps speeds thanks to network overhead.

In addition, the cable modem needs to be fast enough to handle the new speeds, and customer wiring in the home needs to be able to support 100Mbps+ speeds reliably.

Your DOCSIS profile

When a cable modem is attached to the local loop, it contacts the CMTS and downloads the customers DOCSIS profile. The profile provides all sorts of variables to the modem, including the maximum upstream speed that it can send data (downstream speed to each modem is limited by the CMTS itself to avoid flooding the wire with data).

Cable operators can change this remotely to fix problems or allow more speeds; "enterprising" customers have also attempted to hack their devices to go faster than their pay tier. The CMTS can detect modems transmitting faster than their allowed rate and issue a hard bandwidth limit to such devices to prevent flooding the upload link with data.

Cable plant noise

Noise is the enemy of data, and cable lines can be full of it. Cable modems operate at different power levels in order to overcome any noise on the line that might interfere with transmission. The problem could be inside the house, where it's the customer's problem, or in the local node. Either way, too much noise degrades speeds and makes for a miserable experience.

Severe upstream congestion.

Even with the new DOCSIS 3.0, upstream bandwidth is quite limited in cable systems. When shared between an entire neighborhood, this can cause speed problems—and not just for uploads. (This is why Comcast's P2P blocking system only targeted the upload link.)

Users seeding .torrent files or uploading photo sets to Flickr will see a slowdown anytime the upstream link is congested, of course, but so will plenty of other users. TCP, the most common protocol on the Internet, relies on a stream of acknowledgements to make sure that data is arriving accurately at its destination. In the case of a severely overloaded uplink, such acknowledgements may be delayed, which can in turn affect a user's downloads. (This does not apply to "fire and forget" protocols like UDP.)
An overloaded CMTS

The CMTS in your cable company's local office terminates all the local loops and connects them to the cable company's backhaul network. Like a giant router, a CMTS must keep up with the tremendous packet flows that it sees; if for some reason it cannot, performance degrades.

A CMTS can be badly configured, thereby using too much processor time. It can also be loaded down running management functions and reports, or it might simply be handling a huge number of packets. Cisco, a CMTS maker, notes that in scenarios where CMTS processor usage runs above 80 percent during peak times, "end users may start to experience slower performance and increased latency."

DSL, fiber: we don't share (as much)
DSL and fiber share some of these issues, of course. With DSL, for instance, line noise can be a tremendous problem. But providers are publicly more concerned with that big number—101Mbps! 200Mbps!—even if customers will never see those speeds.

While cable's shared architecture means that users simply can't get anything like the peak 160Mbps or 200Mbps, speeds can remain surprisingly high
DSL is not a shared architecture in the last mile; each DSL link runs over dedicated copper from a DSLAM port in the local office to a customer's home. The whole office must be connected to a backhaul network, though, which is generally fiber, and problems can crop up here if a central office is underprovisioned. Speeds are typically less variable than with cable, but they don't "sound" as fast, either.

Fiber also shares, but with far fewer homes than cable. It also offers tremendous bandwidth now, with the possibility of more in the future as new wavelengths are added to the fiber.

But no one shares like cable, and that's why some of these speed numbers need to be considered carefully. When Cablevision in the US offers 101Mbps to customers but a DOCSIS 3.0 connection tops out at under 160Mbps—well, it's clear that customers won't get anything like 101Mbps during peak times. Similarly, Virgin's talk of 200Mbps connections is likewise about the total shared bandwidth on each local loop.

Still, traffic provisioning has gotten better in the last years, and cable can address local issues by splitting nodes. While cable's shared architecture means that users simply can't get anything like the peak 160Mbps or 200Mbps, speeds can remain surprisingly high. Most people, even when "using" their Internet connection, aren't actually using their Internet connection—especially when browsing the web, a notoriously "bursty" activity.

Oversubscription is the same technique used by airlines to sell seats on planes, since they know that some percentage of passengers won't show up. The difference is that, if too many people do arrive, the airline hands out vouchers; cable just hands out lower speeds.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-gets-slow.ars





Verizon Sells Land-Line Business for $8.6 Billion
AP

Verizon Communications, the telecommunications company, said Wednesday that it had reached a deal to shed its traditional telephone line business in 14 states in a deal worth $8.6 billion.

The Frontier Communications Corporation, based in Stamford, Conn., will be taking over the Verizon Communications Inc.) assets in an all-stock deal, the companies say.

The deal gives Frontier 4.8 million access lines to residential and small business customers and narrows Verizon’s focus on wireless, broadband and Internet service.

The deal includes all of Verizon’s wireline assets in Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin as well as some assets in California.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/te...s/14phone.html





ISPs Escape Copyright Trap
Andrew Colley

THE NSW Federal Court will no longer be called to test a contentious legal claim that ISPs directly infringe copyright laws by providing services to individuals who illegally share files on peer-to-peer networks.

A group of copyright holders pursuing iiNet for copyright breaches put the claim before the court last month as part of a case against the ISP.

However lawyers representing the group dropped the component from its claim in an unscheduled hearing early today.

iiNet was awarded legal costs for any legal fees it incurred addressing parts of the claim AFACT has withdrawn.

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), which is coordinating the legal action on behalf of the copyright holders, had claimed that by providing "the intermediate and transient storage of, or further or alternatively, the caching of copyright material", iiNet was the primary copyright infringer rather than just encouraging illegal activity.

If it had been successful, the claim could have set a precedent allowing content owners to argue that ISPs using similar network technology to iiNet directly breach copyright laws just by maintaining the network and internet services that carry illegally shared content.

The claim which has been described by some industry observers as “exotic” relied on a common law concept of conversion which makes illegal the alteration of property in a manner detrimental to its owner

It departed from the legal strategy that AFACT had adopted to pursue iiNet to protect intellectual property rights. This was based on proving that the ISP encouraged and aided copyright infringements, as was successfully proved in the 2005 case against Sharman Networks.

A spokeswoman for AFACT said that the claim was dropped to stop any further delays in progressing the matter to a full hearing.

“Just for expediency and ensuring that the case went ahead on the scheduled date, we dropped it,” the spokeswoman said.

iiNet managing director Michael Malone said he was frustrated that AFACT had taken almost six months to finalise its claim.

He also revealed that iiNet was seeking mediation with AFACT outside the court process.

"We will keep trying to meet with AFACT as we think that a frank discussion of the issues raised by this proceeding is in everyone's best interest," Mr Malone said.

AFACT said it would leave the rest of its claims intact but it has allowed iiNet to delay filing its defence until May 15.

The case is expected to go ahead as scheduled in October.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





FTC Chairman: Agency May Enforce Net Neutrality
Grant Gross

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission may start enforcing net-neutrality rules and take action against bad network management practices when broadband providers don't live up to the promises they make to consumers, the agency's chairman said.

Broadband providers need to inform consumers about the download speeds they're delivering and the types of network management practices they're deploying, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said on the C-SPAN network's program, The Communicators, which aired Saturday.

If a broadband provider blocks Web content that competes with its own content or a partner's content, that could also raise "antitrust problems," potentially prompting FTC action, said Leibowitz, appointed chairman in March after for more than four years on the commission.

"We believe consumers need to have notice and consent about what they're getting," Leibowitz said. "It's very, very important that these providers tell consumers about the speed they're getting, and whether [providers] are making any types of management decisions in terms of the network that affect consumers."

Program host Peter Slen asked Leibowitz whether it was fair for broadband providers to charge customers more for higher speeds or charge more for high-bandwidth users. Leibowitz said those were fair practices, as long as providers gave customers notice.

"You can't surprise someone with a bill that's like 10 times as much as what they expected," he said.

Leibowitz's view on the FTC role on net neutrality and network management issues would mark a change for the agency. Until now, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has handled any net-neutrality complaints, and in mid-2007, the FTC issued a report suggesting U.S. lawmakers should proceed with caution before passing new net-neutrality rules.

Asked about the change of attitude, Leibowitz said net neutrality is a consumer protection issue, and consumer protection is one of the main functions of the FTC.

"In a perfect marketplace where you had more competitors, you wouldn't need the government necessarily to be terribly involved," he said. "Particularly in the consumer protection area, we have a big roll to play. Broadband is a deregulated product. That's good, we like deregulation generally. But when you have deregulation, you also law enforcement to make sure people do the right thing."

Leibowitz also said he hopes people on both sides of the net-neutrality debate can come to comprise agreement about consumers' right to the Web content of their choosing. Groups on both sides seem to be "heading in the right direction," he said.

A spokeswoman from Comcast, one of the largest broadband providers in the U.S., didn't have a comment on Leibowitz's statements on net neutrality. Spokespeople from Verizon and AT&T didn't immediately respond to a request for comments. The FCC, in August 2008, ruled that Comcast could not slow some peer-to-peer traffic in the name of network management.

Comcast's network management practices violated an FCC policy statement saying broadband customers had a right to access the legal Web content of their choice, the FCC ruled.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/16467...eutrality.html





EC Wants Software Makers Held Liable for Code
Tom Espiner

Software companies could be held responsible for the security and efficacy of their products, if a new European Commission consumer protection proposal becomes law.

Commissioners Viviane Reding and Meglena Kuneva have proposed that EU consumer protections for physical products be extended to software. The suggested change in the law is part of an EU action agenda put forward by the commissioners after identifying gaps in EU consumer protection rules.

A priority area for possible EU action is "extending the principles of consumer protection rules to cover licensing agreements of products like software downloaded for virus protection, games, or other licensed content," according to the commissioners' agenda. "Licensing should guarantee consumers the same basic rights as when they purchase a good: the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions."

EU consumer commissioner Kuneva said that more accountability for software makers, and for companies providing digital services, would lead to greater consumer choice.

"If we want consumers to shop around and exploit the potential of digital communications, then we need to give them confidence that their rights are guaranteed," Kuneva said. "That means putting in place and enforcing clear consumer rights that meet the high standards already existing in the main street. (The) Internet has everything to offer consumers, but we need to build trust so that people can shop around with peace of mind."

The Business Software Alliance (BSA), which represents the interests of software makers including Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, criticized the proposals.

"Digital content is not a tangible good and should not be subject to the same liability rules as toasters," Francisco Mingorance, BSA director of public policy told ZDNet UK on Thursday. "Unlike tangible goods, creators of digital content cannot predict with a high degree of certainty both the product's anticipated uses and its potential performance."

Mingorance said the performance of a piece of software depends on the environment it operates in, how the code is updated, whether it is possible to adapt and modify the software, and whether the code is attacked.

According to Mingorance, the proposed regulatory extension would cover all software, including beta products, and would cover both proprietary and open-source software.

Right now, under the current EU Sales and Guarantees Directive, physical products are expected to carry a guarantee of two years. Extending those terms to software would have the effect of limiting customer choice, as contract terms would have to be extended to a minimum of two years, Mingorance added.

"Extending the scope would force the businesses to maintain update services for such contracts beyond the contractual term and ultimately limit the choice of offers," the BSA director said. "It is like renting your house for a summer month and being then obliged to extend the rent for another 23 months."

In addition, Mingorance said that extending consumer regulation to software could lead to less interoperability between software products, as manufacturers might decide to limit how far third-party developers could access their code.

Software companies have long argued against accepting responsibility for the security and efficiency of their code. Linux kernel developer Alan Cox in 2007 told a House of Lords Committee that neither proprietary nor open-source developers should be held accountable for their code.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10237212-92.html





Music Industry’s Plea for Pirate Bay Damages Backfires
Ernesto

Ever since the the Pirate Bay verdict was announced, the poor record labels have been waiting to collect their share of the damages. The law firm representing several record labels has now filed a request at the Swedish Enforcement Authority, to claim anything of value from the Pirate Bay defendants. However, their involvement in the case might backfire.

On Friday April 17, the court announced its verdict in the Pirate Bay Trial. All four defendants were sentenced to one year in prison and each ordered to pay $905,000 in damages to compensate the entertainment industries. In an attempt to get as much from the defendants as possible, law firm Danowsky & Partner has requested the Swedish Enforcement Authority (Kronofogde) to go after the money.

Although the case is under appeal, the claims are legitimate since they apply to the civil part of the verdict. If you don’t pay your bill, or if you have a sentence against you that requires you to pay damages, the Swedish Enforcement Authority has the authority to take what you have in order to settle the debt. They can claim salary, real estate, and other valuable property in order to collect the money.

The Enforcement Authority has reviewed the request and notified the defendants on the demands from each of the various clients represented by the Danowsky firm. The damages have to be paid in Euros and on the notification different amounts are listed for each of the record labels, including Sony Music, Warner, EMI and Universal Music.

The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that the defendants have issued a counterclaim, arguing that the labels shouldn’t be allowed to request damages via The Enforcement Authority at this stage. Whether or not this counterclaim will prove successful, it is unlikely that they will get much from Peter. “If I would have money I would rather burn everything I owned,” he said earlier.

Interestingly, the law firm that sent out these notices may soon have its very own cash flow problem. Someone started a website asking people to send really small amounts of money to Danowsky & Partners, and then request a refund citing a wrong payment.

The law firm will be obliged to file these transfers, and all the accounting will be a costly process, especially when thousands of requests come in at the same time. Then, if the law firm refuses to pay, they can simply inform the The Enforcement Authority and have them go after the money instead. Oh the irony.
http://torrentfreak.com/music-indust...kfires-090510/





No Settlement in RIAA v. Jammie Thomas
David Kravets

The Recording Industry Association of America on Tuesday failed to settle the infamous Jammie Thomas case, setting the stage for a retrial of the nation’s only file sharing case to have gone before a jury.

Thomas’ lawyer, Brian Toder, and RIAA lawyers met privately in a Minnesota federal court for two hours haggling over the case. No conclusion was reached. Thomas has maintained she would never settle. A retrial is set for June 15.

“What they wanted to do, my client did not want to do,” Toder said in a telephone interview. He declined to disclose the RIAA’s financial demands.

A Duluth jury in 2007 dinged Thomas $222,000 for infringing 24 songs on the Kazaa file sharing program. But months later, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis declared a mistrial, saying he falsely instructed the jury that copyright infringement amounted to merely making available copyrighted works on a file sharing program – regardless of whether it was proved anybody else downloaded the content.

Davis ruled it was unclear whether jurors found Thomas liable because she made the songs available or downloaded them from another open share folder. The RIAA, in arguing against a mistrial, said the distinction did not matter. Toder successfully argued that the error was so egregious that a new trial was warranted.

The RIAA has sued more than 30,000 individuals on accusations of copyright infringement. Most have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars.

Among the few who fought their lawsuit was Thomas, the only one to go to trial. But jurors didn’t buy her theory that she was the victim of hacks and cracks via her WiFi connection.

After four days of trial, a jury spent five minutes behind closed doors concluding her liability. Panelists haggled for a few more hours while affixing a damages award. Some wanted to fine her $150,000 per purloined track, the maximum amount under the Copyright Act.

The RIAA announced last year it was discontinuing its 5-year-old litigation campaign. That said, the RIAA continues suing or negotiating settlements with people associated with IP addresses it had detected file sharing from as late as August.

Under its new anti-file sharing campaign, the RIAA is lobbying internet service providers to discontinue service to repeat copyright scofflaws.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/200...lated-june-15/





Intel Says Will Appeal EU Antitrust Decision
Peppi Kiviniemi

Intel Corp. (INTC) Wednesday said it will appeal the European Commission's antitrust decision, finding it baseless.

"We completely disagree [with the commission's findings]," Intel's general counsel Bruce Sewell told Dow Jones Newswires.

The comments follow the commission's decision to fine the computer chip manufacturer a record EUR1.06 billion fine for anticompetitive behavior.

The commission ruled that Intel provided rebates and direct payments to computer manufacturers and a major retailer to pressure them to buy all or most of their chips from Intel rather than rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).

Intel said the accusation is completely without merit as "at no point" did Intel pay a manufacturer not to buy AMD products, nor has Intel made a rebate conditional on not buying products from AMD.

We discount the price of the products, based on volumes bought, we do not require them to buy exclusively from Intel, Sewell said.

However, the commission's findings said it had evidence Intel had made rebates conditional on a manufacturer to exclusively, or near exclusively to buy Intel chips. The commission said it has proof Intel gave payments to manufacturers as a reward for postponing the launches of specific computers using AMD chips.

Intel said the commission relied on "weak evidence," inferring facts from subsets of documents which can be taken to mean several things.

"Intel is going to court to see whether it is reasonable to infer from such documents," Sewell said.

While Intel will do "everything to be compliant" with the commission's order to desist from providing certain kind of rebates, it finds it ambiguous as Intel only provides one kind of rebate, Sewell said.

If the commission is right and can prove that Intel used rebates to lock in market share,

European case law against rebates which aim to lock in market share is solid, and the commission has stuck closely to existing rulings, Brussels-based lawyers said.

"There is nothing in the commission's decision that pushes the established law," said Thomas Vinje an antitrust partner at law firm Clifford Chance.

Ultimately the case will come down to Intel's word against that of the commission on whether or not the rebates were tied to excluding the competition or just used as a regular sales practise, lawyers said.

"Usually when it comes to contesting the interpretation of facts at the European Court of First Instance, the commission has the upper hand," said Stephen Kinsella, a partner at lawfirm Sidley Austin.

The only way Intel can win this appeal is if the commission is wrong about the facts, Vinje added.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-...13-714374.html





AMD Gains Processor Market Share on Intel

Advanced Micro Devices has gained ground in chip shipments over rival Intel, seeing its Q1 market share increase sequentially.
Agam Shah

After five quarters of declining market share, Advanced Micro Devices gained ground in chip shipments over chief rival Intel during the first quarter of 2009, IDC said on Tuesday.

