Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 26th, '08

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"I've worked for everything I've got, and I don't understand why people are out there trying to rob you. I never thought anything like this would happen." – Ellen Saylor, 70 year-old RIAA victim


"Steve loves Apple. He serves at the pleasure of Apple's board. He has no plans to leave Apple. Steve's health is a private matter." – Peter Oppenheimer


"After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money.

You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not." – Joe Nocera




































July 26th, 2008




Every Major Senate Democratic Challenger Announces Support for Network Neutrality
Matt Stoller

For the last few months, we've been posting Democratic Senate challenger positions on net neutrality here at OpenLeft. Since we started posting, we've been getting in statements and positions, from blogs like Cotton Mouth and the Political Base, from the candidates themselves, and from readers who took the time to ask and send in statements. I'm happy to report that every single Democratic challenger with more than $500k in cash on hand has announced their support for net neutrality. This is a milestone for the fight for internet freedom. I included statements reacting to this news from Senator Byron Dorgan, Speaker Pelosi, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Google public policy director Alan Davidson, and Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu.

One thing you'll notice is that there is basically no organized telecom or cable money going to any of these candidates, with the exception of Al Franken, Mark Warner, and Mark Udall. Franken and Warner both had careers with cable or telecom companies, so they have friends in those industries, and Udall is a sitting House member.
http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7125





To See Rights Fade For A Cause You Can't Be On The Wrong Side Of...
Jad

TechDirt stole my thunder, but I shall opine nevertheless. It's quite sad how little attention this is getting outside the corners of the internet where tech-savvy people gather, but perhaps the media thinks those are the only people who would understand it. The overriding theme, the sound bite, the message, it's loud and clear and it can't be argued against:

Internet Service Provider X shuts down access to deep dark portion of the Internet where only pedophiles hang out. Your children are safer now!

You have carte blanche to do whatever you want in this country if you can somehow, in some vague way - with connections basic enough so Joe-casual-news-reader can understand - tie it into protecting the children. If the appearance of the children being protected looks good enough, it doesn't matter what reality actually is.

Besides, a good portion of people out there probably have no idea what Usenet is.

Follow up:

Usenet, in a short and over-simplified way, is interactivity on the Internet before there was interactivity on the Internet, or even the Internet as we know it. Usenet predates the social networking giants that almost all of us use today, it predates the "user generated content" sites, it predates the message boards which came before all that. Usenet is a decentralized system of computers and servers the world over where people post things - messages, stories, topics (so basically the grandfather of the message board). Collectively the posts are known as news and categories of news are known as newsgroups. A hierarchy is in place to group the groups, which give a general idea of the content in them. sci.* will tend to have things about science. news.* will tend to have actual news stories. talk.* will tend to have random banter. You get the idea.

These discussion groups are not the enemy, however. Usenet is also home to the first and, some thought, the last bastion of the file sharing world, alt.* The alt.* newsgroup is where nearly every last bit of new anything you see on the internet for downloading - music, movies, software, games, you name it - is posted before it goes anywhere else. alt.* is the source for many bittorrent releases. Usenet has been a thorn in Big Content's side for a very long time, and it seemed that Big Content had no effective way of stopping it. Shutting down Usenet would be like shutting down a section of the Internet, and that's just never going to happen in America, right?

Give the ISPs a minor amount of credit, they tried everything else they could to fight file sharing for nearly a decade now. They've targeted specific software (Napster, Kazaa), they've targeted individuals (hey neat, the music sharer is in jail longer than the rapist), they've targeted websites that do no hosting of content but just give links to where that content is (Suprnova, Demonoid, OiNK, but not Google because they have way too much money to fight it), they've targeted people at random (college students and grandmothers are keeping record execs from getting that 7th figure in their check!), they've even targeted the concept of higher education in America (lobbying Congress to cut funding for schools who don't cut down or ban file sharing, forget the kids future or the cost of tuition). None of that has worked. File sharing, led by bittorrent and some rather smart people continuing to work on more and more complex decentralized and encrypted methods of file dissemination, has not been slowed.

There are some minds out there in the groupthink collective of Big Content that would probably enjoy seeing the Internet turned off, or turned into a metered pay-per-month website package deal (the Basic tier, 50 websites & now including Myspace! only 29.99/month!). Neither one of those things are going to happen, which leaves only one possible way to stem the file sharing tide: ban an entire subsection of the Internet.

How are you going to do that, exactly? Legal challenges will sprout up from all corners the second any attempt is made to ban any whole section of the internet outright, right?

Enter the convenient excuse: child pornography.

The whole idea behind this oh-so noble movement amongst the ISPs (pressured by Big Content) is not to blot out an entire subsection of the Internet because it is the source for hacked versions of their overpriced software or allows for free dissemination of their mostly substandard entertainment - that would just seem like Big Content being Big Content. No, this cause is noble, and right, and fair, just, and good to throw in some more happy words. This cause is for saving the children. This cause is for stopping child pornography! The pats on the back their giving their selves for their great crusade must feel nice.

This ought to be utterly transparent that this is not a crusade against any such thing - it's an easy way to throw up a smokescreen for a complex problem, make everyone feel good, and actually get nothing done. This is the point where I tip my hat to TechDirt and their explanation for how effective this is in really fighting child pornography:

Taking a stand against child porn wouldn't be overly aggressively blocking access to internet destinations that may or may not have porn (and there's no review over the list to make sure that they're actually objectionable). Taking a stand against child porn would be hunting down those responsible for the child porn and making sure that they're dealt with appropriately. Blocking access to some websites doesn't solve the problem. Those who still produce and make use of child porn will still get it from other sources -- but it will be more underground, making it more difficult for authorities to track down.

That's fine, though. Much like it's okay to put away people who share files for much longer periods of time than people who actually commit real crimes (but multinational corporations are people, too!) it's fine to ultimately hinder future efforts of tracking down those who engage in the perversities of child pornography and the sources they get it from - just as long as Adobe can see a few less copies of Photoshop cracked, or Microsoft a few less copies of Vista, or insert-popular-musical-group-here from having a few more albums downloaded for free.

These are only immediate effects, though. Such decisions, with ISPs going along with it, will undoubtedly have long term ramifications if left unchecked. Back to TechDirt...

Also, this sets an awful precedent in that the ISPs can point out that it's ok for them to block "objectionable" content where they get to define what's objectionable without any review.

What is objectionable, anyhow? Child pornography, obviously, but what about other things that unsettle people? Perhaps porn in general will become too objectionable for the internet. Maybe certain political views? File sharing, of course.

Recently the very popular text editor, Notepad++ caused the entirety of SourceForge to be banned in China because of its stance on the Olympics being held under the repressive regime of China. Chinese ISPs blocked the entire SourceForge domain because one small section of it contained "objectionable" material. Whether it be the ISPs in America, or Big Content and their fat wallets, but I have to wonder sometimes if someone around here is taking notes on how best to go about censoring the Internet.
http://secondpagemedia.com/theroad/i...ause-you-can-t





Bell's Internet Throttling is Like Reading People's Mail, ISPs Say
Peter Nowak

Bell Canada Inc.'s slowing of internet speeds is the equivalent of the post office opening people's mail and deciding when they should get their letters, a group of small service providers have said in their final volley at the company.

The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, a group of 55 companies that rent portions of Bell's network to provide their own broadband services, made its last plea Wednesday to regulators to force Bell to end its speed throttling.

In November Bell started using deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to identify what its customers were using their internet connections for, then started slowing peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as BitTorrent.

The company extended the practice to CAIP members in March, which prompted the group's complaint to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in April.

In its submission on Wednesday, CAIP said Bell's defence for throttling — that the company is only slowing P2P downloads, which still get to the user "eventually" — is discriminatory and anti-competitive.

"Postal service customers have the freedom to decide for themselves the urgency of their packages, and to pay the postal service a fee based on how quickly they want their packages delivered," CAIP said.

"Bell’s high-handed imposition of traffic management is more appropriately analogized to a postal service that opens each package, decides according to its own priorities how important the contents are, and delivers it at a speed of its own choosing, notwithstanding the needs or intentions of package senders and recipients."

A spokesperson for Bell did not return a request for comment but the company has said it only uses DPI to determine the type of traffic, and does not probe any deeper.

The CAIP submission was the final step in a public CRTC investigation, which began in May, into whether Bell has violated the Telecommunications Act by illegally changing its terms of wholesale service. The commission is expected to rule on the case in September.

In its filing, CAIP said Bell has failed to prove there is congestion on its network and has put forward a "varying storyline" for why it has done so since the probe began.

The company initially said it started throttling to prevent the five per cent of heavy P2P users from slowing access for the majority of customers but, CAIP said, Bell made virtually no mention of that factor in its final submission to the CRTC last week.
Bell has since switched tactics and said that P2P applications are designed to eat up all available bandwidth, then again changed gears by saying that exponential growth of traffic has necessitated the throttling, CAIP said.

The group disputed Bell's points, saying its members saw no evidence of network congestion before the throttling began last year.

CAIP also said Bell has shown "proof positive" that its network has no congestion problem by recently unveiling faster speeds for its own Sympatico customers — services that are not available to CAIP members — as well as an online video store, which requires large amounts of network capacity to work properly.

Bell has villainized P2P, CAIP says

Bell has also unfairly characterized P2P as a tool of bandwidth abusers and copyright violators, CAIP said, when in fact BitTorrent has been endorsed as a legitimate application by many Hollywood studios as well as educational and government institutions. P2P has been targeted by Bell because it is a "politically easy target" through this reputation.

CAIP said P2P cannot eat up all available bandwidth because users are limited by the connection speeds they buy from Bell or any other ISP. The group also cited a CRTC submission from network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc., in support of Bell, which forecasts that P2P traffic as a portion of total internet traffic will decline in the next few years.

The group's case has found a wide base of support and has garnered submissions from the likes of Google and Skype, as well as consumer groups, privacy advocates and more than 1,300 individuals. Telus, Rogers and Cisco have made submissions in support of Bell.

CAIP summarized its submission by saying that Bell is trying to stifle competition by removing smaller ISPs' ability to differentiate their services. The CRTC must therefore order the company to stop its throttling in order to preserve competition in providing internet access.

"Canadians have voiced concerns regarding the privacy of their telecommunications and the fact that an array of legitimate and socially, economically and culturally important information and activities, once available to them through P2P applications, are now virtually inaccessible to them during their leisure hours," CAIP said.

"Canadians understand that if Bell is allowed to shape their competitors’ end-user traffic, Bell can effectively render competitors’ products and service offering indistinguishable from its own, thereby eliminating competition in downstream retail markets."
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...tech-caip.html





Internet Founder Blasts ISPs for Hurting National Interests
Peter Nowak

Vint Cerf, who developed the technical principles on which the internet works, has blasted telephone and cable companies for harming national interests by holding investments in their networks to ransom.

Cerf, a long-time advocate of keeping the internet free from control by service providers and a current senior vice-president for search giant Google Inc., told the Silicon Valley Watcher blog that the companies are being childish by threatening to withhold upgrading networks unless they get breaks from regulators.

"Basically, it's like little kids in a tantrum: 'I'm not going to build this system unless you give me three scoops of ice cream and a pony,'" he said in a video posted on the blog on Tuesday. "My reaction to this is quite negative. It's harmful to the national interest to behave in this way because it is serious infrastructure — it's very much like the road ways."

Cerf said large internet service providers (ISPs) need to be split into two entities — one wholesale arm that sells access to the company's network to other firms, and one retail arm that sells internet access to customers. The wholesale arm would have to sell access to other service providers at the same rate that it charges itself.

The model has been adopted in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, where Cerf said it is working. Separation of a company — if not fully structural, then at least of its accounting department — is necessary to keep competition in providing internet access alive, which will head off ISP interference such as the slowing of certain kinds of traffic that is happening in the United States and Canada.

"We have to provide incentives that cause those companies to behave differently or create an incentive for a competitor to put in facilities that will compete with them. I want to take away their monopoly mandate," he said. "We have to make it a privilege to build the infrastructure. There has to be a reasonable rate of return, but it cannot be a confiscatory rate of return and it cannot be abused by allowing people to throttle competitors."

Rogers stirs up new hornet's nest

Cerf's comments come as a new controversy has erupted over internet interference by a Canadian ISP. Online message boards have been lit up for the past few days by users angry over a change made by Rogers Communications Inc. in how failed internet address searches are resolved.

Under the new system implemented last week, when a Rogers customer types in an internet address that does not exist they are redirected to a company-supported page with ads and links, rather than to the typical "server not found" page. Rogers did not notify customers of the change but does offer the ability to opt-out.

The move has outraged users, who say Rogers is hijacking their browser and searches. The opt-out function has also been criticized because it is browser-based, which means users must re-opt out every time they clear their tracking cookies.

"They did this to spam us with advertising when we type in a wrong [internet] address," wrote one poster on the Digital Home website. "I can't believe I pay Rogers for this service and they did this without asking us and they refuse to turn it off."

Nancy Cottenden, spokesperson for Rogers, said the change was made in order to eliminate error pages and "provide helpful search results based on what a customer is looking for."

"We make product enhancements on a regular basis and considered this to be one of them," she said. "We don't notify on each and every one."

University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist said Rogers should offer the function on an opt-in basis, or at least institute the opt-out at a higher level — as other ISPs who have made this move have done — so that people don't have to constantly reset their browsers.