AMD saw its market share in processor shipments reach 22.3 percent during the first quarter of 2009, gaining 4.6 percent of the market compared with the fourth quarter of 2008. Intel lost 4.7 percent of the total market to reach a 77.3 percent share, IDC said in a survey.

AMD saw its market share increase because of a pricing advantage over Intel and a strong increase in desktop shipments, said Shane Rau, research director at IDC. Sequentially, AMD chip shipments increased 13 percent while Intel's shipments declined 16 percent.

Intel's sequential decline was partly due to suppliers holding back on purchases as they tried to clear up excess inventory of mobile processors, especially Atom processors for netbooks. Shipments of Atom processors recorded a sequential decline of 33 percent in the first quarter of 2009.

AMD has been restructuring its operations in an effort to reach profitability after more than two fiscal years of losses. The company last week merged its graphics and chip operations. Before that, it spun off its manufacturing assets to GlobalFoundries in order to cut manufacturing costs and focus on chip design.

AMD saw its mobile-processor market share reach 15 percent, grabbing 4.7 percent more of the market, while Intel's share fell to 84.3 percent from 89.1 percent. AMD also gained 3.8 percent of the market for desktop chips to reach 29.8 percent. Intel gave up 3.9 percent of the desktop chip market.

However, AMD lost 1.2 percent of the server and workstation chip markets, while Intel picked up the same amount to reach 89.3 percent.

AMD's gains couldn't stop the overall decline in worldwide processor shipments. Shipments reached around 65 million during the first quarter, a 13 percent year-over-year decline and a 10.9 percent sequential drop.

Even though excess inventory of desktop and mobile chips has been cleared out, unit shipments may continue to decline as customers hold back on PC purchases during the recession, Rau said.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/16471..._on_intel.html





Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto
William Grimes



Frozen and lonely, Planet X circled the far reaches of the solar system awaiting discovery and a name. It got one thanks to an 11-year-old British girl named Venetia Burney, an enthusiast of the planets and classical myth.

On March 14, 1930, the day newspapers reported that the long-suspected “trans-Neptunian body” had been photographed for the first time, she proposed to her well-connected grandfather that it be named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld.

And so it was.

Venetia Phair, as she became by marriage, died April 30 in her home in Banstead, in the county of Surrey, England. She was 90. The death was confirmed by her son, Patrick.

Venetia, on the fateful day that Pluto popped into her head, was having breakfast with her mother and her grandfather, Falconer Madan, retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He had exciting news to tell. Scientists at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., had just photographed a planet lying beyond Neptune. Its existence had been postulated since the late 19th century, and astronomers working under Percival Lowell, the observatory’s founder, had been chasing it photographically since 1906. Now theory had become fact.

“He wondered what it should be called,” Mrs. Phair recalled in the documentary film, “Naming Pluto,” released last month. “We all wondered, and then I said, ‘Why not call it Pluto?’ And the whole thing stemmed from that.”

Mr. Madan passed the idea along to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford. Pluto, he suggested in a letter, was an excellent name for “the big obscure new baby.”

Mr. Turner, as it happened, was in London for a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, where word of the new planet had members buzzing, and proposals for a name flew fast and furious. “I think PLUTO excellent!!” he wrote to Mr. Madan on his return. “We did not manage to think of anything so good at the RAS yesterday. The only at all meritorious suggestion was Kronos, but that won’t do alongside Saturn.” (Kronos is the Greek equivalent of Saturn.)

Mr. Turner immediately sent a telegram to Flagstaff: “Naming new planet, please consider PLUTO, suggested by small girl Venetia Burney for dark and gloomy planet.”

Unbeknownst to Venetia, a spirited battle ensued, with suggestions flying thick and fast. Minerva looked like the front runner, until it was pointed out that the name already belonged to an asteroid. Other candidates included Zeus, Atlas and Persephone. The Austrian engineer and cosmologist Hans Hörbiger proposed the inscrutable and unpronounceable Onehtn, meaning “first trans-Neptune.”

Capt. Charles E. Freeman, the superintendent of the Naval Observatory in Washington, regarded Pluto as a long shot. “Pluto is the prototype of Satan in many minds, and drops out for that reason, perhaps,” he said.

In the end, scientists at the Lowell Observatory voted unanimously for Pluto, partly because its first two letters could be interpreted as an homage to Percival Lowell, and on May 24 the new planet received its official name.

Mr. Madan gave his granddaughter a five-pound note, and the family added yet another feather to its cap: in 1877, Mr. Madan’s brother Henry, a housemaster at Eton, had successfully proposed that the two dwarf moons of Mars be named Phobos and Deimos, two attendants of the Roman war god, whose names mean fear and terror.

“Pluto is an excellent name, for two reasons,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium and author of “The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet,” said in a telephone interview. “First, it’s a Roman god, as are the rest of the large objects in the solar system, so it conforms to the rules of the time, and second, Pluto is the god of the underworld, a distant place you don’t want to go to. Who could not love the name?”

Venetia Katherine Burney was born in Oxford, where her father, the Rev. Charles Fox Burney, was a professor of scriptural interpretation. He died when Venetia was 6, and she and her mother went to live with Mr. Madan.

Venetia developed an interest in astronomy after playing a game with other children in which lumps of clay, standing for the planets, were placed on a lawn in their positions relative to the sun.

She attended Downe House, a boarding school in Berkshire, and, after studying mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge, became a chartered accountant. She later taught economics and math at two girls’ schools in southwest London. In 1947 she married Maxwell Phair, a classicist, who became housemaster and head of English at Epsom College. She is survived by her son, of Cheltenham.

Mrs. Phair tended to play down her stroke of genius. She came up with Pluto, she said, simply because it was one of the few important Roman gods still available for planetary duty. “Whether I thought about a dark, gloomy Hades, I’m not sure,” she told the BBC in 2006.

Regardless, Pluto was an instant success. Walt Disney used it for Mickey Mouse’s dog, and it provided the name for Element 94 in the Periodic Table, plutonium, which was first identified in 1941. In 1987 the asteroid 6235 Burney was named in Mrs. Phair’s honor, as was a dust-measuring instrument on board New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft that took off for Pluto in 2006.

Mrs. Phair took it in stride when the International Astronomical Union decreed that Pluto was not a planet at all. It was a dwarf planet, and not even the largest one, a lump of rock and ice orbiting in a ring of icy debris known as the Kuiper Belt.

Some face was saved last year when the union announced the coining of the term “plutoid” to designate a dwarf planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. More vexing to Mrs. Phair was the persistent notion that she had taken the name from the Disney character. “It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way around,” she told the BBC. “So, one is vindicated.”

Alan M. MacRobert, a senior editor at Sky and Telescope, foresees sweeter vindication ahead. “In the year 4,000 A.D., when Pluto is hollowed out and millions of people are living inside,” he said, “the name of Venetia Burney may be the only thing that Great Britain is remembered for.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/wo...phair.html?hpw





Rupert in a Snit Over iPhone Glitch
Jason Cochran

The web may be a wonderland for free information, but there's been one notable holdout. The Wall Street Journal, that bastion of conservative economic thought, has, like its money-minded soul sister The Economist, held out on joining most other publications in granting access to its full content for free online. (A smart move, if you ask me, since it expects to survive.) If you want online access to all of the Journal's hard-core market analysis and hard-earned in-depth reporting, you have to pay at least $103 a year to get a web subscription to read much more than the major headline stories.

But the Wall Street Journal is also a favored publication of trend-seekers and conspicuous consumers everywhere, and those readers are carrying the electronic toy du jour: iPhones. The WSJ simply had to have a little program for the iPhone if it was going to remain relevant. So it recently put one out in the form of an "app," distributed by Apple.

Unfortunately for the editors at the Journal, though, Apple hasn't yet figured out a safe or easy way to charge iPhone users for the things they do within apps sold at its App Store. So anything from the Journal that you can read on an iPhone (or an iPod Touch) is not charged.
The Columbia Journalism Review reports that the Journal's ultimate bossman, Rupert Murdoch, has his knickers in a twist over the loophole and has come down hard on the people who let it happen. The app, though, isn't being retracted, at least for now. Unfortunately, the technology for charging iPhone users for the WSJ's content won't be available until the fall at least, "by which time the Journal app's user base will have gotten good and used to getting it for free," as the CJR puts it.

An iPhone starts at $199 with a two-year contract. If regular Journal readers drop their online subscriptions and deduct the cost from that purchase price, they will theoretically pay just $96 for the device. That is, if Murdoch doesn't find a way to plug this loophole as soon as he can. I hear the guy's pretty good with money.
http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/0...e-this-at-all/





Unofficial Software Incurs Apple’s Wrath
Jenna Wortham

The iPhone can teach its users how to perform CPR, mix a White Russian and allow them identify any song playing on the radio.

But for some owners of the Apple touch-screen device, the 35,000-plus applications lining the digital shelves of Apple’s App Store are not enough. If you want to use your iPhone as a video camera, send a photo message or hook it up to your laptop to connect to the Internet, there’s no app for that.

Or at least, no official app.

Through the efforts of developers and hobbyists, the Web is teeming with unauthorized applications for the iPhone and the iPod Touch (which does everything that the iPhone does except make phone calls and incur a monthly bill from AT&T), and there are even some independent online application stores.

However, in order to use these programs, iPhone owners have to “jailbreak” their device — downloading a bit of software that bypasses Apple’s restrictions and allows the installation of unsanctioned third-party programs.

The growing popularity of jailbreaking has set up a legal battle between Apple, which says it has the right to regulate what can go on an iPhone, and the users and developers who want to customize their phones as they see fit.

Jailbreaking is different from unlocking an iPhone, in which users modify the software so the phone can be used on unauthorized wireless carriers. For some iPhone hobbyists, like Mark Janke, jailbreaking is akin to customizing a fancy car — it simply allows owners to personalize the look of their devices, turning their phones into a brag-worthy accessory and status symbol.

“You can modify your phone and say, ‘Hey, look what I did,’ ” said Mr. Janke, who runs a forum called Hack That Phone, which walks iPhone owners through the jailbreaking process in several languages, including Swedish and Persian. “It opens up an amazing world of goodies.”

But according to Apple, jailbreaking is illegal and a breach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. “These modifications not only violate the warranty, they also cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably,” said Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for Apple.

In a legal filing with the United States Copyright Office last year, Apple says jailbroken iPhones rely on modified versions of Apple’s operating software that infringe on its copyrights.

In addition, the company says jailbreaking encourages the piracy of approved iPhone applications and is an expensive burden.“Apple’s iPhone support department has received literally millions of reported incidents of software that crashes on jailbroken iPhones,” the document says.

Apple filed its brief in response to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s request that the copyright office recognize an exemption to the digital copyright act that would permit jailbreaking of iPhones and other devices. The copyright office is expected to rule on the issue by October.

Jailbreaking your own iPhone does not infringe on any copyright, and the tools that help iPhone owners modify their devices do not distribute anything that belongs to Apple, said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates more openness on the Internet. “In our view, consumers are allowed to adapt software for their own personal use,” he said.

For developers, bypassing Apple’s lengthy and opaque approval process allows them to get their software out quickly and on their own terms. Most iPhone owners who jailbreak their phones do so to change the interface of the iPhone or add simple features and functions that are not available through official channels, said Jay Freeman, who operates Cydia, a popular repository for thousands of third-party iPhone applications and modifications.

For example, Mr. Freeman’s site offers two popular applications that he wrote: Cycorder, a free program that allows iPhones to record video, and Cyntact, a $1 program that adds profile pictures to the iPhone’s address book.

Another developer offers a $9.99 application, iPhoneModem, through Cydia that permits the iPhone to share its Internet connection with a computer, a practice known as tethering, which cellular carriers frown upon.

Mr. Freeman estimates that his platform for apps has been installed on about 2.3 million iPhones and iPod Touch devices. In April, Apple said it had sold 37 million iPhones and iPod Touches to date.

To counter jailbreaking, Apple releases updates for the operating system software that can render jailbroken phones useless. But the company’s efforts amount to an elaborate game of whack-a-mole as rogue programmers quickly counter their efforts with their own software updates.

So far, the company has not gone after any specific developers or Web sites that assist people in jailbreaking their iPhones, said Mr. von Lohmann, but given Apple’s penchant for exerting control over its products, it could.

The foundation argues that Apple’s real goal is to limit competition with its App Store, which has been wildly successful since Apple opened its digital doors in July. Since then, more than a billion apps, both free and paid, have been downloaded. Gene Munster, a senior research analyst at the Piper Jaffray investment firm, estimates that the App Store will have generated roughly $617 million in revenue by the end of 2009.

Mario Ciabarra, the operator of a smaller application shop called Rock Your Phone, worries that Apple could quash competitors by simply including the more popular jailbroken iPhone modifications in the third version of the iPhone operating system, due out this summer.

Mr. Ciabarra, whose site offers nine applications for download through a platform he developed himself, says his products have had half a million downloads since mid-March.

“There’s no reason Apple couldn’t offer the products we’re offering,” Mr. Ciabarra said. Like Apple, Mr. Freeman and Mr. Ciabarra take a commission of up to 30 percent from developers selling software through their stores.

In addition to commissions, Mr. Freeman says he makes money from selling applications he created, advertisements on the site, and sponsorships from developers who want their applications featured on Cydia’s home page. All together, he said he earns enough from the site to support himself.

Mr. Freeman said he was not worried about the competition from Apple or the potential ramifications of operating an unsanctioned software platform. “I don’t even understand why they’re trying to fight an entire community,” he said.

William H. Greene, a professor of economics at New York University who studies digital entertainment, said most jailbreaking software is free and does not hurt sales of the iPhone. Some applications available through the independent channels had been rejected by Apple for inclusion in its store. “It’s hard to see where Apple is being harmed by this,” he said.

Apple would have more leverage with its copyright claims if it could prove that jailbreaking is harming its business. “If the jailbreaker, the individual phone owner, were somehow trying to profit, then they might have a case,” Mr. Greene said. Apple is also well within its rights to crack down on pirated copies of legitimate applications, he said.

Mr. Ciabarra, who writes unauthorized apps because the iPhone is “too fun to pass up playing with,” sympathizes with Apple’s position — to a point.

“They’re worried about malware being distributed and third-party developers interfering with the stability of their product,” he said. “We just feel users should be able to decide for themselves if they want to deal with that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/te...jailbreak.html





iPhone ‘Personal Data Center’ Debuts in US
Rich Miller

Back in February we noted the appearance of a new application from a Japanese company called FreeBit that turns the Apple iPhone into a web server. The company’s ServersMan@iPhone app has just been launched in the iPhone app center in the U.S., and is being touted as a “Personal Data Center” that can be created in just 5 minutes. The app allows you to use your iPhone for storage and sharing files and links. Here’s a brief video from FreeBit that reviews how it works:

We’ll recap our snarky commentary from the app’s debut; “We congratulate FreeBit for making it easier for sysadmins to lose their web server in a cab. Here’s the big question: if your iPhone battery runs down, will there be an iFlywheel and iGenerator to keep your server online?”
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/a...-debuts-in-us/





How 4chans /b/ Board Got Crippled

Recently, 4chan pwnd Time Magazine’s poll to identify the World’s Most Influential Person. The online community dominated that poll and made the founder of 4chan, moot A.K.A. Christopher Poole the winner. That’s not surprising. 4chan is known for pwning everything it can get its hands on.

But this last week 4chan got a little of it’s own medicine when it’s infamous /b/ board got crippled (that’s Internet slang for “it stopped working right”). For over a week, the 4chan /b/ board was down. The question is why?

Here’s the scoop straight from our anonymous source’s mouth:

Spammers posted pics with a link saying “See nude girls here?” - The link led to a zip file that was an autoexecutable virus. Allegedly the autoexecutable was a virus based on Virtumonde. The altered virus was able to create a MASSIVE botnet capable of DDosing the board. So in essence, the people who brought down /b/ turned out to be /b/ itself. To many people got infected with the virus that is DDosing that board.

Translated:
4chan users got tricked into downloading a virus which turned around and attacked the server that the 4chan /b/ board forum runs on. The way to fix the problem is for 4chan users to clean up and get rid of the virus.
http://www.businesspundit.com/how-4c...-got-crippled/





Tracking Cyberspies Through the Web Wilderness
John Markoff

For old-fashioned detectives, the problem was always acquiring information. For the cybersleuth, hunting evidence in the data tangle of the Internet, the problem is different.

“The holy grail is how can you distinguish between information which is garbage and information which is valuable?” said Rafal Rohozinski, a University of Cambridge-trained social scientist involved in computer security issues.

Beginning eight years ago he co-founded two groups, Information Warfare Monitor and Citizen Lab, which both have headquarters at the University of Toronto, with Ronald Deibert, a University of Toronto political scientist. The groups pursue that grail and strive to put investigative tools normally reserved for law enforcement agencies and computer security investigators at the service of groups that do not have such resources.

“We thought that civil society groups lacked an intelligence capacity,” Dr. Deibert said.

They have had some important successes. Last year Nart Villeneuve, 34, an international relations researcher who works for the two groups, found that a Chinese version of Skype software was being used for eavesdropping by one of China’s major wireless carriers, probably on behalf of Chinese government law enforcement agencies.

This year, he helped uncover a spy system, which he and his fellow researchers dubbed Ghostnet, which looked like a Chinese-government-run spying operation on mostly South Asian government-owned computers around the world.

Both discoveries were the result of a new genre of detective work, and they illustrate the strengths and the limits of detective work in cyberspace.

The Ghostnet case began when Greg Walton, the editor of Infowar Monitor and a member of the research team, was invited to audit the Dalai Lama’s office network in Dharamsala, India. Under constant attack — possibly from Chinese-government-sponsored computer hackers — the exiles had turned to the Canadian researchers to help combat the digital spies that had been planted in their communications system over several years.

Both at the Dalai Lama’s private office and at the headquarters of the exiled Tibetan government, Mr. Walton used a powerful software program known as Wireshark to capture the Internet traffic to and from the exile groups’ computers.

Wireshark is an open-source software program that is freely available to computer security investigators. It is distinguished by its ease of use and by its ability to sort out and decode hundreds of common Internet protocols that are used for different types of data communications. It is known as a sniffer, and such software programs are essential for the sleuths who track cybercriminals and spies on the Internet.

Wireshark makes it possible to watch an unencrypted Internet chat session while it is taking place, or in the case of Mr. Walton’s research in India, to watch as Internet attackers copied files from the Dalai Lama’s network.

In almost every case, when the Ghostnet system administrators took over a remote computer they would install a clandestine Chinese-designed software program called GhOst RAT — for Remote Administration Terminal. GhOst RAT permits the control of a distant computer via the Internet, to the extent of being able to turn on audio and video recording features and capture the resulting files. The operators of the system — whoever they were — in addition to stealing digital files and e-mail messages, could transform office PCs into remote listening posts.

The spying was of immediate concern to the Tibetans, because the documents that were being stolen were related to negotiating positions the Dalai Lama’s political representatives were planning to take in negotiations the group was engaged in.

After returning to Canada, Mr. Walton shared his captured data with Mr. Villeneuve and the two used a second tool to analyze the information. They uploaded the data into a visualization program that had been provided to the group by Palantir Technologies, a software company that has developed a program that allows investigators to “fuse” large data sets to look for correlations and connections that may otherwise go unnoticed.

The company was founded several years ago by a group of technologists who had pioneered fraud detection techniques at Paypal, the Silicon Valley online payment company. Palantir has developed a pattern recognition tool that is used both by intelligence agencies and financial services companies, and the Citizen Lab researchers have modified it by adding capabilities that are specific to Internet data.

Mr. Villeneuve was using this software to view these data files in a basement at the University of Toronto when he noticed a seemingly innocuous but puzzling string of 22 characters reappearing in different files. On a hunch, he entered the string into Google’s search engine and was instantly directed to similar files stored on a vast computerized surveillance system located on Hainan Island off the coast of China. The Tibetan files were being copied to these computers.

But the researchers were not able to determine with certainty who controlled the system. The system could have been created by so-called patriotic hackers, independent computer activists in China whose actions are closely aligned with, but independent from, the Chinese government. Or it could have been created and run by Internet spies in a third country.

Indeed, the discovery raised as many questions as it answered. Why was the powerful eavesdropping system not password-protected, a weakness that made it easy for Mr. Villeneuve to determine how the system worked? And why among the more than 1,200 compromised government computers representing 103 countries, were there no United States government systems? These questions remain.

Cyberforensics presents immense technical challenges that are complicated by the fact that the Internet effortlessly spans both local and national government boundaries. It is possible for a criminal, for example, to conceal his or her activities by connecting to a target computer through a string of innocent computers, each connected to the Internet on different continents, making law enforcement investigations time consuming or even impossible.

The most vexing issue facing both law enforcement and other cyberspace investigators is this question of “attribution.” The famous New Yorker magazine cartoon in which a dog sits at a computer keyboard and points out to a companion, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” is no joke for cyberdetectives.

To deal with the challenge, the Toronto researchers are pursuing what they describe as a fusion methodology, in which they look at Internet data in the context of real world events.

“We had a really good hunch that in order to understand what was going on in cyberspace we needed to collect two completely different sets of data,” Mr. Rohozinski said. “On one hand we needed technical data generated from Internet log files. The other component is trying to understand what is going on in cyberspace by interviewing people, and by understanding how institutions work.”

Veteran cybersecurity investigators agree that the best data detectives need to go beyond the Internet. They may even need to wear out some shoe leather.

“We can’t become myopic about our tools,” said Kent Anderson, a security investigator who is a member of security management committee of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association. “I continually bump up against good technologists who know how to use tools, but who don’t understand how their tools fit into the bigger picture of the investigation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12cyber.html





Regal: Movie Goers Use Web for Info, Not Newspapers
Gina Keating

More bad news for newspapers surfaced on Tuesday at Regal Entertainment Group’s investor day.

The No. 1 U.S. movie chain noted that its spending on co-op advertising and movie directories is now about a quarter of what it was in 1999, shrinking from $13,000 per screen average to $3,000 per screen last year.

Dick Westerling, Regal’s senior vice president of marketing & advertising, told analysts:

We have conducted a number of surveys and analysis…clearly, customers are getting their movie and showtime information online, and newspaper has become a second or third choice.

Nor is that trend likely to turn around soon. Westerling spent a chunk of his 45-minute presentation extolling the Regal Crown Club, through which the company tracks 14 million moviegoers down to their film and concession preferences.

The program generated an above average 51 million ticket sales for those moviegoers, and costs just $1 million to run each year, Westerling said.

We can reach members on email cheaper than through newspaper advertising.

http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2...ot-newspapers/





Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web
Motoko Rich

Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

Neither Ms. Le Guin nor her publisher had authorized the electronic editions. To Ms. Le Guin, it was a rude introduction to the quietly proliferating problem of digital piracy in the literary world. “I thought, who do these people think they are?” Ms. Le Guin said. “Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?”

This would all sound familiar to filmmakers and musicians who fought similar battles — with varying degrees of success — over the last decade. But to authors and their publishers in the age of Kindle, it’s new and frightening territory.

For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the “Harry Potter” series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire.

“It’s exponentially up,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, whose Little, Brown division publishes the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, a favorite among digital pirates. “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented.”

John Wiley & Sons, a textbook publisher that also issues the “Dummies” series, employs three full-time staff members to trawl for unauthorized copies. Gary M. Rinck, general counsel, said that in the last month, the company had sent notices on more than 5,000 titles — five times more than a year ago — asking various sites to take down digital versions of Wiley’s books.

“It’s a game of Whac-a-Mole,” said Russell Davis, an author and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a trade association that helps authors pursue digital pirates. “You knock one down and five more spring up.”

Sites like Scribd and Wattpad, which invite users to upload documents like college theses and self-published novels, have been the target of industry grumbling in recent weeks, as illegal reproductions of popular titles have turned up on them. Trip Adler, chief executive of Scribd, said it was his “gut feeling” that unauthorized editions represented only a small fraction of the site’s content.

Both sites say they immediately remove illegally posted books once notified of them. The companies have also installed filters to identify copyrighted work when it is uploaded. “We are working very hard to keep unauthorized content off the site,” Mr. Adler said.

Several publishers declined to comment on the issue, fearing the attention might inspire more theft. For now, electronic piracy of books does not seem as widespread as what hit the music world, when file-sharing services like Napster threatened to take down the whole industry.

Publishers and authors say they can learn from their peers in music, who alienated fans by using the courts aggressively to go after college students and Napster before it converted to a legitimate online store.

“If iTunes started three years earlier, I’m not sure how big Napster and the subsequent piratical environments would have been, because people would have been in the habit of legitimately purchasing at pricing that wasn’t considered pernicious,” said Richard Sarnoff, a chairman of Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer titles.

Until recently, publishers believed books were relatively safe from piracy because it was so labor-intensive to scan each page to convert a book to a digital file. What’s more, reading books on the computer was relatively unappealing compared with a printed version.

Now, with publishers producing more digital editions, it is potentially easier for hackers to copy files. And the growing popularity of electronic reading devices like the Kindle from Amazon or the Reader from Sony make it easier to read in digital form. Many of the unauthorized editions are uploaded as PDFs, which can be easily e-mailed to a Kindle or the Sony device.

An example of copyrighted material on Scribd recently included a digital version of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” a collection of fairy tales by J. K. Rowling. One commenter, posting as vicious-9690, wrote “thx for posting it up ur like the robinhood of ebooks.”

For some writers, tracking down illegal e-books is simply not worth it.

“The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys,” Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. “And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.”

Book sales are down significantly, and publishers say it is difficult to determine whether electronic piracy is denting sales. Some of the most frequently uploaded books, like the “Twilight” series, are also huge best sellers.

Some authors say they just want to protect the principle of compensating writers. “I don’t ask to get rich off this stuff,” said Harlan Ellison, an author and screenwriter. “I just ask to be paid.”

Nine years ago, Mr. Ellison sued Internet service providers for failing to stop a user from posting four of his stories to an online newsgroup. Since settling that suit, he has pursued more than 240 people who have posted his work to the Internet without permission. “If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump,” he said.

Others view digital piracy as a way for new readers to discover writers. Cory Doctorow, a novelist whose young adult novel “Little Brother” spent seven weeks on the New York Times children’s chapter books best-seller list last year, offers free electronic versions of his books on the same day they are published in hardcover. He believes free versions, even unauthorized ones, entice new readers.

“I really feel like my problem isn’t piracy,” Mr. Doctorow said. “It’s obscurity.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/te...12digital.html





Rampant Piracy Will Be The Kindle DX’s Savior
Jason Kincaid on May 9, 2009

Earlier this week, we got our first glimpse of the Kindle DX, Amazon’s upcoming E-book reader that has taken the original Kindle’s nearly prohibitive $359 price tag and bumped it up to an even more exorbitant $489 for good measure. Granted, the DX has one major improvement: a bigger screen that makes it suitable for textbooks, professional journal articles, and even newspapers. I’ve spent the last few days mulling over the future prospects of the new device, and up until a few hours ago my forecast was looking pretty grim. But then a lightbulb went off over my head: pirates are going to save the Kindle DX.

But before I get to that, let’s address why the Kindle DX is poised to fail.

The Newspaper Strategy

Three major newspapers have banded together for an experimental trial run on the Kindle DX, offering cheaper long-term subscriptions to customers in return for the fact that their distribution costs will be next to nothing. The newspaper angle might be attractive for a few people, but I’m not convinced that it’s actually going to sell many Kindle DX’s - at least, not without the newspapers subsidizing the device’s cost as part of a subscription plan. Over $500 after taxes, plus paying for the newspaper subscriptions themselves, for convenient access to content that is already available for free online? I just don’t see it happening.

Kindle DX As A Textbook Reader

The other big marketing angle for Amazon is that the Kindle DX is the ultimate textbook reader. This sounds great in principle: students won’t have to lug around massive tomes between classes, and their books may even be slightly cheaper to boot! Unfortunately, for anyone who has ever actually used a Kindle, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t going to be as amazing as it sounds. Sifting through an E-book looking for a certain passage or image when you don’t know its exact page number (some call it ‘random access’) is a strange and unnatural experience. The Kindle sort of makes up for this by offering text search, but this is only helpful if there’s a proper name or unusual vocab term that you can remember in the passage.

But the Kindle’s real weakness is its highlighting and annotation functionality. In a real book, you can mark up your textbook and make notes to yourself in the margins. The Kindle lets you highlight and take notes, but the interface is painful to use with any kind of frequency - E-ink doesn’t lend itself well to quick navigation, nor does the Kindle’s joystick/button interface. From a student’s perspective, the Kindle is badly in need of a touchscreen. And while some students may initially grab the Kindle DX as soon as it comes out for the ‘cool’ factor, practicality (and cost) will rule it out for most of them.

Unless..

Pirates To The Rescue

College textbooks are really expensive. As in, $300+ per quarter (a small fortune for someone with little to no income) for a set of books that you may only occasionally look at and will have no use for three months down the line. If you’re thrifty you can sell those books back to your school and get doubly screwed when they fork over a laughably small return. Selling them online through services like Chegg usually yields better results, but for whatever reason most students still don’t use them.

So why don’t these students, renowned pirates as they are, simply copy the books? Well, textbook piracy already exists. If you know where to look online, you can find many novels and textbooks scanned in their entirety as PDFs. But until now, pirated textbooks were more trouble than they were worth. Reading them on a computer screen is a pain for obvious reasons. The alternative, printing out hundreds of pages at a time, results in an unwieldly mess that also stands out like a sore thumb whenever you pull it out in class.

The Kindle DX changes that. Just find the book you want in PDF form, upload it to your Kindle over USB, and you’ve got a perfectly readable and convenient textbook. Sure, students will have to deal with the usability issues I raised above, like slow highlighting. But these books, frustrating as they might be, will be 100% free. That’s $300 per quarter in extra beer money. Most obstacles and morals fade quickly in the face of that much alcohol.

Now, this is an issue we’ve brought up before when the original Kindle came out, and it hasn’t really been a problem. But most of the books people have been buying up until now are available for a mere $9.99 from Amazon. For most people, the motivation simply isn’t there to figure out how to pirate a book. But when you’re faced with a price tag of around $70 per textbook there’s a far greater incentive to find a workaround. It’s easier to find pirated files on campus too - students will be surrounded by classmates using the exact same textbooks so there’s a better chance someone will have a pirated digital version. And there’s always the resident friendly geek down the hall ready to help with any tech support issues.

So the Kindle DX may wind up selling well to Amazon’s chagrin. Amazon is really in the business of selling ‘the blades’ - it cares more about selling books than it does about selling devices (this is why Amazon offers an E-book reader for the iPhone too). Then again, it might just work out for the company after all. Students may take the time to pirate expensive textbooks, shortchanging their publishers. But a New York Times Bestseller? Why, I’d save myself the trouble and just buy it for $9.99 off Amazon.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/09...le-dxs-savior/





Kindle 2 vs Reading Disabled Students
Meredith Filak

[Update, 13 May: Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to disable text-to-speech remotely. The TTS function has apparently been remotely disabled in over 40 works so far. Affected titles include works by Toni Morrison, Stephen King, and others. Other notable titles include Andrew Meachem's American Lion, and five of the top ten Random House best-sellers in the Kindle store. As a former English major, a teacher, and a lover of books, I can't see how anyone can justify eroding access to popular and classic literature.]

A little-known fact: in my non-IP life, I’m a bit of an education wonk. My mother was a high school English teacher for 30 years, and I work as a part-time SAT and Writing tutor. I specialize in working with dyslexic, ADD/ADHD, and other reading-disabled students–and so, on both personal and professional levels, I am appalled by the backwards approach to equal access espoused by the Author’s Guild during the recent Kindle 2 debacle.

While the Guild claims that they should have the right to selectively block the text-to-speech (TTS) function on the Amazon Kindle 2—due to the “added value” it automatically provides to their work—their response has served to do little more than exclude, alienate, and set back the reading-impaired community.

First, some background on the technology itself: Text-to-speech is a function, available on almost all personal computers for several years now, that translates written text into a computerized voice. (Put aside those images of Stephen Hawking and Speak-N-Spells; the voices are much softer on the ear nowadays.) The TTS function on the Kindle translates e-books to sound. The end result is of decent quality, but isn’t something you’d get particularly excited about.

TTS is not an audiobook. The quality is so disparate that I’d be hard-pressed to say they’re even remotely comparable. Audiobooks are performed and recorded by professional actors and sound technicians, and involve great expense on the part of the publishers. They are performance pieces, subtle, nuanced and genuinely entertaining. (The Harry Potter audiobooks are a phenomenal example.) The Author’s Guild, however, claims that the quality of TTS is improving so rapidlythat someday computerized voices could be on par with, or even superior to, professionally-acted audio books. Putting aside concerns about concerns about (as Cory Doctorow puts it) “the plausibility of the singularity emerging from Amazon’s text-to-speech R&D,” the claim itself is both legally and practically very shaky.

But wait, you say. So what? Who’s affected by all this?

Well, aside from a long list of people who, for one reason or another, cannot physically utilize books, those with text-based learning disabilities are left out in the cold.
Reading disabilities, particularly in youth and adolescence, interfere with nearly every aspect of education and often require prohibitively expensive tests to formally diagnose. (In the DC metro area, a full-spectrum learning diagnostic–often critical for securing standardized test accommodations–can easily cost over $2,000.) Uncounted children have to cope daily with undiagnosed learning disabilities which manifest as vague, nebulous “difficulties” with seemingly disparate tasks.

According to the International Dyslexia Association and Learning Disabilities Association of America, between 4-7% of all school-age children in the United States receive accommodation in school for a learning disability, and 85% of those students (5% overall) have a language-based disability. Estimates of prevalence of language disabilities in the general population can reach as high as an estimated 15-20% of the American population, and at least one study has estimated that as many as one in five children is dyslexic.

Reading disabilities, because of their tangible effect on textual performance, are usually the easiest for educators to identify. Unfortunately, they’re also among the first (along with ADD/ADHD) to be falsely and crassly dismissed as the hallmark of a “slow learner.” On the contrary, reading disabilities often mask otherwise brilliant mathematical, artistic, and analytical minds.

What most people forget is that, on a fundamental level, those with reading disabilities process language differently than a non-disabled reader. A student once explained his dyslexia to me with a familiar analogy; it’s like an older student learning a new language. Dyslexia, he told me, was like a new student translating a passage–a stop-and-go process of read-translate-integrate, which produces a string of words but no obvious coherent meaning. (Having taken Japanese in college, I found the analogy painfully effective.)

For this student and many others, text is quite literally another language. The simple option to have books read aloud to them—even by a computer—is an enormously powerful asset to those with a whole spectrum of difficulties, including dyslexia, ADD/ADHD, and linguistic impairment. English as a Second Language students (whose immersion is, often, primarily aural, and only later textual) also receive the obvious benefits of word-sound association.

Compounding this problem is the fact that reading disabilities last a lifetime. In a longitudinal setting, text-to-speech offers an invaluable resource; TTS provides continual reinforcement, even as the subject matter or reading level changes. A Kindle with text-to-speech could provide a dyslexic child with a lifetime of reading assistance, opening them up to a whole world of literature and information. College students with textual impairments could access their textbooks in TTS format, providing a level of comprehension that they would otherwise only be able to achieve through a private human reader. We teach young children with technology designed to promote associations between sounds and printed words, but too often we overlook the value this same technology provides for adults.