"The Rogers approach certainly isn't respectful of consumer choice," he said. "The response that Rogers has been giving — 'this is our network and we'll do whatever we damn well please' — does highlight what is for many a concern."

Rogers took heat last year for putting its own content on other company's web pages. Rogers experimented with inserting messages on sites such as Google that warned users they were nearing their monthly download limit, but quickly backtracked after being accused of violating net neutrality principles.

The company, along with Bell Canada Inc., is currently at the centre of a storm regarding the throttling of internet speeds: Their decision to slow down peer-to-peer internet applications such as BitTorrent has prompted a complaint with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which has said a full inquiry into net neutrality is coming.

Bell is also embroiled in a CRTC dispute with its internet wholesale customers, a fight that has seen Google accuse it of breaking Canadian telecommunications law. The CRTC expects to rule on the dispute with the Canadian Association of Internet Providers in September.

Cerf, who joined Google as a vice-president and "chief internet evangelist" in 2005, developed the transmission protocols that the internet is based on back in the 1970s.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...tech-cerf.html





Big Six ISPs Capitulate to Music Industry

Britain's six leading internet providers have signed a Government-led agreement to stamp out illegal music file sharing.

The six providers - BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, Sky and Carphone Warehouse - will implement a series of measures against those found to be file sharing.

Offenders may find their internet connection is throttled, or may even have their traffic "filtered" to prevent media files from being downloaded. Thousands of letters are expected to be sent to customers of the big six in the coming weeks, warning them of evidence of illegal file sharing on their connection.

UPDATE: ISPs yet to decide on file-sharer punishment

The ISPs are reportedly reluctant to impose the BPI's preferred "three strikes and you're out" approach of cutting off users' broadband connections.

Change of heart

Some of the ISPs have already begun sending out warning letters to their customers, under previous agreements with the BPI. Both Virgin Media and BT have sent out thousands of warnings to customers suspected of making illegal downloads, whilst Tiscali ran a trial with the BPI last summer before cancelling the deal because of a row over costs.

The deal is something of an about-face for Carphone Warehouse boss, Charles Dunstone, however. He publicly lambasted the three-strikes proposal last year before claiming it wasn't an ISP's job to police its service.

"We believe that a fundamental part of our role as an internet service provider is to protect the rights of our users to use the internet as they choose," Dunstone said. "The music industry has consistently failed to adapt to changes in technology and now seeks to foist their problems on someone else."

Government deal

The new deal has reportedly been brokered by Ofcom, after heavy music industry lobbying of both ISPs and Government.

Speaking last October, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, Lord Triesman, said the Government was not prepared to tolerate "intellectual property theft".

"Where people have registered music as an intellectual property I believe we will be able to match data banks of that music to music going out and being exchanged on the net," he said.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/214620/b...-industry.html





Telco Won't Install Fiber Network, Sues to Prevent City from Doing So
Nate Anderson

The small town of Monticello, Minnesota seems an unlikely spot for a battle over city-owned fiber-to-the-home. The town, which is a distant commute to Minneapolis, thought it could better attract residents and business by building its own fiber-optic network. After a couple years of due diligence, the town held a referendum; 74 percent of voters agreed to fund the $25 million scheme. The city sought the needed municipal bonds, but the day before it closed on them, the local telco filed suit to stop the plan. Its claim: taking out bonds to build a fiber network is illegal.

Bridgewater Telephone argues that the city cannot use tax-exempt bonds to "enter into direct competition with incumbent commercial providers of telephone, Internet, and cable television services." The odd thing about the complaint, a copy of which was seen by Ars Technica, is that it makes almost no argument; instead, the company simply quotes a short bit of Minnesota law and essentially says, "See, it's illegal!" without offering an explanation.

The statute in question says that cities can use bonds to fund nursing homes, garbage collection, parks, playgrounds, "homes for the aged," and more, including "any utility or other public convenience from which a revenue is or may be derived." If the judge finds that fiber-to-the-home is a "public convenience," the case seems to be over.

"Current expenses" go back to the future

The only further comment that Bridgewater makes is that bond money cannot be used to pay for "current expenses," a clear sign from the state that towns cannot spend themselves into debt and just keep issuing bonds to pay for the mess. Bridgewater treats these two words as a law against setting aside a bit of the bond money to cover startup expenses for the new project.

Normally, when a city builds a new swimming pool, for instance, it would set aside a portion of the fees to pay for the initial hiring of lifeguards and the snacks that stock the cafe. Christopher Mitchell, a director at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (which advocates for local control of broadband networks), tells Ars that if the judge accepts such arguments, "then cities cannot bond for anything."

The City of Monticello, which has just replied to the lawsuit, thinks the whole case is ridiculous. In its response, the city's attorney says that the telco offers only a "plain misreading of a Minnesota statute" and "pleads no facts that tend in any way to call into question whether the project constitutes a 'utility or other public convenience from which revenue is or may be derived'."

As for the "current expenses" issue, the city sounds exasperated with Bridgewater. "There is nothing 'current' about the items that Bridgewater/TDS attempts to describe as 'current expenses'," says the response. "Those expenses will be incurred in the future, as part of an effort to secure a benefit that will arise even further in the future when the system is functioning, and that will endure even further into the future."

Mitchell, who has been involved with the city on this entire issue, tells Ars that he's sympathetic to arguments from private companies about having to compete unfairly with cities. But he points out that cities have to publish their business plans, deployment, targets, and funding, which levels the playing field. And Monticello did first approach Bridgewater, asking it to deploy fiber in the town; the answer was no. (Congress has also started to debate the issue.)

The alternative, Mitchell says as he looks at the rest of the world, is that the US will have to be content with second-rate Internet; nearly all major fiber deployments around the globe have had government backing or serious support. The payback on such schemes tends to be too far in the future for companies that have to answer to shareholders on a quarterly basis. Even Verizon, which might be seen as an exception to the rule, proves the point; investors were initially quite skeptical of the proposed $18 billion-20 billion payout, and only recently has the company's move started to look prescient rather than foolishly risky.

As for the Bridgewater claim, Mitchell says that his response upon reading it was, "This can't be serious, they're not even trying to win." The timing of the complaint makes it look as thought Bridgewater wants to delay the process. If so, the company has already succeeded. In the meantime, Monticello has approved a much smaller fiber loop to connect government and major industrial sites.

Local control, choice of ISP

Assuming the lawsuit can be dealt with, Monticello hopes to build fiber lines to each home and business in town with the goals of:

• choice of service provider
• competitive rates
• local service
• local ownership
• economic development
• economic returns to the community

When 74 percent of town's voters want to build themselves a fiber network, but the telco demands that they 1) not do it, and then 2) accept that the telco won't do it for years, either, the market (such as it is) doesn't appear to be functioning well. Monticello's solution is to build an interconnect facility of its own where ISPs can come in and link up to any fiber user who wants their service. The city maintains the lines and the connection facility, but doesn't need to become an ISP.

We're seeing more cities interested in this sort of arrangement as they recognize that fiber is the future but that, unless they are a FiOS town, that fiber won't be coming to the homes in their communities any time soon. Cases like this will help set the parameters for how cities or local co-ops can design, build, and operate such networks.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-doing-it.html





Phone Giants Fight to Keep Subscribers
Laura M. Holson

With millions of people snapping up the iPhone, AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the popular phone, should be quite pleased with the stream of revenue it can expect from customers.

But AT&T, the biggest telecommunications company in the United States, has a problem: analysts say consumers are dropping traditional landlines faster than expected. The company, which still gets 32 percent of its revenue from its landline business, reports its second-quarter financial results Wednesday and is expected to talk about how its traditional phone service is contracting.

AT&T is not the only company facing a changing environment in the communications business. All of the major telecommunications companies — AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Nextel — are figuring out how to make more money from customers as they spend more time sending text messages or browsing the Web on their wireless phones, rather than talking.

At the same time, as the American cellphone market gets saturated — nearly 85 percent of American consumers already own a mobile phone — phone companies are finding that growth is slowing. With more options, mobile phone buyers are also becoming more selective about the calling plans and the type of phones they want, making the market even more competitive.

“In short order, sentiment in the telecom sector has gone from bullish to guarded to ... well, slightly queasy,” Craig Moffett, a research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company who follows communications companies, wrote in a recent report.

Wireless phones are, by far, more common than landlines. According to CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade group based in Washington, there are 262 million wireless subscribers in the United States. In contrast, the Federal Communications Commission counts 163 million business and residential landlines as of June 2007, its latest report.

Analysts say that AT&T will report a decline in the number of its traditional landline subscribers. A spokesman for AT&T said executives could not comment ahead of earnings. Currently the company has 60.4 million traditional landlines — in contrast to 68.7 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2006 — and 71.4 million wireless subscribers.

AT&T has been losing landline subscribers each quarter at an accelerated rate since 2006. It dropped 7.4 percent in 2007. Analysts think that the economic downturn could also have an impact on the landline business. They say consumers looking to cut expenses will drop their landline — which can cost up to $60 a month — before they drop their wireless phone plan.

“I think AT&T is pedaling as fast as it can to transform themselves from a wire line to a wireless company,” Mr. Moffett said. “To a degree it is working.” The question, though, he said, is “is it fast enough?”

Analysts also expect it will report slower growth in its wireless business as well.

Verizon, which reports its second-quarter results on Monday, also is seeing slower growth. On Tuesday, Verizon Wireless said it added 1.5 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2008, the same number it added in its first quarter. Both numbers are down, though, from the fourth quarter in 2007, which was two million new subscribers.

Verizon Wireless, which is a partnership between Verizon and Vodafone, has 68.7 million subscribers.

“It’s still very strong,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president for Nielsen IAG, a market research firm. But compared with earlier figures, he said, it “is indicative of a slowdown.”

Verizon, too, is not immune from customer losses in its landline business. According to the report by Mr. Moffett, Verizon is vulnerable in the East Coast where it has a high percentage of customers.

Despite the loss of customers, companies will still need to spend to upgrade their networks. (Verizon currently has 40.5 million traditional landlines.) A spokesman for Verizon said executives were not available to speak until its financial results were announced.

Mr. Entner said AT&T and Verizon would have to sell customers more services to make up for the decline in traditional landline revenue. It is why they, particularly Verizon, are aggressively competing with cable companies to sell Internet and television services, bundled with traditional and wireless phone service.

“If you own a home business, they are going to want to sell you not only a line for your home, but one for your office too,” Mr. Entner said. “They are going to want to sell you more, more of everything.”

Keeping customers, along with acquiring new ones, is of paramount importance. Sprint, the No. 3 wireless carrier in the United States, has sought to stem the tide of customer defections of its wireless service. In the first quarter of 2008, 1.1 million of Sprint Nextel’s 53.9 million customers fled, and churn — a measure of turnover and therefore how unhappy customers are — was on the rise. It announces its financial results on Aug. 6.

“The big carriers have fed on Sprint Nextel,” Mr. Entner said. “But there comes a time when all the people who want to leave have already left.”

A bright spot, at least in the case of AT&T, is the debut of the latest iPhone. With a subsidized price of $199, it is sure to attract new customers, said Walter Piecyk, an analyst with Pali Research. “Economically, it turns out great for them,” he said, because new customers are required to sign a two-year contract to get the subsidized price.

Carriers are seeking to address declining revenue in the landline business several ways besides focusing on the wireless business and bundling calling plans with Internet and television service. It would not be inconceivable, said one telecommunications executive who declined to be named because he was not authorized to discuss his company’s plans, that in the next 10 years, carriers could entice their least profitable landline customers to give up their old-fashioned phones for free or deeply discounted wireless service.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/te...y/23phone.html





Griping Online? Comcast Hears You and Talks Back
Brian Stelter

Brandon Dilbeck, 20, a student at the University of Washington, was complaining recently on his blog, Brandon Notices, about Comcast’s practice of posting ads in its on-screen programming guide.

He assumed he was writing for his own benefit. “It feels like nobody ever really reads my blog,” he said. “Nobody has left a comment in months.”

Shortly afterward, he received an e-mail message from Comcast, thanking him for the feedback and adding that it was working on a new interactive guide that might “illuminate the issues that you are currently experiencing.”

Mr. Dilbeck found it all a bit creepy. “The rest of his e-mail may as well have read, ‘Big Brother is watching you,’ ” he said.

But Frank Eliason, digital care manager at Comcast, says he was just trying to help.

From a sparse desk dominated by two computer screens in the new Comcast Center here, Mr. Eliason uses readily available online tools to monitor public comments on blogs, message boards and social networks for any mention of Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company. When he sees a complaint like Mr. Dilbeck’s, he contacts the source to try to defuse the problem.

“When you’re having a two-way conversation, you really get to clear the air,” Mr. Eliason said.

Comcast is not the only company trying to reach out to customers online. Using the social messaging service Twitter, Southwest Airlines answers customer questions about ticket prices and flight delays, Whole Foods Market posts details about discounts, and the chief executive of the online shoe store Zappos shares details of his life with 7,200 “followers.” Many other companies also monitor online discussion groups.

But Comcast is going an extra step by talking back, contacting customers who are discussing the company online.

Odds are they are complaining about Comcast. The company was ranked at the very bottom of the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index, which tracks consumer opinions of more than 200 companies. Hundreds of customers have filed grievances on a site called ComcastMustDie.com.