But beyond the technical and educational debate, there exists a more fundamental, compelling reason to preserve TTS technology and protect its implementation. In the TTS debate, those with reading disabilities face not only a challenge to their ability to utilize technology to learn, but a fundamental challenge to their human rights as ensconced in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 27 guarantees every human being “the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”

The Author’s Guild seeks not only to prevent further cultural participation by reading-disabled people, but also to deny them the benefits of scientific advancement by blocking an existing technology from performing its intended role—and doing all this while demanding remuneration for a capability they themselves have done nothing to promote. If this is how the Author’s Guild wishes to treat those with reading disabilities—as freeloaders attempting to abuse the “added value” of TTS—then I fear for the future of equal access.
http://www.keionline.org/blogs/2009/...bled-students/





U.S. State AGs Looking at Google Books Deal
Diane Bartz

State attorneys general are looking into a proposed settlement Google Inc reached with author and publisher groups allowing the Internet company to digitize millions of books, a participant in a recent discussion of the matter told Reuters on Friday.

A group of state attorneys general discussed the deal in a one-hour conference call on Tuesday, said Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive.

The U.S. Justice Department is also making inquiries about the deal Google struck to settle copyright disputes arising from its project to put millions of books on the Internet.

But the deal has come under fire because it is silent on what Google would eventually charge libraries, who fear the service will become a very pricey must-have.

"There was no indication that there was any specific activity planned," by the attorneys general, said Brantley, whose nonprofit Internet Archive also digitizes books in addition to building a digital library of Internet sites.

Google has said the settlement would expand access to millions of books.

"The Department of Justice and several state attorneys general have contacted us to learn more about the impact of the settlement, and we are happy to answer their questions," a Google representative said in an e-mailed statement.

Critics of the settlement say it would also allow Google -- and only Google -- to digitize so-called orphan works, which could pose an antitrust concern.

Orphan works are books or other materials that are still covered by U.S. copyright law, but it is not clear who owns the rights to them.

"My impression is that the questions focused mainly on fact gathering," said Brantley of Tuesday's discussion. He said there was talk over whether the authors of orphan works were adequately represented in the settlement.

Under a proposed settlement reached last October between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, Google agreed to pay $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers can register works and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions or book sales. A court must still approve the settlement.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5474WR20090508





California Open Source Digital Textbook Plan Faces Barriers

The governor of California has launched a new initiative to compile open source textbooks for the state. He hopes that the plan will help cut costs and improve the quality of education. The effort seems very promising, but the state's complex standards and arduous textbook evaluation process will pose major challenges.
Ryan Paul

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has an ambitious plan to reduce the cost of education in California. He intends for the state to develop digital open source textbooks for high school math and science classes. The books will be available for free and will be used at public schools across the state.

Schwarzenegger has tasked California Secretary of Education Glen Thomas with making sure that the new textbooks are ready for deployment in fall 2009. Thomas will be collaborating with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the president of the State Board of Education.

Public education is costly in California and accounts for roughly 40 percent of the state government's annual budget. The state's current financial woes have forced Schwarzenegger to search for ways to cut some of the fat out of school spending.

"As California's budget crisis continues we must find such innovative ways to save money and improve services," said Governor Schwarzenegger in a statement. "California was built on innovation and I'm proud of our state's continued leadership in developing education technology. This first-in-the-nation initiative will reduce education costs, help encourage collaboration among school districts and help ensure every California student has access to a world-class education."

The idea of open source textbooks is not new, but this could be the first statewide initiative to put open content in classrooms. The state's high-profile adoption of freely available open source textbook material could compel other states to follow and adopt similar initiatives. There are, however, many unanswered questions about the plan and how it will be implemented.

The governator will surely be able to stop the digital textbooks from gaining sentience and subjugating humanity, but there are trickier challenges that will be even tougher to defeat than the impending Skynet apocalypse. Textbooks are a surprisingly controversial issue in California and there is a lot of political baggage and bureaucratic red tape that will make an open source textbook plan especially troublesome.

California's textbook troubles could be tough to overcome

Previous efforts to build open source textbooks for California by various independent organizations have largely been unsuccessful. One such attempt was made by an organization called the California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) in 2002, which aimed to produce a digital K-12 history textbook under an open license in collaboration with the Wikibooks project. COSTP claimed that it could help California save over $200 million per year. The program never gained traction and failed to produce a complete textbook.

There is already plenty of textbook-ready material available on the Internet in the public domain or under open licenses, but the real challenge is compiling and editing it so that it will meet the state's exacting standards. California is known for having the most demanding textbook evaluation practices in the country, with publishers forced to go to extreme lengths to meet state requirements. The arduous review process is forcing some publishing companies to stop selling books in the state and is also a factor that has contributed significantly to the rising cost of K-12 textbooks in California.

Among the state's most controversial policies are those which require books to reflect society's diversity by including representative references to individuals of minority ethnicities. Critics say that these requirements are overly burdensome and have made political correctness a higher priority than quality in the textbook production and review process. The situation has raised some bizarre challenges for publishers. For example, some textbook publishing companies controversially enlist able-bodied children to pose in wheelchairs so that they have a sufficient number of pictures of "disabled" students to appease state textbook reviewers.

Now that the state is taking up the task of compiling textbook material itself, it will be forced to contend with its own labyrinthine mess of ambiguous and conflicting requirements. It's not a problem that one can simply crowd-source. The open textbook development process will likely be closely scrutinized by critics and advocates on both sides of California's divisive textbook standards debate.

These controversial issues are probably the reason why governor Schwarzenegger is currently limiting the effort to science and math rather than attempting to produce a complete suite of books across all subjects. California has faced volatile controversy over the manner in which the history of certain religious groups are depicted in textbooks approved by the state. One lawsuit over related textbook changes that were made in 2005 is still ongoing.

This also reflects the reasons why the traditional wiki approach is untenable for California teaching material. Individual changes to textbooks can become a source of fierce debate and there are a multitude of special interest groups battling over what the textbooks should say and how they should say it. It would take the concept of Wikipedia edit wars to a whole new level.

As a Californian who has watched for years with morbid fascination as the textbook battles play out in courtrooms, the media, and the state legislature, I'm a bit skeptical that Governor Schwarzenegger's open source textbook plan will get free books into classrooms in a timely and cost-effective manner. The idea of open source textbooks makes a lot of sense in principle and seems like a very worthwhile undertaking, but I fear that the state will incur some hidden costs while unwrapping its own red tape.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/n...initiative.ars





New Bloomsbury Science Series to be Available Free Online

Science, Ethics and Innovation titles pitched at 'proverbial Guardian reader' will be free of charge on internet, with revenue sought from hard copies
Alison Flood

Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project, has teamed up with Bloomsbury to edit a new series of books that will look at topics including the ethics of genetics and the cyber enhancement of humans.

The series will be the first from Bloomsbury's new venture, Bloomsbury Academic, launched late last year as part of the publisher's post-Harry Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons licences, the intention is for titles in the imprint to be available for free online for non-commercial use, with revenue to be generated from the hard copies that will be printed via print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies.

Publisher Frances Pinter is talking to "very high-level academics" across the disciplines to build up the list, which she hopes to reach 200-odd titles a year by 2014, but Sulston and his colleague John Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University, are the first editors of a series she's signed up. The books she hopes to publish are intended to appeal to the "educated layman" as well as to academic circles and should "help the academic world speak to people who should be listening to what they have to say," she said today.

Sulston and Harris's series, Science, Ethics and Innovation, will be aimed "at a very wide market", covering subjects from "the interplay between science and society, to new technological and scientific discoveries and how they impact on our understanding of ourselves and our place in society", and the responsibility of science to the wider world. Authors they will be looking to commission will range from academics to policymakers, opinion formers, those working in commercial scientific roles, "and maybe even politicians". "They'll be non-technical books which will appeal to any intelligent person," said Harris. "The proverbial Guardian reader."

Sulston and Harris's own current research into topics including genetic ethics and human enhancement is also likely to "find its way" into the series, said Sulston. "Bloomsbury's is a new business model and chimes absolutely with something I've been involved with for years – open access to scientific data," he said. "We immediately hit common ground with Frances Pinter and felt if Bloomsbury was keen to go ahead, we were keen to be part of it."

He stressed that the area he and Harris would be covering - the interface between science, ethics and innovation - was of international interest, and offering the books for free online would allow readers around the world to access them. "Most of the world is very poor and access to literature is a real issue. There are all sorts of ways of sorting this out, and this is clearly one of them," he said.

Cyber enhancement, he said, was a likely topic. "The use of machines and technology to enhance human functions is a very important new area."

The first and only book Bloomsbury Academic has published so far, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig's Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy, has been downloaded for free in 105 countries, said Pinter, but has also been selling well. "Not everyone has enough money to buy a physical book so we're delighted we can get Lawrence's message to people who can't afford the book," she said. "And we're delighted we can sell books too."

Pinter estimates that Bloomsbury would have to sell around 200 copies of a highly technical monograph, priced at around £50, to make a profit, but a more commercial title with a wider appeal and a lower price point would need to sell around 2,000 copies to be worthwhile. "We believe there are enough people who are willing to purchase a hard copy that we will sell enough physical books to meet our needs, to cover our costs and make a modest profit," she said. "But we won't be able to judge whether [the model is] financially viable for the next two years." And with academics more and more frequently looking to publish their work themselves online, Pinter is adamant that "if publishers are not willing to experiment with models, academics will bypass publishers".

Sulston, who jointly won a 2002 Nobel prize for discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death, is the perfect launch editor for the series, she believes. "I've followed what John has been doing and I just think the world of him," she said. "He's very forward looking in terms of what we can do with science – cyber enhancement, genetic manipulation – and all of these things need very sophisticated public debate."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009...ce-free-online





Meet 'Facet,' the RealNetworks DVD Ripper Box
Mark Hachman

It's not every day that a court case drags a product roadmap out into the light of day. Yet that's what happened with "Facet," a set-top box that RealNetworks hopes will do for DVDs what MP3s did for the home stereo.

According to a Real spokesman, Real already has a contract in place to sell the Facet technology to an OEM, which, if all goes well, could have a version of a TiVo for DVDs in the market by the holidays.

The fate of Facet, of course, rests in the hands of Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who is expected to rule in a case this week pitting Real versus the top Hollywood studios and its content control association. The product in question is actually known as RealDVD, code-named "Vegas," which launched last year before the studios halted sales with a restraining order; Facet has been in development nearly as long, and uses the same technology.

Somewhat ironically, Hollywood is positioning Facet and the RealDVD software as just another illegal DVD ripper.

A spokesman said Facet would be priced at less than $300. If Judge Patel rules for RealNetworks without conditions, then the device could be out by Christmas; if not, the company may have to redesign the box to factor in any additional restrictions, he said. A 500-Gbyte drive could hold between 70 and 75 DVDs, he said.

In court, Real chief executive Rob Glaser showed off what Facet actually is, at the moment: a box about the size of a DVD player, with a glowing blue status light. Real is working with Taiwan ODMs to build the first boxes, the Real spokesman said.

Court rules forbid pictures in Judge Patel's courtroom, and Real representatives declined to allow the box to be photographed.

The box displayed the RealNetworks logo while booting up, then displayed a simple overview screen with images of the front covers of DVDs. One key feature that Real hopes to hype is Facet's ability to load an entire boxed set of DVDs, and then remember on which disc and which episode to resume playback after a user returns.

When a user loads a disc to be copied, the screen displays one of Real's chief defenses against piracy: a nagware screen.

"RealDVD should only be used with discs you own," the screen said. "If you own the disc press play."

Glaser acknowledged that are several, if not tens, of illegal third-party ripper software available that can do more on a PC's hard drive, than either Facet or the RealDVD product. Glaser said that the one of the features that he would have liked to include was a feature to compress the video so that more movies could be stored, a feature that the Content Scrambling System contract governing the copy protections on DVDs prohibited.

But, Glaser said, the RealDVD and Facet technology was designed to appeal to families with small children who would scratch the DVDs, as well as consumers with large video collections. Business travelers hopefully would also gravitate toward the RealDVD product, ripping DVDs for use on a plane via a laptop, Glaser said.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2346146,00.asp





RealNetworks Accuses MPAA of Antitrust Violations
Greg Sandoval

RealNetworks has accused the major film studios of antitrust violations in documents filed Wednesday with a federal court.

Real, a software company known best for the company's video and music player, has asked U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel for permission to file an amended second complaint against the six largest film studios as well as Viacom, the entertainment conglomerate and parent company of Parmount Pictures.

Real has been involved in a legal conflict with Hollywood over its release last year of RealDVD, a software that duplicates DVDs and stores the copies on a computer hard drive. The Motion Picture Association of America claims that RealDVD violates copyright law. The two sides have met in court this month so Patel could determine whether to remove an injunction placed on the sale of RealDVD. She halted sales last September, days after the software first went on sale.

An MPAA representative was not immediately available and a Real spokesman declined to comment.

In the latest filing, Real accuses the studios as well as the DVD Copy Control Association, a group dedicated to protecting DVDs from piracy, of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, the federal statute designed to limit cartels and monopolies.

"RealNetworks has become aware of facts demonstrating that the DVD CCA and the Studio Defendants have engaged in both a horizontal group boycott of RealNetworks," Real said in it's filing. "The testimony of the Studio Defendants during the preliminary injunction hearing further confirmed the existence of a horizontal conspiracy."

Real alleged in the document that the studios were guilty of anti-competitive practices when they agreed to block anyone from making copies of DVDs without their say so.

"(The witnesses) unambiguously," Real said in the court filing,"confirmed the Studios' position that the (Content Scrambling System) License Agreement (which is needed to legally make copies of DVDs) resulted from a joint agreement among the Studios to prohibit all copies of DVD content unless the Studios jointly authorize the making of such a copy."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10240490-93.html





Digital Licensing: Do It Yourself
Cory Doctorow

Introduction

When someone wants to license your art, characters, photos, articles or music, how does it shake out? Chances are that these negotiations involve expensive lawyers on both sides of the deal.

If you're running an enlightened company, you might have a Creative Commons license hanging out there for non-commercial, "fannish" uses. (Creative Commons publishes a suite of widely adopted licenses that allow rightsholders to release their work for sharing, remixing, etc.)

But somewhere between Creative Commons and full-blown, lawyerly license negotiation is a rich, untapped source of income for creative people and firms with portfolios of iconic material. To cash in, you just need the courage to let go of a little control.
How We Got Here

Before Creative Commons, there were lawyers. If I wanted to make a Mickey Mouse ear-wax scraper (such a thing does exist, and I once lost an eBay auction for it), I'd need to hire a lawyer who was sufficiently high-powered to get Disney's lawyers to return his calls. After several thousand dollars worth of pitching and drafting and arguing, I'd get my license and could go back to my factory and start cranking out my own special brand of cute and hygienic devices. Presuming, of course, that Disney was willing to grant me the license at all.

This approach works reasonably well for certain kinds of products and services. While I'm sure Bayer would prefer not to keep a couple of lawyers on hand to negotiate with Hanna Barbara every time it wants to change the packaging on Flintstones Vitamins, it's not a great hardship to have them on staff.

Businesses like Bayer know how to talk to businesses like Hanna-Barbera: An electrician might say that they were "impedance-matched" – that is, they speak the same language, employ the same protocols, and have the same base assumptions about how the world should work.

Before the Internet, this state of affairs was, broadly speaking, sufficient. If there was such a thing as a "mom-and-pop vitamin manufacturer," they probably wouldn't be so cheeky as to produce their own unauthorized Flintstones Vitamins, and if they did, they'd either be so obscure as to escape notice and commercial success, or they'd rise to the level of corporate notice by Bayer or Hanna-Barbera, who would crush them into paste.

After the Internet, it suddenly became possible to be:
A mom-and-pop, hand-crafted kind of producer; who
Expected to be able to use trademarks and copyrights; and
Who rose to the attention of lots of people; but
Didn't have any money, lawyers, or even business.


This was a genuinely novel situation. Fans whose fan-fiction stories had formerly reached small groups of friends now reached potentially gigantic groups of friends. They were visible to search-engines (and hence rights-holders). And, technically, they were liable for enormous statutory damages that had been put in place to deter rival media companies and manufacturers by putting a little sting into their punishment – but that little sting was a devastating blow when applied to individuals.

Enter Creative Commons...

Creative Commons

As a non-profit group that provides several kinds of legal licensing agreements for use by content creators, Creative Commons serves an important purpose for today's Net culture.

Since 2001, Creative Commons has distributed these licenses for free to creators all over the world, undertaking the Herculean task of making the licenses binding in dozens of legal systems.

Commons licenses are clean, standardized, universal licenses that lay out simple rules-of-the-road for "doing culture." They allow rights-holders to clearly communicate a set of permissible uses for their works that are offered to all and sundry.

For example, Creative Commons licenses allow you to take my novels and copy them, share them, translate them, reformat them, make new works out of them like movies and plays – provided that you do so non-commercially. If you're making money at this, you have to come and get a license.

It works great. My books are published by real, brick-and-mortar publishers who stick real, reasonably priced lumps of paper in real, well-lit stores, where they change hands for real money. My fans, meanwhile, are empowered to do practically any non-commercial thing with the books that they want: Kids make short movies for school assignments; adults translate into foreign languages to hone their language skills; artists do drawings and paintings for the love of it. People podcast 'em, email them to friends, and otherwise have a good time, all the while generating the market for those physical books.

So far, so good.

Questions of Commerce

The Internet isn't just full of noncommercial fans and commercial artists, though.

There's a whole continuum of production that the Internet has engendered, and quite a lot of it involves money changing hands – something Creative Commons isn't quite equipped to cope with.

Take Etsy, for example, which is among my favorite places in the entire noosphere: It's like eBay for crafters. It's filled with innumerable creators who make physical objects and offer them for sale.

What kind of physical objects?

What kind would you like?

Jewelry, clothes, toys, books, sculpture, painting, game controllers, hand-tooled keyboards, masks, furnishings, tableware, collage, drawings, picture frames, musical instruments, tools – every imaginable product of the cunning artificer's workshop. It's like the Olde Curiosity Shoppe, come to virtual life and expanded to infinite size through several spatial and temporal dimensions.

And it's just a corner of the makerverse. From edge to edge, the Net is filled with creators of every imaginable tchotchke – and quite a lot of them are for sale.

And quite a lot of that is illegal.

That's because culture isn't always non-commercial. All around the physical world, you can find markets where craftspeople turn familiar items from one realm of commerce into handicrafts sold in another realm.

I have a carved wooden Coke bottle from Uganda, a Mickey Mouse kite from Chile, a set of hand-painted KISS matrioshkes from Russia. This, too, is a legitimate form of commerce, and the fact that the villager who carved my Coke bottle was impedance-mismatched with Coke and didn't send a lawyer to Atlanta to get a license before he started carving isn't a problem for him, because Coke can't and won't enforce against carvers in small stalls in marketplaces in war-torn African nations.

If only this were true for crafters on the Net. Though they deploy the same cultural vocabulary as their developing-world counterparts for much the same reason (it's the same reason Warhol used Campbell's soup cans), they don't have obscurity on their side. They live by the double-edged sword of the search-engine: The same tool that enables their customers to find them also enables rights-holders to discover them and shut them down.

It doesn't have to be this way.

The Alternative

Creative Commons works because all you have to do to "license" a work for re-use is to follow and link and read three or four bullet points.

It is impedance-matched with Net culture.

Lawyer-licensing doesn't work for makers, because hiring a lawyer to discover if you can net $45 selling three $28 t-shirts is not cost effective. Even assuming you can get the license, you'd have to raise the cost of the t-shirt to $450 to cover the lawyer-time incurred in getting it.

What would an impedance-matched licensing regime look like for makers? A lot like Creative Commmons.

Here's one model: Imagine if you included the following text alongside all your logos, literature, photos, and artwork:

"You are free to use the visual, textual, and audiovisual elements of this work in commercial projects, provided that you remit 20 percent of the gross income arising from your sales to doctorow@paypal.com. You are required to remit these funds on a quarterly basis, or on an annual basis where the total owing is less than $100."

That's it. For extra effect, put it on a Webpage with downloadable, high-resolution artwork, source videos, 3D meshes – whatever the preferred form of a work for modification might be.

Oh, you could hire a lawyer to tart it up a little. There's probably a business in this for someone who wants to found a firm devoted to fine-tuning the language to ensure it works in multiple jurisdictions and who wants to act as a payment clearing house.

But the point of this license is that it is primarily normative – that is, it's a discussion between two civilians (you and some potential crafter) about some reasonable rules of the road.

Complexity is your enemy here. Two or three sentences are all you want, so that the idea can be absorbed in 10 seconds by a maker at three in the morning just as she embarks on an inspired quest to sculpt a 3D version from your logo using flattened pop-cans.

The secret to simplicity here is in the license fee, the payment schedule, and the enforcement regime.

The Self-Serve Difference

A lawyerly license usually generates a fairly small per-unit royalty on a lot of sales – say, 5 to 10 percent – and is front-loaded with an initial payment. By charging a much higher per-unit royalty and waiving the upfront fee, a maker can take your license on with almost no risk.

He can, for instance, sculpt a steampunk assemblage of your mascot and simply raise the price on the final item a little to cover part of your cut. He still carries the usual risk associated with making art without having a buyer lined up in advance, but he doesn't have to worry that after finishing it, you'll come along and threaten him with a lawsuit.

How do you enforce this license? You don't.

Or rather, you do, but only when it's worth it. Chances are you're not enforcing against most of the little guys these days, because you haven't heard of most of them – and when your lawyers send threatening letters to beloved Etsy sellers who want to celebrate your products, it makes you look like a goon.

If you're sane and smart, you save your enforcement efforts for the Big Guys, people who are clearly living beyond the hand-to-mouth existence of a cottage crafter, firms that list a bunch of regional distributors, and so forth.

Self-serve license-enforcement works exactly the same way. You assume that most people are honest and want to do the right thing (a surprising number of people are, especially when the right thing is easy and impedance-matched). When you find little penny-ante chiselers making out like bandits, ignore them. There are only so many hours in the day, and you're better off spending them ensuring that everyone who wants to pay you can, rather than wasting your time ensuring that everyone who uses your stuff pays.

When you find the big operators, you pay lawyers to threaten them, just as you do now.

The only difference is that honest people have a way to pay you that makes sense for you, and sense for them.

There's one other difference between lawyerly and self-serve licensing: By allowing a much wider diversity of authorized products to exist than could possibly flourish under a top-down, command-and-control regime, you get a free way to discover the opportunities that never occurred to you.

Every crafter becomes your researcher, bearing all the costs of market-testing every conceivable variation on your product. When something starts to really sell, you can bring the crafter in-house by bringing out the lawyers and negotiating a cheaper license for her that gives you more direct control over the production and quality.

A Built-In Future

But what about the brand, the trademark, the almighty image?

The brand is easy. Add a condition to your license:

"As a condition of this license, your work must prominently bear the SELF-SERVE LICENSING logo and the words: THIS WORK IS CREATED UNDER THE TERMS OF A SELF-SERVE CRAFTER'S LICENSE. THE ORIGINAL CREATORS FROM WHICH THIS IS DERIVED HAVE NOT REVIEWED IT OR APPROVED IT, THOUGH THEY ARE COMPENSATED FOR ITS SALE."

That's the whole proposal: two paragraphs of simple, plain-language text and a little, easily recognizable logo, and you'd get yourself a whole world of cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday's pirates into tomorrow's partners.

This has the neat effect of satisfying the trademark question, too: Notices like this preserve the integrity of the trademark, ensuring that customers are continuously notified about the relationship of your marks and your authorization, protecting you from legal dilution.

It's inevitable that some junk will emerge from this stuff, some of which will embarrass you. But Creative Commons showed that cultural and commercial culture could exist alongside one another; a self-serve licensing system aimed at bringing Creative Commons to commercial transactions shows that artisans and commerce can enjoy the same mutually beneficial relationship.
http://www.internetevolution.com/doc...doc_id=176353&





Minnesota Tries to Block Online Poker, Citing Wire Act: Is it a Bad Bluff?

Lawyers claim move has lots of legal problems
Jason Hoppin

Legal experts who ply their trade in the online world say Minnesota's recent effort to block statewide access to online poker sites betrays a naivete about both the workings of the Internet and the U.S. Constitution.

The state recently alerted 11 Internet service providers that they must halt access to 200 sites. Most offer poker, but some offer horse race betting and even bingo. But the list of questions raised by the state's action is long, starting with whether Internet service providers are even covered by the law cited in the Minnesota Department of Public Safety's announcement.

"Even before you get to the constitutional concerns, there's some pretty glaring problems," said John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology.

In 1961, Congress gave a crusading young U.S. attorney general named Robert F. Kennedy the power to go after bookmakers through the Interstate Wire Act, which banned the use of telephones for betting.

But in recent years, there has been a healthy debate about whether the Wire Act applies to online gambling, and in announcing its move April 29, Minnesota's Department of Public Safety acknowledged it was probably the first time a state had used the law to target poker sites.

"We are putting site operators and Minnesota online gamblers on notice and in advance," said John Willems, director of the division of alcohol and gambling enforcement. "Disruption of these sites' cash flow will negatively impact their business models. State residents with online escrow accounts should be aware that access to their accounts may be jeopardized and their funds in peril."
But the act itself refers to "common carriers" — telephone companies, railroads and others required to provide services to customers who request them. Internet providers, Morris said, are most definitely not common carriers.

That is one of the main claims in a lawsuit against the state filed Wednesday by the New Jersey-based Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association. A Department of Public Safety spokesman declined to comment, citing the lawsuit.

Matt Zimmerman, a staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, said government officials often misplace their targets when decrying the evils of online activity, citing recent efforts to shut down erotic services ads on Craigslist as one example.

"The solutions that are all out there are to shut off (free) speech," Zimmerman said. "From a First Amendment standpoint, it's really jarring."

In addition, the state's request asks Internet providers to block access based on numerical Internet protocol addresses. But many Web sites share the same IP address, meaning that blocking access to one poker site could result in the blocking of hundreds of unrelated sites.

Furthermore, while the Department of Public Safety said blocking only Minnesotans' access to these Web sites is "relatively straightforward," Morris and others said it is not. The lawsuit alleges that available technologies do not permit such geographic distinctions.

Internet providers contacted by the Pioneer Press, including Comcast, Qwest and ATT, said they are considering the state's request.

Other companies, such as DirecTV, said they don't provide Internet access. "We're not sure why we were included on the state's list," DirecTV spokesman Robert Mercer wrote in an e-mail.

The list of potential problems continues. For example, it's not clear the Wire Act applies to poker, or even online casino games, though it certainly applies to sports betting.

In 2002, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that "the Wire Act concerns gambling on sporting events or contests" and not poker or other games. The U.S. Justice Department has disagreed with the court.

Lastly, the state's position violates the First Amendment when it comes to some of the sites offering lessons on playing Texas Hold 'em or the history of casinos.

"The government has absolutely no right to block access to that content," Morris said.
http://www.twincities.com/politics/ci_12331115





Study Finds Software Piracy Growing
Diane Bartz

Software piracy grew last year, accounting for 41 percent of all PC software installed, with losses to companies estimated at $53 billion, the Business Software Alliance said on Tuesday.

Worldwide piracy rates rose from 38 percent of software in business and home computers in 2007 to 41 percent in 2008 despite successes in fighting piracy in China and Russia, according to the study done by market researcher IDC for the BSA.

Global PC software sales grew 14 percent last year to $88 billion.

While there was progress on piracy in some countries, with rates down in roughly half of the countries surveyed and flat in one-third, overall "the dollar figure is actually up," said Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the BSA.

Holleyman said that while U.S. piracy was about 20 percent of the total market, the lowest in the world, it was a major problem because more software was sold in the United States than anywhere else.

Holleyman said much of those losses came from small businesses that use unlicensed copies of popular software programs. They might have 50 PCs but only pay for rights to run the software on 25 of those machines. "The U.S. has the highest single dollar loss," he said.

China's piracy rate had dropped from 90 percent of all software in 2004 to 80 percent last year while Russia's piracy rate dropped five percentage points in the past year to 68 percent, the study found.

The progress in China came because the government decided to use only legitimate software, because Internet service providers cooperated in taking pirates off the Internet when asked, and because of other steps, said Holleyman.

The study found seven countries with piracy rates of 90 percent or higher: Georgia, Bangladesh, Armenia, Zimbabwe, Sri Landa, Azerbaijan and Moldova.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Additional reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...54B0UD20090512





Google's Android Seen Gaining Support
Tarmo Virki

Google's Android operating system is gaining support in the mobile industry, with 8 million Android phones to be sold in 2009, up 10-fold from a year ago, research firm Strategy Analytics said on Monday.

With the overall handset market shrinking as economies slow globally, the mobile industry is focusing investment on more advanced smartphones and their software.

Google's Android was introduced in the United States in the second half of 2008, and now all top cell phone vendors except Nokia have said they would use Android. "Android is now in a good position to become a top-tier player in smartphones over the next two to three years," said Neil Mawston, a director at Strategy Analytics.

Mawston said handset vendors and operators like T-Mobile and Vodafone are attracted to Android's relatively low-cost licensing model, its semi-open-source structure and Google's support for services.

Despite the 10-fold growth forecast for 2009, with 8 million phones sold Android would lag far behind market leader Symbian, and Research in Motion, Microsoft, or Apple.

On average, the smartphone market is expected to grow 10-20 percent this year from 152 million phones sold last year.

Roughly half of these used Symbian operating system, while RIM sold 23.5 million, Microsoft 20 million and Apple 13.7 million phones, Strategy Analytics said.

Nokia bought out other shareholders of Symbian last year and gave all its software to an independent foundation, which now develops it on an open-source basis.

Nokia uses only Symbian software in its smartphones, while Symbian is also the key platform for Sony Ericsson, which has said it will also use Windows and Android as complementary offerings.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...54A55K20090511





FCC Chairman Says No To Fairness Doctrine
FMQB

At the inaugural meeting of the FCC's re-chartered Diversity Committee, acting Chairman Michael Copps made it clear that he in no way supports resurrecting the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, which was a rule the Commission dropped more than two decades ago that required radio stations to air both sides of important issues. Both conservative and liberal broadcasters alike have expressed concern about the possible return of the Doctrine, calling it an infringement on First Amendment Rights. But on Thursday, Copps may have put their minds at ease.

"There is one topic that I do not expect this Committee to address - that would be the Fairness Doctrine. I almost hesitate to mention it because it seems so obvious," Copps said at the meeting. "But apparently there are some who remain confused - I hope not willfully so. Those who claim that promoting diversity and addressing the woeful effects of past discrimination are the equivalent of bringing back the Fairness Doctrine understand neither the Fairness Doctrine nor, more importantly, the lack of opportunity minorities and women have when it comes to owning and operating the enterprises that allow us to communicate with one another. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. What you are about is righting the wrong of generations of denied opportunity. When all the statistics show us still heading in the wrong direction, most people without an axe to grind appreciate the wisdom of that old adage, 'justice delayed is justice denied.' Resurrecting the straw man of a bye-gone Fairness Doctrine to deflect this country’s passage to equal opportunity is a kind of issue-mongering that has no place in twenty-first century America."

Copps also stressed that America’s strength is its diversity. "America will succeed in the Twenty-first century not in spite of our diversity, but because of it." he said. "We must nurture the individual talents, genius and creativity of all of our people. Our economic well-being and, indeed, our very democracy, depend on it."

In his speech, Copps also asked the Diversity Committee to take an immediate look at the lack of minority and female ownership in the media, an issue which he says has been neglected for too long.

"I won’t go into a lot of detail about the shameful state of affairs in which we find ourselves, although I certainly could. A couple of statistics tell the story clearly enough. In a country that is now more than one-third minority, people of color own just over 3 percent of full power commercial TV stations," Copps said. "Is it any wonder that issues of interest to the minority community so often don’t get the attention they deserve? Is it any wonder that minorities are so often stereotyped and caricatured and that the positive contributions of the minority community are so often overlooked? And the state of female ownership is also dismal. Women are 51 percent of our population, yet women own 5.8 percent of those TV stations and only about 6 percent of radio’s. That’s not acceptable either."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1313181





EMI Shows Strong Profit Performance
FMQB

EMI Music has issued its financial report for the year ending March 2009, and the company showed strong growth in profits and cash flow in its first full year under Terra Firma’s ownership. EMI reported that EBITDA rose over 200 percent to £163 million. This was driven by a £48 million year-over-year reduction in the cost of returns, strong cost management which has now been embedded in the company, and overhead savings from the significant restructuring that was done in 2008. EMI also said it generated operating cash flow of £190 million during the year, way up from the £142 million it recorded in 2008. The company now says it is "firmly on track" to deliver the £200 million ($301.85 million) of cost savings identified at the time of the acquisition in August 2007.

Despite the improvement in operating performance, sales were actually down. EMI saw a 4 percent increase in net sales to £1.07 billion ($1.62 billion), although there was a 10 percent decline if currency fluctuations were excluded. However, EMI broadly maintained market share at approximately 9.5% (9.7% in the prior year) and market share in the U.S. increased by 1.5 percent. Best sellers during the year included Coldplay, Katy Perry, Lily Allen and Darius Rucker. The company also has strong sales projections for the coming year with releases on tap from Alice In Chains, Corinne Bailey Rae, Beastie Boys, Gorillaz, Norah Jones, Willie Nelson, 30 Seconds To Mars, KT Tunstall, Keith Urban and more. Plus, on September 9, EMI will release the digitally re-mastered Beatles catalog.

Commenting on the performance, EMI Music CEO Elio Leoni-Sceti said, "I am very pleased we have delivered this strong operating performance and would like to thank all the staff and artists whose talent, creativity and hard work made it possible. These results are an important first step in building EMI’s future. We cannot afford to be complacent however since there is still a great deal of work to be done to restore EMI to its former greatness and we are doing it in the face of challenging economic conditions. Looking ahead we have some exciting new releases coming up, a much deeper understanding of the music consumer and a new engaged relationship with our artists to build on. Now it has established this platform, EMI can look to the future with confidence and optimism."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1311192





Bob Dylan Sails To #1
FMQB

After all these years, Bob Dylan shows that he can still be the top dog as his new album, Together Through Life, easily debuted at #1 on the sales chart this week. It sold 125,000 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, giving Dylan his fifth #1 album. Another veteran act also bowed in the Top 10 this week as Heaven & Hell's The Devil You Know started at #8 by shifting 30,500 copies. It's the first new album from the Dio-era lineup of Black Sabbath in 17 years. The final Top 10 debut this week came from the world music-flavored compilation Playing For Change, which opened at #10 with 26,000 copies sold. The rest of the Top 10 was filled out by the Hannah Montana movie soundtrack at #2, Rascall Flatts at #3, Rick Ross at #4, Lady Gaga at #5, the Twilight soundtrack at #6, the NOW 30 compilation at #7 and Taylor Swift at #9.

Outside of the Top 10, Mike Jones' Voice debuted at #12 with almost 25,000 units sold. Tech N9ne's Sickology 101 opened at #23 with 18,600, and Don Omar's IDon bowed at #32 with 14,600 sold. Punk Rockers NOFX started at #36 this week with Coaster, moving almost 14,000, and Atlantic Records newcomers Halestorm bowed at #40 with their self-titled album, selling just over 13,000.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1309364





Green Day Gear Up For Friday Album Release
FMQB

Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown is such an "event" record, it warrants a special Friday, May 15 release date. This Friday, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool will celebrate the record's release with an in-store appearance at the Best Buy on 5th Avenue in New York City. The guys will be the musical guest on Saturday Night Live on May 16, before playing an exclusive fan club gig at the Bowery Ballroom on May 18 and then Webster Hall on May 19 in a special MySpace gig. Next week, Green Day will also perform on Good Morning America on Friday, May 22.