Comcast says the online outreach is part of a larger effort to revamp its customer service. In just about five months, Mr. Eliason, whose job redefines customer service, has reached out to well over 1,000 customers online.

Lyza Gardner, a vice president at a Web development company in Portland, Ore., used Twitter to vent about a $183 cable bill last month. (The bill was prorated for almost two months of service.) Her comment — “very angry at Comcast” — set off Mr. Eliason’s search tool, prompting him to type out his typical reply: “Can I help?” The response caught Ms. Gardner off guard.

“It’s one thing to spit vitriol about a company when they can’t hear you,” she said in an interview. It’s another, she said, when the company replies. “I immediately backed down and softened my tone when I knew I was talking to a real person.”

As blogs, forums and social networking sites have become pervasive parts of people’s lives, companies have grappled with whether — and how — to deal with them. The sites expose hundreds and potentially thousands of other people to the experiences of individual customers.

Brian D. Solis, who runs a public relations firm, FutureWorks, that specializes in social media, said companies like Comcast are “taking what used to be an inbound call center and turning it into an outbound form of customer relations” that can also help spot problems before they get out of hand.

Still, others agree with Mr. Dilbeck, the University of Washington student, that the online outreach is annoying. “Comcast Is Watching Us,” declared a blog called Contempt for the World in February, when Mr. Eliason started wading into the comment sections of blogs.

On the whole, though, all the talking back appears to be good for the company’s public image. Mr. Eliason said he remembered only seven cases in which customers had called him creepy, and he believed the benefits far outweighed the occasional awkwardness.

When a commenter makes claims of being mistreated by Comcast, Mr. Eliason contacts the person directly and steers the case toward a resolution. “Wish me luck @comcastcares,” William Pomerantz, an employee at the X Prize Foundation in Washington, wrote last month as he headed to his new apartment to await his third appointment for a Comcast installation.

Three hours later, Mr. Pomerantz badly needed some luck. The technician had not arrived, a telephone representative had disconnected his call, and Mr. Eliason’s online account was “strangely silent,” as he complained online.

Mr. Eliason, checking his messages as he rode home on a commuter train, noticed Mr. Pomerantz’s comments and responded: “I will get someone there!”

Half an hour later, a technician arrived. “Before he was done, I had two more technicians call and say they were ready to come immediately if I still needed assistance,” Mr. Pomerantz recalled. “The reaction was a thousand times better than what I was getting by phone.”

Of course, most customers still call when they have problems. If they all started blogging and commenting instead, Mr. Eliason would be quickly overwhelmed. “This is a channel, but it is not the first step” for customer concerns, he said.

Already the number of online comments are more than Mr. Eliason can handle himself, so his staff has gradually grown to seven people; soon it will have 10.

By acting quickly when customers complain — even at the oddest hours — the team has proved that its service is not aimed solely at users with the loudest virtual voices. Noting the thunder and wind late on the night of June 11, richrecruiter, a Twitter user, wrote that he was “counting down to Comcast outage interrupting tonight’s Phillies game.” Mr. Eliason quickly replied with a brief “LOL,” short for “laugh out loud.”

“See, I knew you were listening to me!” the customer answered. By then, it was past 11 p.m.

“Absolutely,” Mr. Eliason replied from his BlackBerry, his wife sound asleep in the bedroom. “A little tired tonight, but I am still on it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/te...25comcast.html





Internet Firm Says It Targeted Ads To Customers' Web-Surfing Habits
Ellen Nakashima

Regional Internet company Embarq told lawmakers this week that it notified 26,000 high-speed Internet customers in Kansas that it was conducting a targeted advertising test based on their "anonymous" Web-surfing behavior and offered them the ability to opt out.

Embarq posted a notice in its privacy policy on its corporate Web site more than two weeks before the controversial test was conducted earlier this year, company officials wrote in two letters to leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The lawmakers are investigating the practice and whether privacy laws adequately protect consumers in this area.

Some committee members were not satisfied with Embarq's action.

"I am still troubled by the company's failure to directly inform their consumers of the consumer data gathering test and the notion that an 'opt out' option is a sufficient standard for such sweeping data gathering," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet.

The test in Gardner, Kan., used deep-packet inspection technology provided by the Silicon Valley company NebuAd. When installed in an Internet service provider's network, the technology permits a window into potentially all of a consumer's online activity, from Web surfing and search terms to any unencrypted Web communication.

"Embarq may use information such as the Web sites you visit or online searches that you conduct to deliver or facilitate the delivery of targeted advertisements," the online notice said. "The delivery of these advertisements will be based on anonymous surfing behavior and will not include users' names, email addresses, telephone numbers or any other personally identifiable information."

It also said that "by opting out, you will continue to receive advertisements . . . but these advertisements will be less relevant and less useful to you."

Fifteen subscribers opted out, Tom Gerke, Embarq president and chief executive, wrote in a letter Wednesday to committee chairman John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Tex.) and Markey.

Gerke wrote that Embarq's approach to the test followed "the prevailing industry practices" and was "consistent" with the Federal Trade Commission's proposed guidelines for self-regulation in online advertising.

But at a hearing last week, Markey asserted that an opt-out standard was insufficient. "It's like saying that the mailman can open up any letter . . . find out what's in it, then . . . partner with other companies, letting them know what individual Americans are receiving in the mail," as long as a person has not objected in advance, he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...?hpid=sec-tech





Minsk Says Internet to Stay Free

Authorities in Belarus will not use a new law on the media to restrict the Internet, an aide to President Alexander Lukashenko said on Tuesday.

The new law, approved by parliament last month, does not specifically require Internet sites to be registered, but allows their regulation to be overseen by government decisions.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the continent's leading rights watchdog, called for rejection of the law before its passage.

Independent journalists in the country of 10 million had expressed fears that web sites could be closed down.

"All talk about Belarus introducing restrictions on the Internet is just sheer stupidity," said Vsevolod Yanchevsky, presidential adviser responsible for ideology.

"The authorities feel strong enough not to be afraid of anything, including biased ideas," Yanchevsky said. "On the contrary, it is in our interest to have free development of the Internet and no restrictions. The Internet will be free in Belarus."

Since Lukashenko came to power in 1994, many independent publications have been closed down, leaving the Internet as the chief means of information on the country's small, and often divided, liberal and nationalist opposition.

State media in the country, wedged between Russia and three European Union states, report at length on the president's activities and heap lavish praise on his initiatives. Opposition figures are given little air time apart from brief spots, as required by law, during election campaigns.

Lukashenko, his tough stand on dissent and generous state subsidies are broadly popular, particularly outside the capital.

But the president remains barred from the United States and European Union on grounds that he rigged his 2006 re-election.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/articl.../42/369113.htm





China Tops U.S. in Number of Internet Users
David Barboza

China said the number of Internet users in the country reached about 253 million last month, putting it ahead of the United States as the world’s biggest Internet market.

The estimate, based on a national survey and released on Thursday by the China Internet Network Information Center in Beijing, showed a powerful surge in Internet adoption in this country over the last few years, particularly among teenagers.

The number of Internet users jumped more than 50 percent, or by about 90 million people, during the last year, said the center, which operates under the government-controlled Chinese Academy of Sciences. The new estimate represents only about 19 percent of China’s population, underscoring the potential for growth.

By contrast, about 220 million Americans are online, or 70 percent of the population, according to the Nielsen Company. Japan and South Korea have similarly high percentages.

Political content on Web sites inside China is heavily censored, and foreign sites operating here have faced restrictions. But online gaming, blogs, and social networking and entertainment sites are extremely popular among young people in China.

The survey found that nearly 70 percent of China’s Internet users were 30 or younger, and that in the first half of this year, high school students were, by far, the fastest-growing segment of new users, accounting for 39 million of the 43 million new users in that period.

With Internet use booming, so is Web advertising. The investment firm Morgan Stanley says online advertising in China is growing by 60 to 70 percent a year, and forecasts that by the end of this year, it could be a $1.7 billion market.

China’s biggest Internet companies, including Baidu, Sina, Tencent and Alibaba, are thriving, and in many cases are outperforming the China-based operations of American Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and eBay.

“The Internet market is the fastest-growing consumer market sector in China,” said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. “We are still far from saturation. So the next three to five years, we’re still going to see hyper-growth in this market.”

Baidu, for instance, said on Thursday that its second-quarter net profit had jumped 81 percent. During that period, Baidu had a 63 percent share of China’s search engine market, while Google had about 26 percent, with Yahoo trailing far behind, according to iResearch, a market research firm based in Beijing.

Tencent, a popular site for social networking and gaming, now has a stock market value of $15 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable Internet companies. In comparison, Amazon.com is valued at about $30 billion.

One measure of the growth of the Internet here, and its social and entertainment functions, is the popularity of blogs.

The site of China’s most popular blogger, the actress Xu Jinglei, has attracted more than 174 million visitors over the last few years, according to Sina.com, the popular Web portal, which posts a live tally. According to Sina, 11 other bloggers have also attracted more than 100 million visitors in recent years.

The Internet’s popularity often poses serious challenges to the government. Online gambling, pornography, videos of protests and online addiction have led to regular campaigns to crack down on what the government views as vices. But Internet users have also used the Web for nationalist campaigns to criticize the Western news media or foreign companies, as was the case after riots broke out in Tibet this year.

While several organizations had projected that China would surpass the United States in Internet users this year, the new survey results were the first time a government agency had released figures showing China’s market to be larger than that of the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/bu...6internet.html





China Arrests Online Dissident in Pre-Olympics Crackdown
Ben Blanchard

Chinese police have arrested a prominent Internet dissident for violating his probation terms, a rights group said, as the country steps up a pre-Olympic crackdown on dissent to ensure the Games go smoothly.

Du Daobin, from the central province of Hebei, was given a suspended sentence for subversion in 2004 having been detained by police in Wuhan for posting online essays in support of fellow dissident, Liu Di.

Du was then released into house arrest, Reporters Without Borders said in an emailed statement, but was arrested this week having been accused of posting articles on overseas websites and receiving guests without permission.

"Du was living under a permanent threat," the group said. "He could have been imprisoned at any time under the sentence he received more than four years ago. He is the third leading cyber-dissident to be imprisoned in the run-up to the Olympic Games, after Hu Jia and Huang Qi."

Chinese police arrested Huang in the country's southwest for "possession of state secrets" after he offered help to parents of children killed in the Sichuan earthquake in May.

Hu, a prominent AIDS activist, was jailed for 3- years earlier this year for inciting subversion and criticizing the ruling Communist Party.

A fourth dissident, Ye Guozhu, jailed in 2004 for organizing protests against forced evictions, was due for release on Saturday but he was taken from the prison where he was being held and his whereabouts were unknown, Chinese Human Rights Defenders said.

"We believe that the police took him away to silence him during the Games, and that he will not be released until after the Olympics when most foreign journalists will have left Beijing," the group quoted his brother, Ye Guoqiang, as saying.

Ye Guoqiang said police told him they had taken Ye Guozhu from the prison, but did not say where he was being held or for how long.

Human Rights in China said the government was using the slogan of a "peaceful Olympics" to target rights activists.

"The current state of affairs is intolerable," said the group's China executive director, Sharon Hom, in a statement.

"Under the banner of a 'peaceful Olympics,' authorities continue to employ contradictory and counterproductive security methods, which only serve to exacerbate the human rights crisis and provoke greater instability in China," she added.

The government says the charges of a pre-Olympic campaign against dissidents are groundless.

Last week, the official Xinhua news agency quoted an unnamed Games' spokesman as saying the Olympics were actually improving China's human rights record, and defended security measures.

"To ensure the hosting of a successful Olympic Games, and to ensure the safety of foreign athletes and visitors, China has indeed taken a series of necessary, legitimate and reasonable security measures," the spokesman said.

"lt's unnecessary to arrest so-called 'dissidents' for the sake of the Olympic Games. The accusation is untrue."

Still, the swirl of bad publicity in the run-up to the Games, which open on August 8, appears not to have dampened Chinese people's enthusiasm, though censorship means little foreign criticism is reported domestically.

More than 90 percent of Chinese surveyed by the Pew Research Center's Pew Global Attitudes Project said they thought the Olympics would help China's global image, and almost everyone thought the Games would be a success.

(Additional reporting by Lindsay Beck; Editing by Nick Macfie)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072301045.html





Death Penalty for Bloggers in Iran

A few weeks ago, the Islamic Parliament in Iran approved a draft law which shocked the country and is at the center of current debate.

The draft law is asking for expanded sentencing for those who publish atheistic articles and pornographic materials, or articles about rap, sex slave exports, banditry, prostitution, depravity, and kidnapping.

According to this draft, which was approved for faster review by the majority of Majlis [Iranian members of Parliament], the death sentence could be used against bloggers, journalists, artists, and intellectuals who can be easily falsely accused and convicted by intelligence services or the judiciary branch for publishing "articles against Islam."

Beside China, Iran is the most dangerous country for the bloggers and maintains one of the tightest controls over the Internet. Yet, more than 1.5 million bloggers write daily about their life, publishing about local news or criticizing government and mandatory Islamic rules. Based on Alexa, Iranian internet users are eager to read blogs as a source of news, semi-news, gossips, or entertainment.