Speaking to MTV News about the new album, Armstong said, "We just wanted to evolve naturally. There was no decision like, 'This is how we're gonna sound.' But for this it was like, 'Let's keep moving forward and see where the music takes us.' I love a lot of, like, British invasion. I love The Who and Cheap Trick and the Ramones. And it's like trying to take that power-pop or that pop-punk or whatever you want to call it, and stretching it into places that are further than we've ever gone."

"After we came back from tour, we started fooling around with ideas, coming into the studio with a blank page sometimes. You don't know what to do," Tre Cool revealed. "So we got some drum heads and we put a nail in the wall, and we wrote sort of a pie graph thing, of different eras and genres on there, and we'd spin it, and it would say like, 'Death Metal, '60s Garage Psychedelic' or whatever, and then we'd be forced to go in and write something with that... that's how it all started."

Currently airing on radio stations across the country, FMQB Productions and Reprise Records present Inside Green Day: 21st Century Breakdown, a one-hour world radio premiere special. The special features the band discussing the making of the new album and premiering songs from 21st Century Breakdown.
In other Green Day news, The Bravery has been announced as the opening band for the first leg of their upcoming North American tour (with the exception of their July 22 date in Pittsburgh).
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1317409





For Bands, Bonus Songs Become New Norm
Ben Sisario

If you want to buy the new album by the Dave Matthews Band, “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King” (RCA), next month, you have some choices to make.

There’s the regular CD version, with 13 songs. Then there’s the deluxe version, which includes a documentary DVD, and the $60 “super-deluxe” boxed set, which adds four extra songs, a 40-page photo book, 14 lithographs by Mr. Matthews and a 24-page tribute to LeRoi Moore, the band’s saxophonist, who died last year. If bought on the band’s Web site. davematthewsband.com, each CD comes with an additional live disc. Also online, iTunes is selling the standard version for $10, as well as a pass for $20 that includes still more bonus songs and video.

The Dave Matthews Band will also play a show at the Beacon Theater in New York on June 1 to be shown in a high-definition broadcast on Fuse, a cable channel owned by Cablevision, the parent company of the concert’s promoter, Madison Square Garden Entertainment. (With 2,800 seats, the Beacon is a fraction of the size of the places the band usually plays, and proceeds will go to charity.) In addition, Fuse will offer a week of programming centering on the band, including a documentary.

As the music industry adapts to a changed marketplace, the album is no longer simply a discrete collection of songs but a package that changes size, shape and price depending on how it is sold. And promotion, once the relatively straightforward process of making a video and visiting radio stations, has also been transformed, as labyrinthine exclusive deals are struck with an array of retail and media companies — from Amazon.com and iTunes to Rhapsody, Wal-Mart and Verizon Wireless — eager to make an association with top talent.

With music sales depressed, record labels are happy to strike arrangements for bonus content; indeed, many recording contracts now stipulate that with a new album artists must deliver as many as a half-dozen additional songs for promotion. But artists and their managers are not always so eager to comply. Some complain of bullying by powerful retailers as well as by their own labels to pack their albums with secondary, often inferior material.

“If you have a 12-song album, all of a sudden you need two extra songs for Target, two extra songs for Wal-Mart, two extra songs for Best Buy,” said Jim Guerinot, who manages No Doubt and Nine Inch Nails. “You just barely finish getting your record done and you’re starting to make plans to put it out, and you’re being asked to essentially record a new record.”

Jay Marciano, president of Madison Square Garden Entertainment, said that deals like the one his company struck with the Dave Matthews Band are attractive to artists in part because they make up for the slashed promotional budgets of the major record labels. Since 2000, album sales have declined 45 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

“Artists can no longer depend upon their label to execute a marketing plan behind a new release,” Mr. Marciano said. “They have to look elsewhere.”

But in many cases an artist’s label is the broker for such deals, and for major acts the range of these arrangements can test the meaning of exclusivity. For its new album, “21st Century Breakdown,” which will be released by Reprise on Friday, Green Day is selling two versions on iTunes: one has two extra songs, and both versions come with yet two more bonus tracks when the album is bought in advance.

Another download service, Rhapsody, has its own collection of supplemental songs. And Verizon Wireless, Comcast and MySpace Music are each offering videos of intimate recent Green Day performances in New York and Oakland, Calif.

“A lot of times we might do an exclusive just to say that we also have a period of exclusivity,” said Ed Ruth, director of digital content and programming for Verizon. He added that sometimes deals are struck mainly to “deflate” a competitor’s claim to exclusivity.

The strategy of packaging extras with music dates back to the B-side. But record executives, managers and retailers say it has become more urgent with the rise of online services and the disappearance of large record chains like Virgin Megastore, which will close its last American shops this summer. Online sellers like Amazon.com and iTunes, as well as big box stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, compete to sell entertainment content that fans can’t get anywhere else, and when those companies have exclusive content, they promote it aggressively.

Such arrangements can also mean more income for an act. Mike Bair, the president of MSG Media, which operates Fuse, said he hoped to make deals like the one with the Dave Matthews Band once a month, and that as part of the deals artists and their labels could share in the revenue raised through sponsorships.

“We are not going to live and die by the concert,” Mr. Bair said of the deals. “We are going to live and die by the concert as a linchpin of a much larger promotion that has content in it. We are helping Dave Matthews sell tickets, and we are going to be getting lots more content back from them over an extended period of time.”

Not all artists are willing to go along with a retailer or cable company’s marketing strategy, however. Although few artists or managers will voice their complaints publicly for fear of retaliation, many say that retailers’ requests for content are effectively demands, and that refusal to comply can result in diminished promotion. Managers and some labels also argue that alterations to an album made on behalf of a retailer can compromise it artistically, breaking up the unity of a creative product and including material that is by definition secondary.

“The more content you make available, the less interesting the artist becomes,” said Jeff Antebi of Waxploitation Artists, which manages Gnarls Barkley and Danger Mouse.

A representative for Wal-Mart said it did not require exclusive content to feature an album. A spokesman for Apple’s iTunes declined to comment, and a spokeswoman for Best Buy would not elaborate on this point.

While requests for additional songs used to come occasionally, the expectation of bonus material is becoming codified into artists’ contracts, said Douglas J. Davis, a music and entertainment lawyer in New York.

“For an artist who takes their time creating a 12-song album,” Mr. Davis said, “ doing 50 percent more work so the labels can deliver a track for a Wal-Mart digital exclusive and a track for a movie soundtrack becomes a burdensome obligation.”

Recently the Beastie Boys released some bonus content of a sort: without making any announcement, the band hid a seven-inch single with new songs into random copies of the deluxe vinyl version of the reissue of its 1992 album “Check Your Head.” When fans began to find the records, music blogs compared it to the golden tickets in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

“Our philosophy is that if you have to do some kind of promo thing, we usually try to find a way to have fun with it,” said Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. “But when you have to do 20 of them for all different outlets, it spreads you thinner. It gets to be a lot.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/ar...c/13bonus.html





New Danger Mouse CD Released As A Blank CD-R Due To Legal Fight With EMI

If you follow copyright issues, you're no doubt aware of Danger Mouse. He's the DJ who got quite a lot of attention a few years back for creating one of the very first mainstream mashups -- mixing the Beatle's The White Album with Jay-Z's The Black Album to create the rather unique The Grey Album. Of course, one of the main reasons why the album became so well known was because EMI sent cease-and-desist letters to everyone who posted copies of the album, and then to anyone who posted that they were going to participate in the "Grey Tuesday" protest. The whole thing seemed pretty silly. It's not as if anyone listening to The Grey Album would find it a substitute for either of the other albums.

Since then, of course, DJ Danger Mouse has gone on to even more mainstream success with his Gnarls Barkley project, a collaboration between Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green. However, it looks like DJ Danger Mouse has another album that he's been working on, in association with Mark Linkous (of Sparklehorse). Yet, due to ongoing legal troubles with EMI, he can't actually release the music. So he's come up with a rather creative solution. Found via Andrew Dubber, the news is that the next album will be released as album artwork with a blank recordable CD.

Yes, a blank CD-R.

There is no music on it. Because if there were music on it, it would get him in more trouble with EMI. Yet, if you have that blank CD and all the artwork, you certainly could (not that they're suggesting you do...) find that music elsewhere and burn it to the CD. The statement from Danger Mouse reads:

Danger Mouse's new project Dark Night Of The Soul consists of an album length piece of music by Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and a host of guest vocalists, along with a collection of original David Lynch photography inspired by and based on the music.

The photographs, which provide a visual narrative for the music, are compiled in a limited edition, hand numbered 100+ page book which will now come with a blank, recordable CD-R. All copies will be clearly labeled: 'For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.'

Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to release the recorded music for Dark Night Of The Soul without fear of being sued by EMI.

Danger Mouse remains hugely proud of Dark Night Of The Soul and hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited by it as he is.

In some ways, this is reminiscent of what the band Green Day did many years ago, offering up blank CDs with artwork for fans who had downloaded the music from unauthorized sources. Yet, in this case, it's even more interesting since there are no authorized sources at all for the music. It'll be fun to see how EMI reacts. Update: Meanwhile, the folks at NPR alert us to the fact that they're hosting a streaming version of the album for anyone who wants to hear it.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...54504899.shtml





Norway Wins the 54th Eurovision Song Contest
Amie Ferris-Rotman and James Kilner

Norway won the 54th Eurovision Song Contest early Sunday in Moscow, when singer Alexander Rybak beat 24 other contestants with his song Fairytale.

Rybak scored a record 387 points, beating Iceland with 218 points and Azerbaijan with 207 points. It was the third time Norway has won the competition, one of the most watched television shows in Europe every year.

"Now Norway is really on the map," said an overjoyed Rybak at the post-tournament news conference.

The floppy-haired Rybak, a 23-year-old ethnic Belarussian who grew up outside Oslo, had been the pre-tournament favorite and he wooed the crowd with his singing and violin playing in the final at a stadium built for the 1980 Olympic Games.

In an interview with Reuters before the competition started Rybak -- who composes his own music -- said the song was based on a traditional Norwegian fairytale but with a modern twist.

Asked at the news conference why he thought he had won, Rybak answered: "In Russia they like nostalgia and melancholy. In Norway we're the happiest people in the world. The mix of them was a success."

Moscow was reported to have spent $42 million on the five-day event, making it the most expensive competition in Eurovision's history.

As usual glitz and kitsch dominated the show, including dancing Roman gladiators and one performer clad in a blue sequined mask, writhing on the floor.

But there was also a smattering of well-established stars. Andrew Lloyd Webber, famed for his successful musicals, composed the British entry and U.S. burlesque dancer Dita von Teese played a supporting role in the German song.

Politics also bubbled to the surface of this year's competition. Organisers banned Georgia's entry earlier this year because its song was considered a political jab at Russia, with which it fought a brief war last August.

And Saturday dozens of riot police detained gay rights protesters who had defied the Moscow authorities and tried to stage a banned demonstration.

Rybak appeared to throw his support behind the gay rights protesters when he said at the news conference: "Why did they (the Moscow police) spend all their energy stopping gays in Moscow when the biggest gay parade was here tonight?"

As winner, Norway will host the next Eurovision Song Contest.

(Editing by Tim Pearce)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...54F2IH20090516





House Committee OKs Radio Payments to Music Labels
Yinka Adegoke

Broadcast radio stations may finally be forced to pay music labels for playing their songs, as proposed U.S. legislation moved a step closer toward approval on Wednesday.

While newer media such as satellite, cable and Internet stations pay music companies to broadcast their music, terrestrial U.S. radio stations have resisted for decades.

The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted 21 to 9 on Wednesday to send the Performance Royalties Act to the full House for a vote.

Music companies, struggling with rapidly declining CD sales and online piracy, said the proposed law supported artists and rights holders in their fight for fair compensation when music is broadcast on AM and FM radio stations.

"Corporate radio's days of hiding behind a loophole in the copyright law are over," said Jennifer Bendall, executive director of industry lobbyist musicFIRST Coalition, calling for similar pay-to-play contracts for all radio stations.

But the National Association of Broadcasters said, if enacted, 50 percent of the new fee would go directly into the coffers of the major labels.

"Record label abuse of artists from Count Basie to Prince is well documented, as evidenced by scores of lawsuits filed by musicians cheated out of royalties," NAB Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton said in a statement.

"Moving forward, the fundamental question is this: If the debate is about 'fairness to artists,' why should the record labels get one penny from a performance tax on radio stations?"

Broadcast radio stations have long argued that they serve as an important free-to-air promotion outlet for music fans to discover new songs and albums to buy. In other words, they say they have provided free advertising for the record labels.

But as music sales have plummeted, the recorded music industry has become louder in their calls for changes to a system which could provide an important new revenue stream.

Warner Music Group (WMG.N) Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman told Wall Street analysts last week that if the Performance Rights Act is passed "it would result in a meaningful improvement" to his company's results.

The labels say the United States is at odds with many major music markets in Europe and other countries, where radio stations usually pay some sort of licensing fee to play songs.

Broadcast radio stations are not likely to give up easily on the passing of a law, which could significantly raise their costs.

Radio advertising, the main revenue source of most stations, is one of the worst hit sectors of the ad business in the ongoing recession. It is also facing a secular decline as advertisers move some of their radio spending to new areas like the Web. (Reporting by Yinka Adegoke; Editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/marke...54828820090513





Brain Scanning May be Used in Security Checks
Owen Bowcott

Distinctive brain patterns could become the latest subject of biometric scanning after EU researchers successfully tested technology to verify #identities for security checks.

The experiments, which also examined the potential of heart rhythms to authenticate individuals, were conducted under an EU-funded inquiry into biometric systems that could be deployed at airports, borders and in sensitive locations to screen out terrorist suspects.

Another series of tests fitted a "sensing seat" to a truck to record each driver's characteristic seated posture in an attempt to spot whether commercial vehicles had been hijacked.

Details of the Humabio (Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behaviourial Analysis) pilot projects have been published amid further evidence of biometric technologies penetrating everyday lives.

The Foreign Office plans to spend up to £15m on fixed and mobile security devices that use methods including "Facial recognition (two and/or three dimensional), fingerprint recognition, iris recognition and vein imaging palm recognition".

The biometric sensors and systems, it appears, will primarily be deployed to protect UK embassies around the world. The contract, about which the FCO declined to elaborate further, also mentions "surveillance" and "data collection" services.

The Home Office, meanwhile, has confirmed rapid expansion plans of automated facial recognition gates: 10 will be operating at major UK airports by August.

Passengers holding the latest generation of passports travelling through Manchester and Stansted are already being checked by facial-recognition cameras.

Biometric identity checks are also becoming more common in the world of commercial gadgets. New versions of computer laptops and mobile phones are entering the market with built-in fingerprint scanners to prevent other people running up large bills and misusing pilfered hi-tech equipment.

Among security experts there is a preference for developing biometric security devices that do not rely on measuring solely one physiological trait: offering choice makes scanning appear less intrusive and allows for double-checking.

The holy grail of the biometrics industry is a scanning mechanism that is socially acceptable in an era of mass transit and 100 per cent accurate. Researchers are eager to produce 'non-contact' biometric systems that can check any individual's identity at a distance.

The US government's secretive IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) is seeking development proposals to enhance such technologies. Insisting that it is not interested in 'contact-type' biometrics, it asks for ideas that will "significantly advance the intelligence community's ability to achieve high-confidence match performance ... [for] high fidelity biometric signatures".

The Humabio project, based in Greece, is involved more in blue-sky scientific thinking than in intelligence work. Its research, highlighted in the latest issue of Biometric Technology Today, is at a "pre-commercial, proof-of-concept stage".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ecurity-checks





Former Agent Gets Probation for Hollywood Wiretaps
AP

A former FBI agent has been sentenced to one year of probation for using the bureau's computers to dig up information on Hollywood executives involved in a prominent wiretapping case.

The former agent, Mark Rossini, was not working on the wiretapping case against Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano and was not authorized to look up the files.

But he admitted he used FBI computers illegally to search for files on powerbrokers related to Pellicano such as former superagent Michael Ovitz, entertainment lawyer Bert Fields and William Morris talent agency President James Wiatt.

Rossini was sentenced on Thursday.

The information was passed on to attorneys for Pellicano, who is serving 15 years for bugging celebrities' phones.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...-Wiretaps.html





10 Things We Hate About ISPs and Cable and Phone Companies

From their automated phone-support systems to their missed service appointments to their penchant for nickeling and diming us to death, service providers seem have an inexhaustable supply of habits that get our blood pressure up.
Mark Sullivan

Her voice is urbane, saccharine-sweet, maternal. She is grateful that I telephoned; my call is important to her. I hate the sound of her voice.

It's the recorded voice you hear when you call your cable, telephone, or satellite TV company. I saw the owner of that voice on TV once, on a news show, recording her happy, reassuring, tranquil little messages in some voice-over booth in Burbank. A pretty mom, late thirties, tanned--exactly what you'd expect.

To me, her voice has come to represent everything that irks me about service providers. It's the first thing I hear after something goes wrong with my service, and I have to set off on the long march toward getting the problem fixed. Her voice is a bad omen, often foretelling protracted service outage, long consultations with bored/impatient/arrogant/not-so-bright phone reps, missed appointments, false promises, and strange charges on my bill--in short, everything that irks me about service providers. That's what this story is about.