Blog providers inside Iran are very sensitive to the content of blogs they host. If they find an anti-Islamic or pornography focused blog, they immediately delete it. If they ignore the blog, the filtering center in the Communication Ministry will delete it. My Persian language blog, like many blogs and websites criticizing the regime, is banned and filtered inside Iran by either the service providers or the government.

This new law, which brought waves of criticism against new conservative Majlis, including from major EU and human rights organizations, brings the prospect of harsh suppression of intellectuals and bloggers. The death penalty is an option.

To underscore the point, there are many political prisoners in the notorious jails inside Iran who are there because they have been accused of atheism or have been targeted by fatwas issued by top mullahs including the Supreme Leader Khomeini. Under Islamic law in Iran, the sentences these people face include beheading, slashing, executing and the cutting hands and feet.

Bloggers inside Iran believe the draft law is created to threaten youth and intellectuals, as well as suppressing freedom of speech and expression.
http://www.theseminal.com/2008/07/23...ggers-in-iran/





Police Director Sues for Critical Bloggers' Names

Site popular with citizens, officers
Amos Maki

Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin and the city of Memphis have filed a lawsuit to learn who operates a blog harshly critical of Godwin and his department.

The lawsuit asks AOL to produce all information related to the identity of an e-mail address linked to MPD Enforcer 2.0, a blog popular with police officers that has been extremely critical of police leadership at 201 Poplar.

"In what could be a landmark case of privacy and the 1st Amendment," the anonymous bloggers write on the site, "Godwin has illegally used his position and the City of Memphis as a ram to ruin the Constitution of the United States.

"Some members of the Enforcer 2.0 have contacted their attorneys and we are in the process of filing a lawsuit against Larry and the City of Memphis. What's wrong Larry? The truth hurt?"

It wasn't clear if the lawsuit is aimed at shutting down the site or if it's part of an effort to stop leaks that might affect investigations.

Many of the documents in the case, filed in Chancery Court on July 10, have been sealed by Chancellor Kenny Armstrong. Police officials would not discuss the action, citing pending litigation.

Whatever the reason, Internet and free-speech advocates said they had serious problems with the city's actions.

"You can complain about the government, and you should be able to do that without fear of retaliation or threatening actions on the part of the people in these positions," said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based watchdog group. "I guess they've kind of annoyed them at some level, but you really don't want to see law enforcement or government resources spent in this way."

AOL has been ordered to turn over similar records in the past.

In 2001, Japanese company Nam Tai filed a complaint in California state court against unknown Web posters claiming they committed libel and violated the state's unfair business practices statute.

Nam Tai was able to obtain the e-mail address of one of the posters and then obtained a subpoena from a Virginia state court to AOL seeking the name behind the e-mail address.

AOL filed a motion to have the order quashed, but lost that bid in trial court and the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Officials with the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee said they will be watching the case closely and that anonymous speech is essential to the free flow of ideas in a democracy.

"We are quite interested in preserving the anonymity of the bloggers," said Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee. "Anonymous speech has long been protected speech under the First Amendment."

The bloggers, who operate under the name of Dirk Diggler -- the name of the porn star in "Boogie Nights" -- say their site provides an important service to officers and citizens.

"This is another attempt at disrupting an outlet for officers to gather and complain about the administration," they said on the site.

"Further, this allows us unrestricted communication with the citizens of Memphis. The citizens should be made aware of the scandals that rock the administration and shudder the rocky foundation in which they operate today."

The bloggers also said city attorneys earlier this year wrote a threatening letter on city letterhead to a company that produced T-shirts for the bloggers.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news...ogger-critica/





Record Labels Ask Judge for Ruling Against Lime Wire
Stefanie Olsen

Thirteen record labels have asked a judge to issue a decision in a 2-year-old case against peer-to-peer software company Lime Wire for allegedly inducing copyright violations of music files.

The motion for summary judgment was filed Friday with the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York. The record labels, including Warner Bros. Records, Sony Records, and Virgin Records, are asking the judge for a decision because they claim Lime Wire has "promoted infringement," and has taken no steps to prevent illegal file trading, among other complaints.

The record companies originally filed their suit against Lime Wire in August 4, 2006, alleging "inducement of copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and with respect to pre-1972 recordings, common law copyright infringement and state law unfair competition." They also allege personal acts of copyright infringement by Mark Gorton, the owner of Lime Wire, and CTO Greg Bildson.

Lime Wire, which has filed a similar motion for summary judgment in the case, argues that it is not liable for "vicarious" or contributory copyright infringement because of the Sony-Betamax safe harbor. That safe harbor roughly states that makers of technology used for a variety of purposes are not liable for its creation and distribution so long as the products are "merely capable of substantial noninfringing uses," according to its filing.

The record label's filing states that a statistical study of Lime Wire showed that nearly 99 percent of download requests on its P2P software are for infringing music files. Because billions of files are shared every day, the "probable scope of copyright infringement is staggering," according to the document.

Because of the obvious parallels of previous cases against P2P file-sharing companies, the legal document refers heavily to those cases, including a 2005 Supreme Court decision against Grokster.

"As the Supreme Court observed in the context of the very similar Grokster litigation, '[w]hen a widely shared service ... is used to commit infringement, it may be impossible to enforce rights in the protected work effectively against all direct infringers, the only practical alternative being to go against the distributor of the copying device for secondary liability...'" according to the legal filing.

It continues: "Given the vast number of infringements that occur every day using LimeWire and the lack of a genuine issue as to any material fact, the argument for imposing secondary liability on this summary judgment motion is as powerful as it was in Grokster."

Lime Wire's CEO George Searle said in a statement that the recording industry's lawsuits aren't helping the music consumer, nor artists, songwriters, and publishers.

"Litigation isn't a good digital business model," said Searle, whose company's software has been downloaded more than 150 million times. "We're confident in our position and in the eventual outcome of this lawsuit, and we look forward to the day we can work together with the entire music industry to help expand its reach and deliver more to the consumer."

Based in New York, Lime Wire was founded in 2000. This spring, the company launched a music store for songs of independent artists.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9997427-93.html





Universal Says DMCA Takedown Notices Can Ignore 'Fair Use'
David Kravets

Universal Music told a federal judge here Friday that takedown notices requiring online video-sharing sites to automatically remove content need not consider whether videos are protected by the "fair use" doctrine.

The doctrine permits limited use of copyright materials without the owner's permission.

The music company made the argument Friday as part of a lawsuit brought by a Pennsylvania woman whose 29-second video of her toddler dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" was removed last year after Universal sent YouTube a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The act requires the automatic removal of material a rights holder claims is infringing its copyrights. If it isn't removed, legal liability can be placed on YouTube or other video-sharing sites. But the act also allows the uploader -- in this case, the Pennsylvania mother of the dancing toddler -- to demand the video return online.

Universal did not challenge Stephanie Lenz's assertion that the video was a "fair use" of Prince's song. After being taken down for six weeks, the video went back online last year, having now generated about half a million hits.

The courthouse dispute on Friday centered on a rarely used clause in the DMCA -- originally approved by Congress in 1998 -- allowing victims of meritless takedown notices to seek damages in a bid to deter such notices and breaches of First Amendment speech.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the woman's law firm, asked U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel on Friday to award attorneys' fees and other unspecified monetary damages under Section 512 of the DMCA.

In what Fogel said was a "case of first impression," Universal attorney Kelly Klaus said Universal or other copyright holders are not liable for damages when somebody asserts fair use to reverse a takedown notice.

Klaus and the judge agreed that damages have been awarded when a sender of a takedown notice falsely represents copyright ownership. But in this case, Universal owns the rights to Prince's song.

"Are you saying there cannot be a misuse of a takedown notice if the material is copyrighted?" Fogel asked Klaus.

"I don't think 'fair use' qualifies," Klaus answered.

Corynne McSherry, an EFF staff attorney, countered. She said the DMCA's damages clause "intended to prevent misuse of takedown notices," even when there's a fair-use defense.

Fogel, who did not indicate when he would rule, said "It's a very important issue of statutory interpretation."

While there is no bright-line rule, the factors to consider whether a video that's uploaded to a file-sharing site is a fair use are: how much of the original work was used, whether the new use is commercial in nature, whether the market for the original work was harmed, and whether the new work is a parody.

Here are Universal's and EFF's latest briefs in the case.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...rsal-says.html





Bill Asks Attorney General to Investigate Piracy
Mark Hachman

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate on Thursday that would allow the U.S. Attorney General to bring civil actions against Americans that violate copyrights.

The bill, the "Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008", was scheduled to be introduced on Thursday, according to Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who authored the bill along with Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). The bill's co-sponsors include Senators Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas).

The bill is similar to the "Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Act" of the 2007 Congress, which set out to establish a so-called Intellectual Property Enforcement Network (IPEN) made up of the deputy secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security, Justice, the Treasury, Commerce, and State, plus the Deputy Attorney General and other senior government members.

However, the current bill would pair the IPEN with a designated Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, an advisor who would report directly to the President. Enforcement would be left to the FBI, who would be authorized to form an operational task force to fight copyright crime. An organized crime task force would also be created at the Department of Justice to link copyright violations to organized crime, such as DVD piracy. Five "intellectual property law enforcement coordinators" could be sent overseas to work with local law enforcement.

"The time has come to bolster the Federal effort to protect this most valuable and vulnerable property, to give law enforcement the resources and the tools it needs to combat piracy and counterfeiting, and to make sure that the many agencies that deal with intellectual property enforcement have the opportunity and the incentive to talk with each other, to coordinate their efforts, and to achieve the maximum effects for their efforts," Sen. Leahy said in a statement. "The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008 does just that."

The proposed bill would also tighten civil IP laws, requiring that an actual copyright be filed before a criminal case can be brought. However, according to the text of the bill, no actual copyright would need to be filed in the case of a civil suit brought by the Attorney General or another individual or company.

The bill would also explicitly allow documents and records to be seized in the course of a civil copyright-infringement suit. And a "harmless error" provision would allow prosecutors to gloss over minor errors in copyright filings that would otherwise provide defendants a loophole.

Reactions split across industry lines

Unsurprisingly, the bill was welcomed by software groups, including the Business Software Alliance. ""BSA and its members commend Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Evan Bayh (D-IN), John Cornyn (R-TX), George Voinovich (R-OH) and others for their leadership on intellectual property issues, as further illustrated today, with the introduction of the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008," the BSA said in a statement. "This important legislation will go a long way to curbing software piracy which cost more than $48 billion around the globe. The bill will provide US law enforcement with new legal tools to combat software piracy and counterfeiting. It will also provide much needed resources to investigate and prosecute IP crimes and expand the successful program of placing IP attaches in key US embassies around the globe."

"American innovators and creators are driving our nation's economy. Whether they are born of research, technological innovation or the strum of a guitar, creative expression of ideas are the backbone of job creation, growth and surplus trade," executive director Patrick Ross of the Copyright Alliance added.

"We urge Congress to act quickly so that copyright owners can see new enforcement measures on the President's desk this Congress," Ross said in a statement.

Public interest group Public Knowledge said it was concerned, however. "We are concerned that several provisions in this bill could have harmful, if unintended, consequences that would harm consumers," Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of the organization, said in a statement. "The bill rightly targets enforcement of copyright law against commercial infringers, but some of these same enforcement provisions are likely to hurt ordinary consumers.

"The provisions allowing seizure of equipment may be harmful to consumers," Sohn added. "Seizing expensive manufacturing equipment used for large-scale infringement from a commercial pirate may be appropriate. Seizing a family's general-purpose computer in a download case, as this bill would allow, is not appropriate. This bill goes even farther, expanding the penalties under the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to create new grounds for allowing a family's computer to be seized if used to circumvent digital rights management, even if for fair uses.

"In addition, this bill would turn the Justice Department into an arm of the legal departments of the entertainment companies by authorizing DoJ to file civil lawsuits for infringement, forcing taxpayers to foot the bill," Sohn concluded.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2326397,00.asp





Government Copyright Bill Fails Green Test
Michael Geist

The environment is obviously one of the biggest issues of the moment. The federal political parties are spending their summers trying to sell Canadians on their plans for the future, provincial governments are unveiling regulations to address waste, and local municipalities are getting into the game with increasingly sophisticated recycling programs.

As our environmental policies move beyond establishing emissions standards or cleanup requirements, law and regulation is increasingly focused on creating incentives for business to reduce polluting activities and for consumers to adopt environmentally-friendly habits. Given the desire to reorient long-standing practices, laws not traditionally considered part of the environmental file should also be examined to determine whether they are consistent with promoting "greener" behaviour.

The notion of "green copyright" sounds odd, yet the policy choices found in Bill C-61, Industry Minister Jim Prentice's controversial copyright bill, disappointingly run directly counter to the current emphasis on the environment.

For example, Canadians trash an estimated 184,000 tonnes of old computers, cellphones, and printer cartridges each year, with many of containing potentially hazardous materials such as mercury and lead. In response, the Ontario government recently proposed a new electronic waste fee to encourage recycling of older devices.

Despite attempts to reduce e-waste, Bill C-61 establishes new barriers to the reuse of electronics. If enacted into law, it would prohibit the unlocking of cellphones, forcing many consumers to junk their phones when they switch carriers (there are an estimated 500 million unused cellphones in the United States alone).

Similarly, the U.S. version of Bill C-61 has resulted in lawsuits over the legality of companies that offer to recycle printer ink cartridges. In one lawsuit, Lexmark sued a company that offered recycled cartridge and though it ultimately lost the case, the lawsuit created a strong chill for companies set to enter that marketplace.

Bill C-61 also creates new barriers in the race toward network-based computing, which forms part of the ICT industry's response to the fact that it accounts for more carbon emissions than the airline industry.

Network-based computing – often referred to as "cloud computing" – benefits from the efficiencies provided by large computer server farms that are often situated in proximity to clean energy sources. Network experts argue that Canada could parlay its high-speed optical networks and environmental advantages in the north to become a global cloud computing leader with zero carbon emissions, yet the new copyright bill now stands in the way.

The bill prohibits companies from taking advantage of cloud computing to offer network-based video recording services (as are offered by some U.S. based providers). It also stops consumers from shifting their music, videos, and other content to network-based computers, limiting these new rights to devices physically owned by the consumer. In fact, the bill even blocks consumers from using network-based computer backup since multiple copies of purchased songs or videos is forbidden.

Canadian politicians entered the summer recess expecting to get an earful about the environment from their constituents. To the surprise of many, the digital environment has joined the physical environment as one of the hot-button issues of the summer.

Sources indicate Prentice received more than 20,000 letters criticizing Bill C-61 within weeks of its introduction. Local members of Parliament such as Conservative Bruce Stanton (Simcoe North) and Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal (Newton-North Delta) have scheduled town hall meetings on copyright in response to constituent concerns, while author and broadcaster Tom King, an NDP candidate in the forthcoming Guelph by-election, has emphasized copyright as a key campaign issue.

As Canadians express concern over both their physical and digital environments, many may begin to link the issues by advocating for a greener copyright bill.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/463909





First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.
Randall Stross

AFTER scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for “all publishers” of college textbooks, warning them that “myself and all other students are tired of getting” ripped off. (The contributor’s message included many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.)

All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

Consider the cost of a legitimate copy of one of the textbooks listed at the Pirate Bay, John E. McMurry’s “Organic Chemistry.” A new copy has a list price of $209.95; discounted, it’s about $150; used copies run $110 and up. To many students, those prices are outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by callous professors, who choose which texts are required). Helping themselves to gratis pirated copies may seem natural, especially when hard drives are loaded with lots of other products picked up free.

But many people outside of the students’ enclosed world would call that plain theft.

Compared with music publishers, textbook publishers have been relatively protected from piracy by the considerable trouble entailed in digitizing a printed textbook. Converting the roughly 1,300 pages of “Organic Chemistry” into a digital file requires much more time than ripping a CD.

Time flies, however, if you’re having a good time plotting righteous revenge, and students seem angrier than ever before about the price of textbooks. More students are choosing used books over new; sales of a new edition plunge as soon as used copies are available, in the semester following introduction; and publishers raise prices and shorten intervals between revisions to try to recoup the loss of revenue — and the demand for used books goes up all the more.

Used book sales return nothing to publishers and authors. Digital publishing, however, offers textbook publishers a way to effectively destroy the secondary market for textbooks: they now can shift the entire business model away from selling objects toward renting access to a site with a time-defined subscription, a different thing entirely.

The transition has already begun, even while publishers continue to sell print editions. They are pitching ancillary services that instructors can require students to purchase, just like textbooks, but which are available only online on a subscription basis. Cengage Learning, the publisher of Professor McMurry’s “Organic Chemistry,” packages the new book with a two-semester “access card” to a Cengage site that provides instructors with canned quizzes and students with interactive tutorials.

Ronald G. Dunn, chief executive of Cengage Learning, says he believes the printed book is not about to disappear, because it presents a large amount of material conveniently. Mr. Dunn predicted that textbook publishers were “headed for a hybrid market: print will do what it does best, and digital will do what it does best.”

Whether students will view online subscriptions as a helpful adjunct to the printed textbook or as a self-aggrandizing ploy by publishers remains to be seen.

As textbook publishers try to shift to an online subscription model, they must also stem the threat posed by the sharing of scanned copies of their textbooks by students who use online publishing tools for different purposes. The students who create and give away digital copies are motivated not by financial self-interest but by something more powerful: the sweet satisfaction of revenge.

Mr. Dunn says that online piracy is “a significant issue for us.” His company assigns employees to monitor file-sharing sites, and they find in any given month 200 to 300 Cengage textbook titles being shared. The company sends notices to the sites, demanding that the files be removed and threatening legal action.

Textbook Torrents, a site that opened last year and was wholly dedicated to arranging peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files, closed without explanation this month. But other sites continue to rely upon similar technology for disseminating unauthorized copies of textbooks, facilitating the piece-by-piece movement of copies of files found on the computers of participants.

The Pirate Bay, which is based in Sweden, presents a devilishly fearless challenge to American textbook publishers. It describes itself as an “anticopyright organization” and offers music, movies, television shows and software, as well as e-books like textbooks — not a single item of which, it boasts, has ever been removed at the request of a copyright owner.

When a copyright holder sends the Pirate Bay a removal request, the letter is posted on the site with a sarcastic response, like inquiring where an invoice should be sent for the costs of “Web publishing and hosting services” that Pirate Bay incurred when it posted the notice. I corresponded last week with Peter Sunde, a Pirate Bay founder, asking about evidence of greater interest in textbook titles. He said his site does not collect statistics about downloads because of privacy concerns, but generally, he said, the volume of e-book downloads had increased.

The textbook publishers have abundantly good reasons to promote e-books. When Cengage sells an e-book version of “Organic Chemistry” directly to students, for $109.99, it not only cuts out the middleman but also reduces the supply of used books at the end of the semester.

THE e-book is wrapped with digital rights management, which, history indicates, will be broken sooner or later. But as long as it does work, digital publishing with a subscription model is a much fairer basis for the business. Such an arrangement spreads revenue across multiple semesters, so it isn’t the unfortunate few students in the first semester with a new edition who shoulder the bulk of the burden.

A one-semester e-book subscription does require a change in expectations. Students cannot sell their texts at the end of a course, so buying one can’t be viewed as a short-term investment to be cashed out. But as students show no attachment to textbooks in any case, the loss of access after semester’s end seems likely to go unlamented.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/te...gy/27digi.html





Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?
Motoko Rich

Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online. Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to search and read online.

At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.

Setting Expectations

Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is unrealistic to expect all children to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice” for fun. And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.

Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will not.

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.

Last fall the National Endowment for the Arts issued a sobering report linking flat or declining national reading test scores among teenagers with the slump in the proportion of adolescents who said they read for fun.

According to Department of Education data cited in the report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.

The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.

It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize the most.

“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

What’s Best for Nadia?

Deborah Konyk always believed it was essential for Nadia and her 8-year-old sister, Yashca, to read books. She regularly read aloud to the girls and took them to library story hours.

“Reading opens up doors to places that you probably will never get to visit in your lifetime, to cultures, to worlds, to people,” Ms. Konyk said.

Ms. Konyk, who took a part-time job at a dollar store chain a year and a half ago, said she did not have much time to read books herself. There are few books in the house. But after Yashca was born, Ms. Konyk spent the baby’s nap time reading the Harry Potter novels to Nadia, and she regularly brought home new titles from the library.

Despite these efforts, Nadia never became a big reader. Instead, she became obsessed with Japanese anime cartoons on television and comics like “Sailor Moon.” Then, when she was in the sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net, she turned off the television and started reading online.

Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages. Many of them have elliptical plots and are sprinkled with spelling and grammatical errors. One of her recent favorites was “My absolutely, perfect normal life ... ARE YOU CRAZY? NOT!,” a story based on the anime series “Beyblade.”

In one scene the narrator, Aries, hitches a ride with some masked men and one of them pulls a knife on her. “Just then I notice (Like finally) something sharp right in front of me,” Aries writes. “I gladly took it just like that until something terrible happen ....”

Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.”

“So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”

Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.

The simplest argument for why children should read in their leisure time is that it makes them better readers. According to federal statistics, students who say they read for fun once a day score significantly higher on reading tests than those who say they never do.

Reading skills are also valued by employers. A 2006 survey by the Conference Board, which conducts research for business leaders, found that nearly 90 percent of employers rated “reading comprehension” as “very important” for workers with bachelor’s degrees. Department of Education statistics also show that those who score higher on reading tests tend to earn higher incomes.

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.

Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading skills. A recent study of more than 700 low-income, mostly Hispanic and black sixth through 10th graders in Detroit found that those students read more on the Web than in any other medium, though they also read books. The only kind of reading that related to higher academic performance was frequent novel reading, which predicted better grades in English class and higher overall grade point averages.

Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.

One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”

Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.

“The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?” said Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. “The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it.”

Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.

But This Is Reading Too

Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.

“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”

Zachary Sims, the Old Greenwich, Conn., teenager, often stays awake until 2 or 3 in the morning reading articles about technology or politics — his current passions — on up to 100 Web sites.

“On the Internet, you can hear from a bunch of people,” said Zachary, who will attend Columbia University this fall. “They may not be pedigreed academics. They may be someone in their shed with a conspiracy theory. But you would weigh that.”

Though he also likes to read books (earlier this year he finished, and loved, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand), Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”

The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately, corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills can be cognitively demanding.

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.

Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.

“Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented,” said Donna E. Alvermann, a professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia. “Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today.”

A Lifelong Struggle

In the case of Hunter Gaudet, the Internet has helped him feel more comfortable with a new kind of reading. A varsity lacrosse player in Somers, Conn., Hunter has struggled most of his life to read. After learning he was dyslexic in the second grade, he was placed in special education classes and a tutor came to his home three hours a week. When he entered high school, he dropped the special education classes, but he still reads books only when forced, he said.

In a book, “they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed,” Hunter said. “Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.”

When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites. Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget.

Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”

Karen Gaudet, Hunter’s mother, a regional manager for a retail chain who said she read two or three business books a week, hopes Hunter will eventually discover a love for books. But she is confident that he has the reading skills he needs to succeed.

“Based on where technology is going and the world is going,” she said, “he’s going to be able to leverage it.”

When he was in seventh grade, Hunter was one of 89 students who participated in a study comparing performance on traditional state reading tests with a specially designed Internet reading test. Hunter, who scored in the lowest 10 percent on the traditional test, spent 12 weeks learning how to use the Web for a science class before taking the Internet test. It was composed of three sets of directions asking the students to search for information online, determine which sites were reliable and explain their reasoning.

Hunter scored in the top quartile. In fact, about a third of the students in the study, led by Professor Leu, scored below average on traditional reading tests but did well on the Internet assessment.

The Testing Debate

To date, there have been few large-scale appraisals of Web skills. The Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, has developed a digital literacy test known as iSkills that requires students to solve informational problems by searching for answers on the Web. About 80 colleges and a handful of high schools have administered the test so far.

But according to Stephen Denis, product manager at ETS, of the more than 20,000 students who have taken the iSkills test since 2006, only 39 percent of four-year college freshmen achieved a score that represented “core functional levels” in Internet literacy.

Now some literacy experts want the federal tests known as the nation’s report card to include a digital reading component. So far, the traditionalists have held sway: The next round, to be administered to fourth and eighth graders in 2009, will test only print reading comprehension.

Mary Crovo of the National Assessment Governing Board, which creates policies for the national tests, said several members of a committee that sets guidelines for the reading tests believed large numbers of low-income and rural students might not have regular Internet access, rendering measurements of their online skills unfair.

Some simply argue that reading on the Internet is not something that needs to be tested — or taught.

“Nobody has taught a single kid to text message,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English and a member of the testing guidelines committee. “Kids are smart. When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.”

Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford who lobbied for an Internet component as chairman of the reading test guidelines committee, disagreed. Students “are going to grow up having to be highly competent on the Internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to make them discover how to be highly competent if we can teach them.”

The United States is diverging from the policies of some other countries. Next year, for the first time, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools.

Even those who are most concerned about the preservation of books acknowledge that children need a range of reading experiences. “Some of it is the informal reading they get in e-mails or on Web sites,” said Gay Ivey, a professor at James Madison University who focuses on adolescent literacy. “I think they need it all.”

Web junkies can occasionally be swept up in a book. After Nadia read Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night” in her freshman English class, Ms. Konyk brought home another Holocaust memoir, “I Have Lived a Thousand Years,” by Livia Bitton-Jackson.

Nadia was riveted by heartbreaking details of life in the concentration camps. “I was trying to imagine this and I was like, I can’t do this,” she said. “It was just so — wow.”

Hoping to keep up the momentum, Ms. Konyk brought home another book, “Silverboy,” a fantasy novel. Nadia made it through one chapter before she got engrossed in the Internet fan fiction again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/bo...eading.html?hp





Black Radio on Obama Is Left’s Answer to Limbaugh
Jim Rutenberg

Warren Ballentine, one of black talk radio’s new stars, was on a tear against Senator John McCain as he broadcast from the Greenbriar Mall here last week, blithely dismissing Mr. McCain’s kind words about Senator Barack Obama at the recent N.A.A.C.P. national convention.

“He came out talking about how good of a race Barack Obama was running, and how proud he was of Barack,” Mr. Ballentine said. “You know he went back home and said, ‘I can’t believe I spoke in front of all those Negroes today!’ ”

“He was pandering to the crowd, talking about how he felt when Martin Luther King Jr. died,” Mr. Ballentine went on. “However, he didn’t vote for the holiday of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Rush Limbaugh, meet your black liberal counterprogramming. Mr. Ballentine is one of the many African-American radio hosts and commentators who are aggressively advocating for Mr. Obama’s election on black-oriented radio stations daily.