Auto-Attendant Horror

You're usually not in a very good mood when you hear her, and your frustration is usually on the verge of getting worse as you begin your trek through menu options that are supposed to help you reach "the best person to assist you". Too often it's a road to nowhere: "OK, let's get started; tell me why you're calling today." Here's me talking to her:
"No. No. I want to speak to a person. A person. No. No. Agent...agent...agent...agent. Hello? Hello? Helloooooooo?? Agent. Agent. Agent. Agent. [sound of finger pounding on zero key]. Agent! Agent! Representative! Human! Human! Why you dirty #$@!&#$&!#!$%#!$%^$%@#@#$#$%@#@."

Some service providers empower the automated attendant to do a lot more than just field and redirect calls. Some arrange for her to do actual customer support. This is convenient for the service provider, but tough for you if your problem doesn't fit into any of the slots anticipated in the prerecorded script she uses.

Beth Morgan of Southern Pines, North Carolina, knows the drill: "She makes me go through all kinds of grief, such as turning my computer off and on, unplugging my cable modem, etc. Then she tells me she doesn't understand what I mean, and suggests we start over when I get so frustrated that I start screaming for help. When I finally do get to a live person, they make me do this all over again."

The auto-attendant also seems ready at the slightest slip-up to send you off to the company's online help pages (even when you're calling because you can't connect to the Internet!) or to dump you out of the system in some other way that doesn't cost the company time or money.

Only as a last resort, it seems, will the auto attendant lady put you through to a real human being--a rep, not a replicant. And even then, depending on your problem, the human being might set you off on a wild transfer-fest complete with exasperated agents and plenty of hold music.

The auto-attendant, the voice of the interactive voice response (IVR) systems used by service providers everywhere, hint at a larger, uglier truth: After the service provider has signed you up and begun tapping your bank account every month, the honeymoon is over; and the company would really rather not hear from you except in the form of that monthly electronic transfer of funds. That's because nine times out of ten, your call costs the service money. It's hardly surprising, then, that the IVR system seems intent on throwing up barriers to your effectively registering your complaint with a real person. It may even throw in the old "our menu has changed" message, in case you've memorized (poor you) the exact sequence of numbers needed to get through to a human rep quickly.

There is another way. I found a wonderful site called GetHuman that lists quick ways to bypass the IVR systems of about 900 US companies, including all major service providers. At AT&T Wireless, for example: "Press 0 at each prompt, ignoring messages."

Give Me the Best Deal, Too

Starting about five years ago, service providers became hell-bent on selling consumers a triple-play of TV, phone, and Internet service. The all-in-one deal was supposed to save us money and simplify our bills. But competition to sell the bundle has been fierce, and service providers continually offer new and better deals to steal customers from each other.
Try getting one of these deals from your current provider, though, and you'll be told that your contract is "locked in" at a certain rate for a certain period--and that you're not eligible for the advertised "promotional rate."

If you complain loudly enough, the service may reduce your bill slightly, as sales trainer Laurie Brown from Ferndale, Michigan, found out. "I discovered that I was paying double for my cable bill [what] my friend who had the same service four blocks away in the same city [paid]," Brown says. "After many angry calls I got my bill reduced, but I will never trust them again."

To the service provider, the "lock-in" pricing strategy may make perfect business sense; but to many customers, it seems like an unfair punishment for their unwillingness to jump ship. "The cable and satellite companies would never think to reward customer loyalty by lowering prices," writes Judy Nichols from Wilmington, North Carolina. "They are far more likely to announce a rate increase because they've expanded the basic service by offering more channels that you will never ever watch."

You usually have to be willing to go to the brink of changing services to get a better deal from your provider. Clear evidence that you are prepared to cancel your service outright seems to be the only thing these companies understand. But if the service provider doesn't blink, you'll have to deal with the considerable hassle of actually switching your service to another company.

"If they would give you the best deal to begin with, you probably wouldn't consider leaving, as it's a huge hassle to change providers," concludes Lindsey Slattery of Clarksville, Tennessee.

How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?

The scenario is reminiscent of Fatal Attraction. You have a brief affair with a big company and sign up in just a few heady minutes. But if you try to break things off, it clings obsessively through endless rounds of bureaucratic buck passing and phone tag. (See our investigative feature, "Just Cancel the @#%$* Account!")

The preternaturally perky customer associate kicks you over to the tired billing representative, who transfers you to the guilt-tripping account retention and disconnections team ("Why are you leaving us? Why? Why?"). Five operators later, you think you're home free--until you notice that your online account says the disconnection will take effect at the end of the next billing cycle, not immediately (as you requested).

"Dish Network makes it extra difficult for customers to cancel--a lot of waiting on hold and dealing with pushy customer service reps," says Stephen Hansen, a marketing director from Lombard, Illinois. "First, they tell us there's no cancellation fee, and then turn around and bill us $175 cancellation fee (we had 2 months left on our contract). When asked about it, no one could explain why, and that phone call was an hour and 45 minutes long."

Lost Love and Telemarketing

And don't for a minute imagine that the day of your final bill is the last time you'll hear from your ex-service provider. The company already has your information and its minions will use that data to try to reel you back in (or worse).

"We got inundated with calls and mailings from Dish TV promising all sorts of bells and whistles--including the dual receiver we wanted replaced in the first place," reports Anne Zeise of Milpitas, California. "I had to talk to a whole lot of people before I could get off their spam lists."

Some services even robocall you--or sell your information to other companies so that they can bother you.

All Talk and No Walk

Hey, wireless providers: Stop feeding me a line about your big plans to install a new cell tower in my neighborhood. It'll never happen. Your coverage and service quality is, in real life, a lot worse than the wonders you guys promised me when I signed up, and it's going to stay that way. Just admit it.

A colleague of mine tells the story of her experience with AT&T. At her house in Alameda, California, she can get regular cell phone service in only a couple of places in her 1100-square-foot, four-room home. One of these spots is in the bathroom, with her face pressed against the window. The other reliable location is on the couch, where she must lean back to get closer to the living-room window. She can't get service in the back yard or the front yard; but if the weather is right, she can make a call from the front porch.

Last fall, a company rep told her that AT&T would be putting up a new tower in March that would greatly improve the service on her block. Months later when the service didn't improve, another rep denied that the promised tower had ever been planned. Still another rep told her that the provider deemed the quality of her service "moderate"; when asked whether there was any service level lower than that, the rep explained that in her world "moderate" was as low as you could go.

Draconian Pricing Schemes

It's the classic phone company gambit: You can use our network for 2 cents a minute for 1000 minutes a month, but that 1001st minute--and every one after it--is going to cost you plenty.

Debra Costner, a Web publisher from Sonoma, California, writes in to remind us of this pain: "How is it they can charge you 2 cents a minute for the first 1500 minutes and then 25 times that price for the next 200 minutes?" Costner asks. "It really should be outlawed! They ought to be forced to charge the overage minutes at no more than double the price you're paying for the initial minutes--and they'd still be making money. Or even better, bump you up to the next level and let you pay an additional $30 for another 1000 minutes instead of charging you $100 for 200 extra minutes."

Through the (Appointment) Window

Service providers: Stop making appointments that your people can't keep.

Just this morning I waited for the cable guy to come and pick up two of the service's boxes--and after having stood me up on two previous days, he actually materialized! His appointment window was from 8a.m. until 10 a.m.; he called at 9:55 and showed up at about 10:10. I left for work late, but feeling as if anything were possible after all.
Of course not everyone is so lucky, as I learned from a number of people who wrote in. Here's food service business owner Lisa Jessick of North Easton, Massachusetts:

"I don't know how the cable provider Comcast can think I have nothing better to do than stay at home for a 3-hour window for the representative to show up 15 minutes after the 3 hours ends and then start working for another 60 minutes," Jessick complains. "Because I have to contact the cable provider and this is all they offer, I have no alternative but to accept it. When there's no competition, the provider can do anything they want and I have to take it."

Ah the simple joys of monopoly/duopoly. When you're practically the only game in town, you can count on your humble subscribers to wait for you. Drug dealers are keen on this sort of customer relationship, too.

Stop Patting Yourself on the Back (and Get Real)

What is it with you guys and your surveys? Seems like I can't have a conversation with you on any medium (phone, chat, e-mail, whatever) without your asking me for a little survey love at the end.

Of course, service providers use these surveys to develop positive-sounding customer satisfaction statistics, which they crow about endlessly over every medium they can think of. Often the provider begins asking for positive affirmation when the problem hasn't even been handled yet, as this telco customer relates:

"We'll subscribe to a new service and, after taking only the first step to completion, they'll call us with a customer service survey," complains Cassandra McSparin, an executive assistant from Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. "Sure, they've done a good job of completing the preparations necessary for what we require so we can't give them a bad review, but once they've confirmed their magnificence, we won't hear from them for a few weeks and have to push them to finish the job."

According to customer relationship management (CRM) consultant Jim Gardner, service providers often measure the wrong things to create the rosy numbers, which don't really reflect the way customers feel. Gardner explains that the cable industry claims to have achieved a satisfaction rating of better than 90 percent because its technicians arrive within a promised 4-hour window 94 percent of the time, and because these technicians address the issue on the first visit 97 percent of the time. "Trouble is, customers do not see waiting for half a day as good service, even when that time window is observed. After a 4-hour wait, resolution on the first call is a considered a baseline standard for customers, not an indication of superior service."

An independent report from Forrester Research may provide a truer look at customer satisfaction: "Looking at customer satisfaction for all subscribers to TV, home phone, Internet, and bundle services, they feel lukewarm about their providers' customer care. In fact, satisfaction levels for customer care--in any channel--fail to break 60 percent for TV, home phone, and Internet customers."

I Don't Want My Sí TV

Cable and Satellite Providers: Let me buy channels à la carte--you know, just the channels I want, not the channels you want to sell--or else I'm going to cancel the service and just download all my shows from the Internet.

And I'm not the only one. "I have to buy every package under the sun to get one [French channel]; but the package I have has five Spanish channels on it and I don't want ANY Spanish channels," says the aptly surnamed Dana Hostage, a Web entrepreneur from Boston. "Talk about being taken for a ride--I support the Spanish channels, don't want them, and can't get rid of them without getting rid of Discovery and Nickelodeon and the rest of the channels worth supporting. That bugs me no end. I want to pay for the channels I want to watch, not support the ones I don't want."

The National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) says that if people like Ms. Hostage and me got our wish, lots of small, niche networks would go out of business, and the diversity of available channels would be diminished. I say so be it.

'Our Time Is More Valuable Than Yours'

Service providers: Don't even think about charging me a fee for paying my bill over the phone. I'm giving you my money, and you want to charge me for the privilege? The nerve of you people!

If you're wondering why I haven't picked on service provider phone reps much so far, it's because I've been saving that for last. Many reps seem to lack basic reasoning skills and solid judgment, and service customers have had to accept the growing problem of a language (or at least accent) barrier. But the central problem is that many representatives are trained--actively or passively--to regard subscribers as revenue streams instead of as people.
This mindset explains much of the bad behavior by service provider reps that customers complain about. In fact, the mindset is moving toward a logical extreme, as service providers experiment with charging customers for everything from sending a tech out for a repair, to providing person-to-person phone support. This might look great on a business plan, but in the real world, it infuriates people:

"I'm already paying for your service; if you come out to add new service (meaning you'll make even more money from me), or to fix a problem with my existing service (meaning your company did something to interrupt what I'm paying for), then why are you charging me a trip charge?" asks Martin Kozicki, a real-estate consultant from Nashville. "Isn't it enough that I'm already giving you $150 for cable and Internet service each month--you now have to drive the dagger in harder by penalizing me just to maintain said service?"

I could go on.

I'm not saying that being a service provider is easy. And I'm not saying that everybody who complains about them is always right. Of course not. But in general, service providers and their people could do a lot more to satisfy their subscribers. Too often it feels as though these large companies want to keep customers just happy enough not to cancel, but no more. And they seem to have a thousand different ways of giving us that impression.

PC World Senior Associate Editor Danny Allen contributed to this story.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/16438...mpanies.h tml





Google Outage Lesson: Don't Get Stuck in a Cloud
Ian Paul

Google has apologized for yesterday's service outage that left 14 percent of its user base without Google's wide variety of online services for a few hours. Google said in a blog post the outage came down to a simple traffic jam at an Asian data center. The search giant described the situation by using the analogy of a large number of airplanes being rerouted through one airport that was not equipped for a massive influx of traffic. But in Google's case, it wasn't airplanes looking for a place to land; it was cloud-based data trying to stay up in the sky.

The confusion surrounding the issue was evident on Twitter where users quickly used the #googlefail hashtag to get the word out and scream bloody murder. One Tweep, named Leigh said, "the Internet dies without Google." She complained that she couldn't access her bank account online, because the bank needed Google Analytics -- Mountain View's web traffic analysis utility -- to work. "This is made of lame," Leigh said.

But is Google that important to today's Internet? Well, a quick look at this graph from the Web security company Arbor Networks shows a canyon-sized hole in North American Internet traffic during the G-outage. With a wide variety of practical services like Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, Calendar, and even Google search gone, online activities came to a standstill for many people during the Google blackout. On the National Business Review's New Zealand site a reader named Karen complained of losing important business appointments in Google Calendar while other entries were duplicated and even tripled, creating a confusing mess. Let's hope Karen was able to sort it all out.

Ultimately, the outage was a fixable error and the Internet didn't come crashing down because of it. However, the #googlefail, while annoying, gives us a moment to pause and think about the wisdom of cloud-based computing. Just how smart is it to depend on a company to store all your data online?

On the one hand, online storage is incredibly convenient. By offloading photos, videos, calendars and documents to someone else's hard drive, you free up storage space at home. There is also the added convenience of being able to access your data anywhere whether you're on the road, in a meeting or stuck on the tarmac waiting for take-off. And with portable 3G devices like the MiFi coming out, the need for the cloud will only increase.

But it's not all rainbows and light when you dance in the clouds, because eventually a storm rolls in. In an article published today entitled, "Will Your Data Disappear When Your Online Storage Site Shuts Down?" PC World's Tom Spring reports on the many recently shuttered data storage services from big companies like AOL, HP, and Sony. Some smaller storage companies have even gone under without giving users a chance to collect their precious bits and bytes. Canadian photographer Ryan Pyle told Spring how he lost more than 7000 edited and retouched images after the storage company Digital Railroad abruptly shut its doors last year.

Granted, Google is a much bigger company than Digital Railroad and it's unlikely that a service like Google Docs or Picasa would disappear forever with little or no warning. But yesterday's headache shows that Google is not immune to major problems and glitches that can cost you time and effort. And that fact alone should inspire all you Gmail and Google Docs users out there to think about clearing your hard drive of old movies and Heroes episodes, and pulling copies of your more essential data out of the clouds and back onto solid ground. Just don't forget to back up.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/16494...n_a_cloud.html





Pay-Per-Click Web Advertisers Combat Costly Fraud
Susanna Hamner

GIVEN the state of the automobile industry and the economy, it is understandably a rough time to run a company called NewCars.com, a subsidiary of Cars.com.

As the company, based in Santa Monica, Calif., tries to ride out the economic downturn, the last thing it needs is to get tricked by people trying to game the online pay-per-click advertising system.

But, according to Cars.com, that is what has been happening. Over the last year, a substantial number of clicks on NewCars .com ads have come from Bulgaria, Indonesia and the Czech Republic, countries where the company does no business.

In pay-per-click, advertisers pay a search engine every time a Web surfer clicks on their links; click fraud refers to clicks made simply to make money for the sites that carry the links or to damage a competitor.

Marketers say the situation is worsening because of the economic downturn.

“Click fraud is a serious problem, and we’re aggressively trying to fight it,” said Isabel Sopoglian, vice president of online marketing for Cars.com. “In this tough time, it’s important for advertisers to not waste dollars.”

But according to the click fraud detection business Click Forensics, marketers are wasting more money than ever. Because of the troubled economy, companies have shifted their advertising dollars to more cost-effective formats like pay-per-click advertising, which was the only form of Internet advertising that grew last year. It accounted for 57 percent of Internet advertising in 2008, up from 52 percent in 2007, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing online advertisers.

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“The recession caused more companies to shift dollars to pay-per-click advertising because it’s a more effective and measurable form of advertising, and the rise in the ad dollars increased the click fraud rate,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics. “These issues combined meant more customers turning to us for help.”

Click Forensics, based in Austin, Tex., concluded that in the fourth quarter of 2008, 17 percent of all online ad clicks were fraudulent. Google and Yahoo are the two biggest pay-per-click ad networks.

Search engines like Google say that they have the problem under control. Google says that advertisers contend that fraudulent clicks account for just 0.02 percent of all online activity. If Google and an advertiser agree that a click is fraudulent, it offers the advertiser a credit.

(In 2006, Google settled a $90 million lawsuit after advertisers argued that it had not given them adequate compensation for fraudulent online ad clicks.)

“We are working hard as ever” to protect customers from fraud “and to innovate to detect click fraud,” said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager of trust and safety. “And we’re getting fewer questions from advertisers about click fraud.”

Reggie Davis, vice president of network quality for Yahoo, says he believes that Google’s click fraud rate of less than 1 percent is not accurate. “We’ve disclosed that our rate, before hiring Click Forensics, was between 12 and 15 percent,” a number that includes invalid clicks, or traffic that an advertiser should not pay for, he said. According to Outsell Inc., an information industry research group, 13 percent of the total of online advertising clicks were fraudulent last year.

“Click fraud should be at the top of the priority list with Obama and the F.T.C.,” said Jeff Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy, an advocacy group. “The F.T.C. has seriously lagged in coming to grips with the problems surrounding the online ad market, specifically click fraud. It’s extremely important to address the problem because it ultimately affects the consumers, meaning what they end up paying.”

One of the challenges of click fraud detection is distinguishing genuine clicks from fraudulent ones. Indicators of click fraud include suspicious activities from an Internet Protocol (I.P.) address — the address assigned to every computer that uses the Internet — in a region the advertiser does not serve, or a large number of clicks in a short period. For instance, a clicker might view 10 pages on a site but spend exactly 2.1 seconds on each page.

Click fraud continues to be fueled by Web sites that offer to pay people to click on ads to artificially increase revenue. These networks can hide behind servers that mask the click’s origin.

Other networks are much easier to find. Some companies offer to pay consumers to click on ads, often advertising their services as market research or system testing. They solicit people via e-mail messages and banner ads.

Click Forensics contends that, on average, its technology cuts a client’s click fraud by more than 60 percent in a month. The company says it saves its customers, on average, more than 10 percent of their total online ad spending.

Click fraud represented 20 percent of NewCars.com’s overall ad spending on Yahoo in 2007, according to the automotive company. It declined to disclose how much it spent on advertising. The number dropped to just 7 percent after NewCars.com hired Click Forensics last year and Yahoo made vigorous efforts to combat the problem, Ms. Sopoglian said.

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Click Forensics has more than 120 customers, including Intel, Progressive and Zappos.com.

Click Forensics is one of a number of businesses that try to eliminate, or at least curtail, click fraud. AdWatcher, part of the Internet marketing company MordComm Inc., tracks when an ad has been clicked on five or more times from the same I.P. address and will show a warning message to the visitor that his or her address has been logged. Anchor Intelligence, a click fraud detection company based in Mountain View, Calif., works with 30 partner ad networks and search engines, including Ask.com, AdBrite and LookSmart. “With this surge of online ad dollars comes scrutiny, accountability and higher expectations,” said Ken Miller, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anchor Intelligence. “It’s a very different landscape than even a couple of quarters ago.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/bu...ia/13adco.html





Court Tosses Case Over GPS Tracking

Watervliet man will get a new trial in burglary case in which police tracked him without a warrant

A Watervliet man will get a new trial on burglary charges after the state's top court ruled Tuesday it was wrong for a police investigator to slap a GPS device on the defendant's van to track his movements without a search warrant.

A divided Court of Appeals, in a 4-3 decision, reversed the conviction of 41-year-old Scott Weaver, finding that his protection against unlawful search and seizure under the state constitution was violated. The court suppressed information obtained from the device from being used as evidence at a new trial as it was at the first trial.

Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, in the 20-page majority opinion, wrote: "What the technology yields and records with breathtaking quality and quantity is a highly detailed profile, not simply of where we go, but by easy inference, of our associations — political, religious, amicable and amorous, to name only a few — and of the pattern of our professional and avocational pursuits."

He also wrote that "the great popularity of GPS technology for its many useful applications may not be taken simply as a massive, undifferentiated concession of personal privacy to agents of the state."

Four years ago, State Police tracked Weaver during 65 days. In the early morning hours of Dec. 21, 2005, an investigator slid underneath Weaver's van, which was parked on the street, and placed the global positioning system device, known in police jargon as a "Q-ball," inside the bumper. At one point, the device's battery needed replacing, and the investigator made another nocturnal visit to van's undercarriage, Lippman noted.

The ruling, considered to be Lippman's first major decision since becoming chief judge in February, delves into the realm of high technology, finding that for police to use a GPS device the state constitution requires a warrant and a showing of probable cause. Also voting with the majority were Judges Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, Eugene Pigott and Theodore Jones.

"This is a New York constitutional case," and therefore it's insulated from further appeals, including leave to appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, said appellate attorney Matthew Hug of Troy, who won on Weaver's behalf.

"The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution on search and seizure and New York's constitution have the exact same language," Hug said.

"History shows there's a constant battle between liberty and security," he said, "and over the past decade we've seen that our interest in security has trumped our interest in liberty where we are starting to go down that Orwellian road. The Court of Appeals stepped in and said 'Not on our watch.'"

Hug called the top court "the most influential court that has been heard on this issue. ... New York is certainly going to be the standard-bearer for this."

Oregon and Washington also found that warrants were required under their state constitutions, but a federal appeals court ruled warrants were not required because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this area. The U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on the issue.

Five days ago, however, a Wisconsin appeals court upheld the secret use by police of a GPS device to collect evidence against a man stalking an ex-girlfriend.

According to the ruling in People vs. Scott Weaver, Hug said "If police put a GPS device on your car without a warrant, they can't use any of that evidence against you if you are accused of a crime."

But he said it's still not illegal for police to put a device on a suspect's car, or for that matter for anyone to put a device on someone's car. Police just can't use as evidence what it learns from the device.

The state Legislature needs to pass a penal code statute making it illegal, akin to stalking, he said, and to clearly spell out that individuals cannot plant GPS devices on other people's cars.

In her dissent, Read said "the majority opinion — while destined to elicit editorial approval — is wrong on the law and unnecessarily burdens law enforcement and the courts, and, more importantly, all New Yorkers."

Read, with Judge Victoria Graffeo concurring, also said this subject is "more effectively dealt with legislatively than judicially."

In his dissent, Smith wrote: "The attempt to find in the constitution a line between ordinary, acceptable means of observation and more efficient, high-tech ones that cannot be used without a warrant seems to me illogical, and doomed to fail."

Christopher Horn, special counsel to District Attorney David Soares, said Associate Judges Susan Read's and Robert Smith's "well-reasoned dissents sum up my views on the subject."

"A police officer can tail you without a warrant, photograph you, videotape you, see who's in the car with you and use it all as evidence at trial, but because a GPS device can be used to track your car more easily and at all hours — somehow that requires a warrant even though it provides far less detailed information," Horn said. "I fail to see the logic."

This new technology is used by police "rarely and when we think we can get useful evidence that way," Horn said. "We're not doing dragnets, not following everyone around, not interested in what grocery stores people are going to."

Calling the majority opinion a landmark ruling, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said, "New York's highest court has stood up for privacy and due process in the 21st century."

A decision must be made by Soares on a new trial.

Troy attorney Trey Smith, who represents Weaver, said with GPS evidence ruled out, "the case is weakened substantially because there is no basis to place Mr. Weaver at the Kmart other than the testimony of a witness named Amber Roche who has since recanted her testimony. I'd be very surprised if they tried to retry this case."

A jury convicted Weaver for a Christmas Eve 2005 burglary at Kmart in Latham. He has been free on bail pending appeal. The Appellate Division in a 4-1 ruling last June upheld the conviction.

"It's an extremely important day for the people of the state of New York and for this country," Trey Smith said. "Mr. Weaver's privacy rights were clearly violated by 65 days of warrantless GPS surveillance."

Research Director Sarah Hinman contributed. Carol DeMare can be reached at 454-5431 or by e-mail at cdemare@timesunion.com.

"Technological advances have produced many valuable tools for law enforcement, and as the years go by, the technology available to aid in the detection of criminal conduct will only become more and more sophisticated. Without judicial oversight, the use of these powerful devices presents a significant and, to our minds, unacceptable risk of abuse."
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories...storyID=799375





Vulnerability Renders MPAA/RIAA Copyright Warnings Useless
Ernesto

In a bid to educate pirates, copyright holders hire companies such as BayTSP to track down people who share their titles on P2P networks. The alleged infringers then receive a warning and are given the opportunity to resolve the issue. However, this system is vulnerable to abuse and therefore completely useless.

Companies like BayTSP have the honorable task of joining BitTorrent swarms and other file-sharing networks looking out for copyright infringers. When someone shares a piece of a copyrighted file with them, they log the IP-address, look up the ISP and send out a copyright infringement notice automatically.

These notices usually list details about the infringing file, the person’s IP-address and the time the infringement was recorded. In addition, BayTSP includes a link to a response form where you can indicate whether or not you will comply and remove the file from your computer.

The problem with these response forms is that they are not very secure. If you get a notice from BayTSP, someone else can easily find it through Google for example, and fake a response in your place. There is no way for them to tell who responded to the complaint unless the response originates from the IP-address linked to the infringement.

Perhaps even worse, anyone can send out a fake e-mail to someone claiming to be BayTSP. XSS vulnerabilities on the site make it pretty easy to fabricate fake complaints and convince innocent people that to avoid court they have to download trojans, or perhaps even enter credit card details to pay a small fine.

BayTSP told TorrentFreak that they are looking into the XSS issues, hopefully to solve the problem. They also admitted that their response forms are flawed, that everyone can indeed fill out the response form, and that they can’t be sure that the person who responded to it actually received the notice.

We concluded from this that the response form (and thus the warnings) are completely useless, but BayTSP disagreed with this assessment. “We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one,” was their final response after having exchanged some arguments back and forth.

For those people in receipt of an infringement notice it might be good to know that their case becomes closed as soon as they indicate that they have removed the infringing file from their computer. Easy as that. Those who do not comply will receive additional notices until they do so.
http://torrentfreak.com/vulnerabilit...seless-090514/





U.S drops to fourth

BitTorrent: King of Copyright Infringements
enigmax

While anti-piracy company MediaDefender only got involved in hindering downloaders, BayTSP is the outfit that tracks file-sharers and sends infringement notices to ISPs. Using cumulative data from its entertainment industry clients, the company reveals which nation’s sharers get caught infringing the most.

Anti-piracy company BayTSP works with the entertainment industry to track down illicit file-sharers, monitor them and gather evidence in order to issue infringement notices to their ISP, i.e stop downloading - or else. In addition, the company gathers intelligence for clients who want to see where their content is appearing, to understand the scope of it all.

BayTSP has used the data it collected on behalf of its clients to produce its just released Online Trends & Insights 2008 report and there are some quite interesting findings. The report notes that BitTorrent has further strengthened its dominant position as the protocol used to infringe the most copyrights, with eDonkey (eD2k) in second place. It has to be noted that BitTorrent may be more actively and easily monitored than Usenet and other file-sharing platforms, and that this resulted in more recorded infringements.

“BitTorrent and eDonkey are optimized for large file distribution and despite the growing popularity of streaming video, are still where the majority of copyright infringement takes place,” said BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa in a comment on the report.

In terms of P2P infringement location, BayTSP also claims that despite topping the list of most-infringing countries in 2007, the United States has seen the number of infringements fall ever since, pushing it down into 4th position.

Copyright infringement on file-sharing networks has surged in Europe, helping France move up to 3rd place in the piracy league. A single ISP, France Telecom, clocked up more than 2 million logged infringements. Second place went to Italy and one of its ISPs, Telecom Italia, also reached over 2 million infringements.

The title of most-infringing country goes to Spain, with ISP Telefonica De Espana playing host to more than 2 million infringements. The report also reveals that BayTSP sent more than a million infringement notices each to Comcast, AT&T and Road Runner in 2008. Comcast had the most copyright infringements of all ISPs in the US, 1,668,738 in total during 2008.

Finally, the report discovered another interesting trend. The median download time for a TV-show is much shorter on BitTorrent than on eDonkey. With BitTorrent it takes roughly 10 hours while eDonkey users may have to wait a full 4 days before their download is complete.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-k...ements-090512/





McDonalds' Free Wifi Users Soak Up Seating
Ry Crozier

McDonalds has earmarked potential changes to seating plans in some restaurants to prevent free wifi users from monopolising seating, particularly in peak periods.

Anthony Rosenkowitz, IT project manager at McDonalds Australia, said the restaurant chain had exceeded one million user sessions on its free wifi service since launching it in November 2008.

It is on track to hit 3.9 million user sessions before the end of the year, he said.

In the first month since the initial rollout to 92 per cent of restaurants was completed, it recorded some 305,000 sessions. That number grew by 15,000 sessions in the current month, pointing to the service's increasing popularity.

The average session time is around 35 minutes "whereas an average patron would normally spend around 10 minutes in the restaurant", he said.

But it appears not everyone is happy with the ‘stickiness' of customers to some stores.

Its advantages - including that no purchase is necessary, that there are no time constraints on usage (capped at 50MB per session) and that no voucher codes are required to log on - are leading to a key disadvantage - that there is often less seating available to customers who only come to the restaurant to eat.

"We've had some feedback from licensees about people [using wifi] sitting across all the benches and sitting there too long," Rosenkowitz said.

"We'll address it. We may have to demarcate some space for wifi and space for regular customers. It's an issue we'll have to work around."

Rosenkowitz also said the chain was considering offering a premium service that would offer users an increased download capacity.

"Maybe purchasers will have to fund that," he said.

Early studies of the user base indicated that many were transient users - for example, city office workers in CBD restaurants, as well as travellers.

"A lot of people seem to be coming into Maccas to conserve the data limits on their 3G plans by using our service instead," Rosenkowitz said.

"There's also strong wifi session counts on weekends, which indicates a lot of recreational usage."

Rosenkowitz said the IT systems behind the wifi network - put together by earthwave and integrated by redbridge - detect operating system and device type information from each user session, but he said that McDonalds "don't harvest that information".

The wifi service is backed by a secure internet gateway product from wholesaler earthwave called Clean Pipes, which is there in part to apply McDonalds' Family Friendly policies to the service.

It had so far not detected any major ‘red flag' sessions that had to be reported to law enforcement authorities, a representative of earthwave said.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/103029...p-seating.aspx





Teens Panic as They're Forced to Unplug at Camp
Megan K. Scott

Tim Chai keeps in touch with friends through Facebook, listens to music on his iPod and never goes anywhere without his BlackBerry.
So when the 17-year-old was looking for a summer camp, he ruled out a church camp with a no cell phone, no computer policy.

"I just thought it was too much for me to handle," said Tim, of Carmel, Ind. "I love my Internet. I love my phone. I'm not ashamed to say it."

For a generation used to texting, Facebook and YouTube, going away to sleepaway camp can be a bit unnerving. Many outdoor camps don't allow cell phones, laptops or iPods, and there is no computer lab for them to update their pages.

Many campers are "a little panicked" to part with their cell phones, said Tony Sparber, founder of New Image Camps, with locations in Florida and Pennsylvania. Some try to smuggle them in or bring more than one phone in case one is confiscated, he said.

Even parents who are used to having constant access to their kids can experience anxiety.

Kimberley Fink, 40, of Weston, Mass., is a little nervous about her 14-year-old daughter who is going away to camp for the first time. The camp lasts for two weeks and her daughter won't be able to call.

"It makes me slightly uneasy," said Fink. "I will probably be one of the mothers who calls the camp office after a couple of days to check in. Sometimes you just need that reassurance."

Dave Steinberg, owner and director of Canteen Roads Teen Travel Camp out of Huntington, N.Y., said most parents ask about the no-cell-phone policy out of concern for their children's safety.

To reassure them, he gives them his cell phone number and campers a prepaid calling card. He also uploads photos to a password protected site that the parents can access.

Experts agree that unplugging is a great idea. But it will be a "shock to the system" for those who are digitally dependent, says Anastasia Goodstein, author of "Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online."

Some like Chai may be reluctant to go to a camp for that reason, said Gary Rudman of GTR Consulting, author of the upcoming 2009 gTrend Report, which focuses on teens and technology.

Sean Hakim, 16, struggled to give up his gadgets for two weeks when he went to Antiochian Village Camp in Pennsylvania. The camp does not allow cells or iPods and campers have no computer access.

"At first, it was scary," admits Sean, of River Vale, N.J. But he said, "once you get there, you realize you don't really need it. You are always with people, doing something."

Plugged in teens are under tremendous pressure to maintain "Brand Me" on Facebook and other social networking sites, said Rudman. Without a cell phone or online access, it's like they are invisible.

And while teens will inevitably make friends at camp, 10 friends in your bunk is not the same as hundreds on Facebook, he said.

"The dilemma for camps is that if they do allow technology, the kids will likely plug in and tune out," said Rudman, adding that being off the grid may be the best thing for chill-challenged teens. "That would defeat the purpose of camp."

When camp starts, plugged-in children may feel a little disoriented, like a part of them is missing, said Dr. Michael Assel, associate professor of pediatric psychiatry at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Those feelings should subside as children get involved in camp activities, he said.

Campers say that's what usually happens. They forget about their lost social connections much like they forget about television.

"They keep you so busy, you are having so much fun, I forget about the computer. I forget about Facebook," said Max Truen, 15, of Dix Hills, N.Y., who goes to New Image Camp's Camp Pocono Trails each summer.

So what happens when camp is over? Do teens give up texting? Or Facebook?

Not a chance. They have more friends.
http://www.newstimes.com/national/ci_12371092





EU Member Targets French Internet Law
UPI

A member of the European Parliament says he will urge legal action against France if it adopts a controversial Internet anti-piracy law.

At the urging of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, France's lower house of Parliament this week passed a "three-strikes" law that would cut off Internet access to those caught downloading copyrighted material. But the measure runs afoul of EU efforts to ban such access cut-offs without court orders and could generate a legal challenge, the EU Observer reported Wednesday.

French Socialist MEP Guy Bono says he will to ask the European Commission, which has consistently supported the parliament's position against Internet access cut-offs, to initiate a lawsuit against Paris for "not respecting (European) community legislation.

"If a French constitutional judge does not react, I will ask the European Commission to request the European Court of Justice launch infringement proceedings against the French government for not respecting community law," Bono told the newspaper.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/05/...7441242224579/





Sony Pictures CEO: "I'm A Guy Who Doesn't See Anything Good Having Come From The Internet. Period."

The panel was about the future of filmmaking, but that didn’t mean anyone had to like what they saw. “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet,” said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. “Period.”

At a breakfast cohosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and The New Yorker Thursday, Lynton wasn’t just trying for a laugh: He complained the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”

Co-panelist Nora Ephron, who started her career in print, said the Internet has had a greater effect on “our beloved print than it’s had on the movie business.” But, she conceded, “We’re in the last days of copyright, if you want to be grim about it….Stop it. I dare you.”
http://current.com/items/90049647_so...net-period.htm


















Until next week,

- js.



















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