Since Mr. Limbaugh first flexed his tonsils two decades ago, Democrats have publicly worried about their lack of an answer to him and his imitators, who have proven so adept at motivating conservative Republicans to go to the polls, especially for President Bush.

Now it is Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who has a harmonious chorus of broadcast supporters addressing a vital part of his coalition, feeding and reflecting the excitement blacks have for his candidacy in general. Mr. Obama is getting support from white liberal talk radio hosts as well, but the backing he is getting from black radio hosts could be especially helpful to his campaign’s efforts to increase black turnout and raise historically low voter registration enough to change the math of presidential elections in battlegrounds and traditionally Republican states like this one.

“Urban stations can be in ’08 what Rush Limbaugh delivered for conservatives a generation ago,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has a two-year-old radio program that is now syndicated on stations throughout the country, including in states like Georgia, Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina. “If you look at the political map of where our shows are, it matches the gap of unregistered voters.”

Mr. Limbaugh and other conservative hosts generally support Mr. McCain, though perhaps with less enthusiasm than they displayed for the man he hopes to replace.

When it comes to criticism from black radio hosts like Mr. Ballentine, Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said, “John McCain believes every person is entitled to their opinion, no matter how outrageous.”

“But John McCain is an inclusive candidate,” Mr. Bounds added, “and he will be the president of all Americans.” (Mr. Ballentine was correct that Mr. McCain voted against the Martin Luther King holiday, in 1983 — but Mr. McCain later expressed regret and supported the holiday in his home state.)

While debate may continue over whether Mr. Obama is drawing an inordinate share of attention from mainstream news and entertainment outlets, there is generally little pretense of balance in major African-American media outlets. More often than not, the Obama campaign is discussed as the home team.

Mr. Obama conducted frequent interviews with black radio personalities during the primary season, appearing on programs like “The Tom Joyner Morning Show,” where his swing through the Middle East was referred to as a “pre-victory tour” on Friday; the “Michael Baisden Show,” where the host has joked that the savings from the gasoline tax suspension Mr. McCain supports would help him buy a pack of “Now & Laters” candy, and “The Steve Harvey Morning Show.”

Those three shows report reaching a combined audience of nearly 20 million, though industry analysts say exact, national numbers are hard to peg and programs generally are known to exaggerate their audiences.

The favoritism extends beyond talk radio.

This month’s Ebony magazine lists Mr. Obama first among the “25 Coolest Brothers of All Time,” alongside Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. Caribbean stations play songs about him, like “Barack Obama” by Cocoa Tea and “Barack the Magnificent” by the calypso star Mighty Sparrow. “We spin them three, four times a day,” said Sir Rockwell, the morning D.J. at WDJA in Delray Beach, Fla.

Earlier this year, attendees of the Black Entertainment Television network’s annual awards program, including the stars Alicia Keys and P. Diddy, turned it into an impromptu rally for the candidate (“Obama, y’all!,” Ms. Keys shouted upon receiving an award before a television audience of nearly six million people).

The network is planning to show Mr. Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention live, but not Mr. McCain’s. “This is an historic occasion, so that demands some special treatment from us,” Debra L. Lee, the BET chairman, said of the Democratic convention. Her smaller rival, TV One, said it would not cover the Republican convention at all.

Within the black media, there have been questions about whether Mr. Obama is keeping his distance from them and their audiences to avoid being too identified by race. Some black radio hosts now complain that he is avoiding them at worst and taking them for granted at best as he courts white voters through more mainstream outlets.

“There is the appearance he will go to a Larry King before he will go on black radio in, say, Arkansas,” said Bev Smith, a black talk radio pioneer based in Pittsburgh. She placed the blame on Mr. Obama’s staff, not the candidate, who has occasionally visited her program. The Obama campaign has come under similar criticism from some members of the major trade group for black newspaper owners, the National News Publishers Association, after Mr. Obama declined invitations to appear at the group’s events.

Aides to Mr. Obama said he has been busy transitioning to a general election footing, part of which has included outreach to other voter groups less familiar with Mr. Obama. But, earlier this week the campaign hired a new communications strategist, Corey Ealons, to focus exclusively on black media and help with an intensified effort to take advantage of their excitement about Mr. Obama’s candidacy.

“As Senator Obama expands his outreach to voters during the general election, African-American media will continue to be a very important part of expressing his priorities for the community,” Mr. Ealons said. Mr. Obama is to appear Sunday at a gathering of minority journalists in Chicago called the Unity ’08 Convention. Mr. McCain declined an invitation to speak to the group.

Whatever criticism the black media has of the Obama campaign, it has generally not shown up heavily on the air or in print. Earlier this year, the PBS and public radio host Tavis Smiley, one of the best known black radio and television voices, resigned as a regular commentator on Mr. Joyner’s show after receiving a hail of angry e-mail messages and phone calls for questioning Mr. Obama’s commitment to black issues.

One caller to Mr. Ballentine’s show last week laid out some boundaries for him, as well: “All of us coming down on him and criticizing him before we give him a chance, you know, that might hurt his campaign — let’s get him in there first,” the caller said. Mr. Ballentine responded, “Brother, I would never criticize him — until he’s in the White House.”

Mr. Ballentine, who says he has an audience of three million people nationally, usually broadcasts from his home town of Durham, N.C. His special appearance at the mall here — with a predominantly black clientele — provided a vivid example of just how helpful hosts like him can be.

“Even if you are a convicted felon, you can go and vote,” he told his listeners, although the laws vary from state to state. “We need to be registering people with tremendous numbers.”

At each commercial break, he invited his local audience to come to the mall to register; he did not mention that the man signing up voters was an Obama staff member.

Mr. Ballentine has plenty of company in the registration drive. “I really push to get out the vote,” Ms. Smith, the host from Pittsburgh, said. Ms. Smith said Mr. Obama could turbo-charge the efforts by appearing on black radio more, though she understood the complexities.

“Barack Obama is walking a thin line because whites will accuse him of being too black and blacks will accuse him of being too white,” she said. “I think he’s a godsend — whether he’s on my show or not, I’m going to talk about him every day.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/us...7radio.html?hp





Merger of XM and Sirius a Step Closer to Approval
Tim Arango

The Federal Communications Commission was set to approve a merger between XM and Sirius on Thursday, a move that would end a nearly 18-month review of a deal that would essentially create a monopoly in satellite radio.

Late Wednesday, the F.C.C. reached a consent decree with the two companies involving violations of commission rules, an agreement that should pave the way for formal commission approval as early as Thursday.

“I’m optimistic that this is a significant obstacle we can take off the table and move ahead very shortly with the merger,” Kevin J. Martin, the chairman, said in a telephone interview Thursday morning.

The violations involved receivers in cars that were not compliant with F.C.C. rules. XM will pay a $17.5 million fine, while Sirius will pay $2.2 million. The difference in the fines is because XM, according to Mr. Martin, continued to flout commission rules after being notified they were in violation. “That’s a significant violation of our own rules,” he said.

On Wednesday, Deborah Taylor Tate, a Republican member of the F.C.C., appeared ready to vote in favor of the deal, which would break a deadlock along party lines among the other four commissioners. She would join Mr. Martin in supporting the merger, with certain conditions.

Jonathan S. Adelstein, a Democratic F.C.C. commissioner, on Wednesday voted against the merger, arguing that it was not in the public interest to let the only two companies in a particular business combine.

Both XM and Sirius operate satellites that beam radio signals to subscribers, who must pay for the service; each offers a menu of stations with a much broader geographic reach than terrestrial radio.

In March, the Justice Department, which reviews deals on antitrust grounds, approved the proposed $5 billion merger. Agency officials said they did not view the deal as creating a monopoly because of the many alternatives in audio programming, like iPods and HD Radio.

The combination of Sirius and XM would create one satellite radio company with about 17 million subscribers and programming that would run the gamut from Howard Stern to Oprah Winfrey, Major League Baseball to Martha Stewart.

Although the F.C.C. made no announcement on Wednesday, Mr. Adelstein’s public comments suggested that the commission was close to approval.

“I was hoping to forge a bipartisan solution that would offer consumers more diversity in programming, better price protection, greater choices among innovative devices and real competition with digital radio,” he said in a statement. “Instead, it appears they’re going to get a monopoly with window dressing.”

Patrick Reilly, a spokesman for Sirius, did not return a call seeking comment. Nathaniel Brown, the spokesman for XM, declined to comment. A spokesman at the F.C.C. declined to comment, and Ms. Tate did not immediately return a call for comment.

While no formal announcement was made, many saw the deal as a fait accompli.

“As expected, the Federal Communications vote on the XM-Sirius deal is going to be a 3-2 vote, with Republican Commissioner Deborah Tate casting the decisive vote, most probably, in our view, in favor of the transaction,” wrote Blair Levin, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus and a former chief of staff at the F.C.C., in a research note on Wednesday.

With the final go-ahead from the government, the deal could close within days, giving a significant victory to Mel Karmazin, the chief executive of Sirius and the person who would run the combined company. A longtime media and entertainment executive — he previously ran CBS and was president of Viacom — Mr. Karmazin was the chief architect of the merger with XM.

Among the conditions that both companies had already accepted were à la carte programming that would give consumers flexibility in which channels they pay for, the permission for any electronics company to develop devices that would receive the service and a price freeze for three years.

Shares in both companies rose on Wednesday in anticipation of approval. XM rose 94 cents, or 10.3 percent, to close at $10.04. Sirius closed at $2.68, up 30 cents, or 12.6 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/bu...a/25radio.html





Music Industry Zealous in Tracking Tune Thieves
Thomas Kaplan

Ellen Saylor, a 70-year-old retiree who lives in Clearwater, does not exactly fit the profile of someone who might steal music on the Internet.

Yet America's largest record companies are suing her in federal court this month on accusations of illegally downloading music she didn't buy, a charge that has quietly ensnared dozens in the bay area in recent years, much to their fright. "I don't even know how to use a computer," Saylor says. "How could they say I'm doing something like that?"

Saylor stands to lose thousands of dollars if the record companies prevail, and she is not alone. With little fanfare, record companies are filing thousands of lawsuits per year across the country in an effort to discourage the illegal downloading they say has cost the music industry billions.

And just in this part of Florida, judges are awarding them hundreds of thousands of dollars for their claims.

Scores have been sued in Florida's Middle District since 2003, and facing the prospect of even larger costs in legal fees, at least 50 of them have not even bothered to fight the lawsuits in court, according to a review of records by the St. Petersburg Times. Judges have ordered them to pay the record companies a total of more than $300,000 in damages.

That doesn't include the many people who settle with the record companies rather than face a lawsuit. Attorneys who have handled the cases say there is little else for defendants to do but settle or simply allow the court to rule against them, with legal costs prohibitive and the prospect of a lengthy court battle with the billion-dollar record industry daunting.

Lawsuits were filed this month against Saylor and five others in the area, including 21-year-old Monika Pierzchlewicz, a student at the University of South Florida.

Pierzchlewicz's mother, Grazyna, said when she first learned of the lawsuit, she wanted to fight. But then she went online and read about other cases, including that of a Minnesota woman who decided to challenge her own copyright infringement lawsuit and was found liable by a jury last fall for $220,000 in damages.

That changed her tune. "I'm just so scared," she said this week. "I think we're just probably going to settle. I don't even want to go to court."

Her reaction was hardly unique among people facing the suit, according to Michael Wasylik, a Dade City lawyer who has handled several "file sharing" lawsuits in the bay area.

"The primary impact of these lawsuits is sheer terror in not only the targets, but their families," he said. "For college students especially, I get phone calls from mothers and fathers who are angry, who are upset, who are confused, who are terrified at what's going to happen to their children."

But the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group that represents the record companies, says the lawsuits are not about intimidation or making money, but rather the principle that stealing music on the Internet is exactly that — stealing.
"The reality of it is that nobody wants to get caught, and most people complain when they are," said Liz Kennedy, a spokeswoman for the RIAA. "Bringing lawsuits was never the music industry's first choice, rather a small piece of a large puzzle ultimately aimed at encouraging fans to go legal."

More than half of all college students download free music illegally, amounting to as many as 1.3-billion illegal downloads annually, according to studies cited by the record companies. To fight back, the RIAA monitors online file-sharing traffic and looks for copyrighted work being shared; when such material is found, investigators determine the user who was sharing the music.

Then they take action. The RIAA has filed more than 30,000 lawsuits since 2003 and has even set up a Web site where people can pay their settlements via credit card.

So that's what many people do. "It's impossible to fight it," Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who is a leading critic of the record industry's suits, said in a telephone interview. "They have no good options. They can't afford to pay for lengthy litigation; they can't afford the settlement."

That was the predicament facing Dunedin resident Morgan Halloway, a 23-year-old senior at St. Petersburg College. Halloway admits she downloaded music illegally — just like all her friends, she said — but never expected to face the wrath of the record companies.

"Your first thought is, 'How am I going to pay for this, am I going to go to jail?' " she recalled this week. "I didn't mean to do anything wrong. Why (sue) me, when so many people do it?"

Halloway said she tried to settle with the record companies but could not afford the $5,000 fee they demanded. "I tried to explain to them, 'Hey, I'm a full-time student, can I do a payment plan?'" she said. "They said, 'Well, that's not good enough for us.' "

So she did nothing, and a federal judge in April entered a $7,500 judgment against her, one of dozens piling up in federal court here. (Money made from the lawsuits is reinvested into education programs and deterrence efforts, Kennedy said. The court awards depend, in part, on the number of songs a person is accused of getting illegally.)

Halloway's father, John, 48, a retired Pinellas County sheriff's deputy, still fumes about the ordeal. "This is a record company shakedown, is what it is," he said. "It's time that it stops."

Saylor, meanwhile, didn't even realize she was being sued until a reporter telephoned her this week. The record companies say they caught her sharing more than 1,800 songs — including tracks by Destiny's Child, Kenny Chesney and Christina Aguilera — last summer.

A retired housekeeper of limited means, Saylor said she has a computer at home that a granddaughter has occasionally used for schoolwork, and nothing else. Faced with the lawsuit, she says she isn't sure what she'll do next.

"I've worked for everything I've got, and I don't understand why people are out there trying to rob you," she said. "I never thought anything like this would happen."

Times researchers Shirl Kennedy and John Martin contributed to this report. Thomas Kaplan can be reached at (813) 226-3404 or tkaplan@sptimes.com.


>>FAST FACTS

How illegal file-sharing works

In general, record companies monitor peer-to-peer file sharing networks online — accessed through programs like Lime Wire and, before it was shut down, the original Napster — to see if copyright songs are available for download. The programs allow people to avail their music collection to fellow Internet users to download, and to search for songs (and movies and TV shows) to download for their own enjoyment. But people who share their music can be identified by their internet protocol (IP) address, which can then be traced to reveal their full identity and allow the record companies to file lawsuits.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/article709473.ece





Man Receives Suspended Sentence for File Sharing
The Yomiuri Shimbun

The Kyoto District Court sentenced a man to 18 months in prison Thursday, suspended for three years, for distributing popular TV animation footage using the Share file-sharing software without the permission of the copyright holders.

Prosecutors had sought an 18-month prison sentence for Kazuhiro Maki, 34, a former company employee of Kawasaki, over violations of the Copyright Law.

According to the ruling, Maki infringed on copyrights from April to May by helping an indefinite number of Share users download animation footage originally aired on TV.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national...25TDY02304.htm





Serious YouTube Test of Copyright Law
Bob Egelko

A woman who posted a home video on YouTube of her 13-month-old son dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" squared off Friday against entertainment giant Universal Music Corp. in a federal court case that tests copyright law.

The issue in Stephanie Lenz's lawsuit against Universal is whether the owner of the rights to a creative work that's being used without permission can order the Web host to remove it without first considering whether the infringement was actually a legal fair use - a small or innocuous replication that couldn't affect the market for the original work.

Lenz's lawyers, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say her 29-second video, with fuzzy camerawork and unclear sound, was such an obvious noncommercial fair use that Universal should have to reimburse her for the costs of taking it out of circulation for more than a month last year.

The company's lawyers say the 1998 federal law that authorized copyright-holders to issue takedown orders didn't require any such inquiry - in fact, they argue, there's no such thing as an obvious fair use.

No court has ever addressed the issue, said U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose, who is presiding over the case.

Lenz, a writer and editor from Gallitzin, Pa., used her digital camera to take the video of her son, Holden, dancing to "Let's Go Crazy" on a home CD player in February 2007, and she posted the file on YouTube for family and friends, her lawyers said.

Four months later, Universal, which owns the rights to the song, ordered YouTube to remove the video and nearly 200 others involving compositions by Prince. Copyright owners gained that power under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows them to remove Web postings that they believe to be unauthorized duplicates without having to sue for infringement.

Lenz, exercising her rights under the same law, notified YouTube several weeks later that her video is legal and ordered it restored. YouTube complied after waiting two weeks, as required by law, to see whether Universal would sue Lenz for copyright infringement - a suit that would have allowed her to claim fair use as a defense. Lenz then sued Universal in Northern California, YouTube's home district, claiming the takedown order was an abuse of the copyright law.

"There must be some requirement that a copyright owner both consider fair uses and determine honestly whether they exist before sending their (takedown) notice," Lenz's lawyer, Corynne McSherry, said in court papers. She said the video, which focuses on the toddler and contains only a snippet of the song, couldn't have any conceivable impact on the market Universal's copyright was meant to protect.

But Fogel, at Friday's hearing, said he was concerned that requiring copyright holders to consider the possibility of fair use before ordering a takedown puts judges in the business of "trying to read their minds" and seems to be an expansion of the 1998 law.

Universal's lawyer, Kelly Klaus, argued that even brief homemade videos have a potential commercial effect if they proliferate on a site like YouTube and that Lenz's posting flies in the face of the 1998 law, which allows copyright holders to order removal of work believed to be an infringement.

Fogel observed, however, that the law is "intended to prevent misuse of takedown notices."

The Lenz video can be viewed at http://links.sfgate.com/ZEGD





Wife's Rant on YouTube Falls Foul of Judge
Ed Pilkington

A British actor who took her battle against her millionaire husband to the internet, posting videos that lambasted him on YouTube and which gained an audience of millions, has been ordered to leave her New York home by a judge who has ruled her behaviour was "spousal abuse".

Tricia Walsh-Smith, 52, whose previous claim to fame had been bit parts in the Benny Hill Show and a play she wrote called Bonkers, had the YouTube videos professionally filmed in the Park Avenue apartment she has shared for 13 years with her husband. In them she claimed Philip Smith, a Broadway producer, 77, was trying to evict her and leave her penniless.

In a six-minute rant, she railed against "male chauvinist pigs" and exhorted "woman warriors" to flock to her cause. She also revealed embarrassing details, notably that he had a stash of the impotence drug Viagra despite the fact they never had sex. The videos attracted more than 4m hits on YouTube.

Smith sued for divorce on the grounds that the videos were a form of spousal abuse, and this week Judge Harold Beeler of New York state supreme court agreed.

He said Walsh-Smith had embarked on a "callous campaign to embarrass and humiliate her husband and his daughters. Smith has been publicly humiliated to an unprecedented extent." Walsh-Smith must quit the apartment within a month. Smith in turn is bound to pay her $750,000 (£375,000) under the terms of their pre-nuptial agreement. "I'm terribly sorry it came to this, but I'm obviously happy with the result," Smith said. Walsh-Smith insists she has no regrets about her dalliance with marital meltdown via the web: "It brought attention to my plight and the plight of a lot of other women."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/23/usa.youtube





Woman Accused in MySpace Suicide Case Seeks to Have All Charges Dismissed
Peter Whoriskey

The lawyer for a Missouri mother accused of creating a fake MySpace page to harass a 13-year-old girl is arguing that charges should be tossed out of court because if she is guilty, then so are millions of Internet users every day.

Lori Drew became the focus of national outrage after the girl committed suicide. Court papers filed yesterday seize on a possible weakness in the prosecution case that has been noted by several legal experts since the May indictment: While Drew's alleged behavior may have been wrong, there is no legal sanction against it.

In charging Drew, prosecutors relied on their belief that she, like countless others on social networks such as MySpace, created a fake identity -- in this case, a 16-year-old boy, "Josh Evans," who flirted with and then rejected 13-year-old Megan Meier.

Because the false profile violated MySpace policy, prosecutors charged Drew with four counts based on her accessing a computer system "without authorization." In doing so, they relied on a statute commonly wielded against hackers and information thieves.

Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization and via interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

"The government, in its zeal to charge Lori Drew with something, anything, has tried to criminalize everyday, ordinary conduct: the wayward or misuse of a social-network website," defense attorney H. Dean Steward wrote in a motion to dismiss that was filed yesterday.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office declined to comment.

Drew's alleged harassment of Meier is often cited as an example of boorish behavior on the Web, where the freedom of electronic communication has often devolved into vitriol and vulgarity.

But whether such behavior can be or should be legally regulated is disputed.

Prosecutors say Drew created the "Josh Evans" identity in order to strike up a flirty conversation with Meier, who had been friends with her daughter. After a few weeks of chatting, "Josh Evans" began to send Megan nasty messages. Finally, her father said, one suggested that "the world would be a better place'' without her.

In October 2006, soon after allegedly receiving the message, Meier hanged herself in her bedroom.

The resulting public outrage led state and federal prosecutors in Missouri to examine the case.

After a meeting in March 2007, "it was decided that the case should be declined for federal prosecution," according to an internal memo from the FBI's St. Louis office.

Later, however, federal prosecutors in the Los Angeles area, where MySpace's servers are, picked up the case.

"To my knowledge, it is the first case of its kind in the nation,'' U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien told reporters. "But when an adult violates terms on a MySpace account to gain information that creates this type of reaction, it caused this office to take a really hard look.''

While acknowledging that public sentiment runs against Drew's purported Web behavior, some legal experts and civil liberties groups argue that the prosecution's case would mean that millions of people who violate the terms of service at the Web sites they visit could become criminally liable.

Many people gloss over or simply skip the legal documents they encounter on the Web. But in the Drew case, the essence of the prosecution is that by violating MySpace's terms-of-service agreement, she was accessing the MySpace system "without authorization."

"The problem with this case is it makes a criminal out of virtually everybody online," said Mark Rasch, a former computer crime prosecutor at the Department of Justice and now a privacy and security consultant. "This was a hackers' statute -- a break-in statute. When we start to apply it to other conduct, it puts other people's liberty at risk," he said.

"The conduct that is abhorrent is leading this girl on -- and if they want to prohibit that, they should pass a cyber-harassment law," Rasch said.

Experts in the field also said that if violating terms of service is a crime, then the Web sites that write the agreements essentially could function as lawmakers or prosecutors.

"The possibilities for abuse are endless because Web site terms of service are arbitrary," said Orin S. Kerr, a former federal computer crime prosecutor and now a George Washington University law professor, who has provided informal advice to the defense. "A computer owner could set up a public Web site; announce that only Christians can visit; and then refer for prosecution any Jews, Muslims or atheists who visit the Web site out of curiosity."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072301542.html





Facebook Libel Case Damages Won

Businessman wins first ever libel case involving Facebook
BBC

A businessman whose personal details were "laid bare" in fake entries on the Facebook social networking website has won a libel case at the High Court.

Mathew Firsht was awarded £22,000 in damages against an old school friend, Grant Raphael, who created the profile.

The judge ruled that Mr Raphael's defence - that the entry was created by mischievous party gate-crashers at his flat - was "built on lies".

The profiles were on Facebook for 16 days until they were taken down.

Mr Firsht accused Mr Raphael of creating a false personal profile, and a company profile called "Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?".

Mr Raphael said that "strangers" who attended an impromptu party at his house in Hampstead in North London sneaked off to a spare bedroom and created the profiles on his PC.

Deputy Judge Richard Parkes QC described his claim as "utterly far-fetched".

The judge heard that the private information concerned Mr Firsht's whereabouts, activities, birthday and relationship status and falsely indicated his sexual orientation and political views.

Bearing a grudge

Mr Firsht complained about allegations that he owed substantial sums of money which he had repeatedly avoided paying by lying, and that he and his company were not to be trusted.

He was awarded £15,000 for libel and £2,000 for breach of privacy and his company, which finds audiences for TV and radio shows and provides warm-up services for live audiences, including the evictions on Big Brother, was awarded £5,000 for libel.

The two former friends went to school together in Brighton but fell out around six years ago over a business dispute.

Mr Firsht accused Mr Raphael of bearing a grudge against him and of creating the false Facebook entry with the aim of causing him anxiety and embarrassment.

"He is plainly a businessman of single-minded drive and dedication, and he did not strike me as being the kind of man to waste valuable time on ancient disputes," the judge said.

By contrast, Mr Raphael's company went into voluntary liquidation and, by the time the present dispute arose, "Mr Firsht was prospering and highly successful, and Mr Raphael was not".

The judge said Mr Firsht would have accepted an apology if Mr Raphael had offered one at an early stage, thus avoiding the distress and expense of litigation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7523128.stm





Scrabble Maker Hasbro Sues Over 'Scrabulous'
Declan McCullagh

This is the lawsuit we all knew was coming: Hasbro, which sells the Scrabble board game, has sued to shut down the wildly popular knockoff on Facebook called Scrabulous.

Hasbro on Thursday filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit in New York against the creators of the ad-supported Scrabulous application, which boasts an astonishing half-million daily users.

Mark Blecher, general manager for Hasbro Digital Media, said in a telephone interview that his employer's goal is to promote its authentic, legitimate Facebook application. "This is theft of intellectual property," Blecher said of Scrabulous. "It's really no different from when the recording industry faced the issue of folks posting music on sites like Napster and letting them copy it for free."

Blecher said that Hasbro waited, "in deference to the fans," until it launched its official Scrabble Facebook app earlier this month. That was created by Electronic Arts and is used by a mere 8,900 daily users.

The lawsuit names as defendants Kolkata, India-based RJ Softwares, its CEO Rajat Agarwalla, and Jayant Agarwalla, who launched Scrabulous two years ago. It asks the court to yank the Scrabulous game from Facebook, disable the Scrabulous.com domain name, and grant Hasbro damages and attorneys fees.

It's unclear how the lawsuit will proceed; the defendants could simply ignore it if they no U.S. assets to seize, and aren't worried about Indian courts enforcing a default judgment. RJ Softwares did not respond to queries on Thursday.

Hasbro combined the lawsuit with a notice to Facebook invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's takedown provision. Facebook also did not immediately respond to queries. As of approximately 2 p.m. PT on Thursday, the Scrabulous application was still listed on Facebook.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-999...=2547-1_3-0-20





Turnabout

Facebook Sues German Rival
Natalie Weinstein

Social-networking giant Facebook has filed a copyright infringement suit against a German counterpart, according to the Financial Times.

StudiVZ is accused of "copying the look, feel, features and services" of Facebook, including its "wall" feature, according to the complaint filed Friday in California, the Financial Times reported.

The suit asserts that the sites are so similar that StudiVZ simply replaced Facebook's "blue color scheme with a red one."

According to StudiVZ's site, the Berlin-based company has 10 million users. The site was purchased last year by German publisher Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck.

Facebook launched its own German language version in March.

CNET News could not immediately reach StudiVZ for comment.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9995188-93.html





Man (27) Prosecuted Over Obscene Bebo Messages

A man has been prosecuted for putting offensive and obscene messages on social networking site Bebo in what is believed to be the first case of its kind to come before the Irish courts.

Paul Anthony Matthews (27) posted what a judge described as "outrageous" messages on a teenage girl's site on January 31 this year.

Matthews, of Carnbeg, Doylesfort Road, Dundalk, agreed to pay the victim €3,000 instead of going to jail.

The pioneering case was brought under Section 13 (I) of the Post Office Amendment Act 1951 for sending offensive or indecent material by means of telecommunication.

Matthews, a father of one, admitted posting explicit and abusive messages on the teenager's site. The victim cannot be identified because of a court order.

Dundalk District Court was told that Matthews had a previous disagreement with the then 16-year-old and posted the messages on her Bebo page. The teenager had made a complaint about Matthews to gardai regarding another matter and the Bebo messages were investigated.

Arrested

Matthews was arrested and admitted when questioned that he had put up the messages on her site.

Judge Conal Gibbons said this was the first of its type he had ever had to deal with.

He was outraged by what Matthews had written about the girl "for all the world to see".

He added: "It's a shocking state of affairs that this rubbish can be put up on sites."

He was shown the messages and he said they "certainly were offensive and damaging".

"The owners don't look at the pages and edit them. They wash their hands and say it's not their business," he said.

"It strikes me that they should take responsibility but that doesn't take away from the culpability of the defendant."

The judge praised the gardai for taking the matter seriously. He said that while most people used modern communication for positive ends, some, like Matthews, used it "to do evil".

He noted that Matthews had admitted his involvement and had pleaded guilty. He placed Matthews under the supervision of the probation service and the case was adjourned to June 3, 2009 for the compensation to be paid.
http://www.independent.ie/national-n...s-1399572.html





My Son, the Blogger: An M.D. Trades Medicine for Apple Rumors
Brian Stelter

For eight years, Arnold Kim has been trading gossip, rumor and facts about Apple, the notoriously secretive computer company, on his Web site, MacRumors.com.

It had been a hobby — albeit a time-consuming one — while Dr. Kim earned his medical degree. He kept at it as he completed his medical training and began diagnosing patients’ kidney problems. Dr. Kim’s Web site now attracts more than 4.4 million people and 40 million page views a month, according to Quantcast, making it one of the most popular technology Web sites.

It is enough to make Dr. Kim hang up his stethoscope. This month he stopped practicing medicine and started blogging full time.

“In some ways I’ve neglected the site for so long,” he said in a telephone interview. “Now that I actually have a chance to work on it full time, there’s a good chance it can grow more.”

Dr. Kim epitomizes the home-grown publishers whose wealth has been enabled by the Internet. Although few of the millions of blogs ever make their creators rich, the ones that do provide all the incentive necessary to fuel the medium.

A question Dr. Kim often fields from friends and associates is, “How does that make money?” He answered the question in an entry on his personal blog last month. It can all be “boiled down to one simple accomplishment: building traffic,” he wrote. “That’s it. If you have a site that attracts a lot of visitors, you will be able to make money. On the Internet, traffic equals power, which subsequently equals money.”

When Dr. Kim, who lives just outside Richmond, Va., began blogging about Apple in 2000, the word blog had not entered the lexicon. Creating anything beyond a bare-bones Web site required programming skills and tech knowledge. Dr. Kim, a computer science major at Columbia University, had the know-how. He also knew that almost everyone enjoys an advance look at future products.

He envisioned MacRumors as an aggregator of all the rumors and hints that appeared on message boards and other Web sites. “The rumor reports have probably been more right than wrong over the years,“ he said.

Given Apple’s penchant for secrecy, the company inspires a lot of speculation in the technology industry. Apple enthusiasts dissect every product rumor the way political pundits do political sound bites.

As one of the original Web sites about Apple, MacRumors was well positioned to become a destination for users and a clearinghouse for gossip. MacRumors “knows more about Apple than Apple management does,” the blog 24/7 Wall St. declared last spring.

The site placed MacRumors No. 2 on a list of the “25 most valuable blogs,” right behind Gawker Media and ahead of The Huffington Post, PerezHilton.com, and TechCrunch. Two of the other tech-oriented blogs on its list, Ars Technica and PaidContent, were sold earlier this year, reportedly for sums in excess of $25 million.

Ars Technica reaches an estimated three million people a month, according to Quantcast. PaidContent and its three associated blogs reach about half a million people, but earn additional revenue through conferences and seminars. Since MacRumors attracts a far larger audience, those valuations would suggest Dr. Kim has created a very valuable piece of Web real estate.

Dr. Kim is not a millionaire blogger yet, and given the slumping online advertising market, he faces some hurdles as he expands the site. But he has reason to be optimistic.

Stepping away from medicine felt somewhat strange, he admits. Dr. Kim was bringing home a six-figure income as a doctor, but he recognized that blogging was becoming more lucrative. He says the site also yields a six-figure income for him.

About three years ago, through a combination of Google text advertising, banner ads and commissions on product sales, MacRumors started turning a substantial profit. While Apple is obviously not an advertiser, other technology-oriented companies are, including Verizon, the online audio-book store Audible.com and the information technology products company CDW.

Still, he hesitated to make it a full-time job because he enjoyed medicine — and he had invested almost $200,000 in his education. But he finally concluded that “on paper, it was an easy decision.” He also had a practical reason for wanting the ability to work from home. Her name is Penelope, and she is 14 months old.

When he told his father, also a doctor, about the decision, Dr. Kim was pleased that “he was very supportive of it, which was sort of surprising to me.”

For Dr. Kim, figuring out which rumors are real and which are mere dreams is the fun part.

“It is sort of a gut feeling,” he acknowledged, adding that most of the images of future Apple products that circulate on message boards are fakes. Sometimes he will post suspicious images with a caveat about their authenticity.

On one memorable occasion, he said, Apple accidentally raised the curtain on a new Mac on its Web site a week ahead of the official announcement, leading to a free-for-all on MacRumors’ message boards and some urgent phone calls from the company.

Dr. Kim has worked in relative anonymity. For many years, readers knew him only by his user name, “arn.” (“If I really wanted to hide, I could have done a better job,” he said. He eventually added his full name so he could receive media credentials for conferences.)

Dr. Kim is branching out beyond MacRumors. He helps run a spinoff Web site, Touch Arcade, that tracks the new games available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. But he is remaining coy about his other expansion plans. Apple, it seems, is not the only company trying to keep secrets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/te...21blogger.html





Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry
Matt Richtel

The personal computer industry is poised to sell tens of millions of small, energy-efficient Internet-centric devices. Curiously, some of the biggest companies in the business consider this bad news.

In a tale of sales success breeding resentment, computer companies are wary of the new breed of computers because their low price could threaten PC makers’ already thin profit margins.

The new computers, often called netbooks, have scant onboard memory. They use energy-sipping computer chips. They are intended largely for surfing Web sites and checking e-mail. The price is small too, with some selling for as little as $300.

The companies that pioneered the category were small too, like Asus and Everex, both of Taiwan.

Despite their wariness of these slim machines, Dell and Acer, two of the biggest PC manufacturers, are not about to let the upstarts have this market to themselves. Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, recently sidled into the market with a hybrid of a notebook and netbook that it calls the Mini-Note.

Several makers are taking the low-powered PCs one step further. In the coming months, they are expected to introduce “net-tops,” low-cost versions of desktop computers intended for Internet access.

A Silicon Valley start-up called CherryPal says it will challenge the idea that big onboard power is required to allow basic computing functions in the Internet age. On Monday it plans to introduce a $300 desktop PC that is the size of a paperback and uses two watts of power compared with the 100 watts of some desktops.

It wants to take advantage of the trend toward “cloud computing,” in which data is managed and stored in distant servers, not on the actual machine.

Industry analysts say that the emergence of this new class of low-cost, cloud-centric machines could threaten titans like Microsoft and Intel, or even H.P. and Dell, because the giants have built their companies on the notion that consumers want more power and functions built into their next computer.

Some of the big computer companies put a positive spin on the low-cost machines, saying they welcome new categories. But they would just as soon this niche did not take off, given the relatively low profit margins.

“When I talk to PC vendors, the No. 1 question I get is, how do I compete with these netbooks when what we really want to do is sell PCs that cost a lot more money?” said J. P. Gownder, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Even as some PC vendors are jumping into the fray, others say they are resisting. Fujitsu, one of the world’s top 10 personal computer makers, said that it believes the low-cost netbook trend is a dangerous one for the bottom line.

“We’re sitting on the sidelines not because we’re lazy. We’re sitting on the sidelines because even if this category takes off, and we get our piece of the pie, it doesn’t add up,” said Paul Moore, senior director of mobile product management for Fujitsu. “It’s a product that essentially has no margin.”

Stan Glasgow, chief executive of Sony Electronics, said, “We are not looking at competing with Asus.” But he said the company is investigating what consumers want in a second PC.

It is a market that caught the major computer companies — both hardware and software — by surprise after Asus, entered the market last year with the $300 Eee PC. The company thought the device would essentially appeal to the education market, or as a starter laptop for adolescents, but the interest has turned out to be broader.

With an emphasis not in on-board applications (like word processing), but Internet-based ones like Google Docs, the Linux-based Eee PC sold out its 350,000 global inventory. It has been in short supply ever since, said Jackie Hsu, president of the American division of Asus. Everex has sold around 20,000 of its CloudBook, which sells for about $350.

The sales are a veritable drop in the bucket compared with the 271 million desktop and laptop PCs shipped globally last year. But there is an intensifying debate about how big the category can become, and what segment of the market finds these computers appealing.

IDC, a market research firm, is predicting that the category could grow from fewer than 500,000 in 2007 to nine million in 2012 as the market for second computers expands in developed economies.

Intel is projecting that by 2011, the market for the netbooks will be 40 million units a year, which is why Intel is jumping in with low-powered chips that would be used in the netbooks and the net-tops.

With its new Atom chip, Intel is competing against upstarts including Via, a Taiwanese company that has a chip called the C7. The C7 is showing up in netbooks and, indeed, is being used in the Everex models and in H.P.’s $500 Mini-Note.

William Calder, an Intel spokesman, said that the cost of the Atom for PC makers is around $44, compared with $100 for a state-of-the-art chip. He said that Intel executives think the market for low-cost PCs is too big to pass up, though it does raise a potential threat to more powerful and more profitable computing lines.

Microsoft has been a reluctant participant too. Even though it is no longer selling its Windows XP operating system software, it made an exception for makers of these low-cost laptops and desktops. Microsoft said it was responding to a groundswell of consumer interest in the low-cost machines, but some makers of those machines say Microsoft did so reluctantly because it did not want to lose market share to Linux.

Tim Bajarin, an industry analyst with Creative Strategies, a technology consulting firm, said that while the big computer companies have been caught off guard by the market’s potential, they are finding little choice but to dive in.

“H.P., Dell and these other PC makers have learned that if there’s consumer interest, you can’t just sit back and let someone else steal all the thunder,” he said.

Hewlett-Packard thinks consumers want more than a mobile Internet terminal. “Our competitors proved there is a pretty good market,” Robert Baker, a notebook product manager at Hewlett-Packard conceded.

Dell has not been specific about the price or features of its entry, but Michael Tatelman, vice president for marketing at Dell, said he believed that the category would have limited consumer appeal.

They are useful for someone on the go at an airport or on a commuting trip on a bus, but not for a more intense computing experience, he said. “It’s a good 30- to 90-minute experience.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/technology/21pc.html





New Mobile Browsers Bringing Real Web to Handhelds

'The browser wars are back,' says one developer
John Cox

A new generation of mobile Web browsers is finally making the Web a reality on handheld devices.

The latest example is last week's beta launch of Opera Mobile 9.5, a native Web browser for high-end smartphones. It's an evolutionary release for the Norwegian software company, but it comes just days after Apple's iPhone 3G, with its highly capable Safari browser, went on sale. Other brand-new entrants, such as Mobile Firefox and Skyfire, are expected later this year, at least in beta form. (See slideshow of new mobile browsers.)

But the evolving mobile browsers are only one part of the picture. Mobile browsing is affected by the client hardware, ranging from the processor to the kind of wireless network being used, all of which have improved markedly. It's also affected by the design of Web sites being targeted, and there's new attention being focused on optimizing these sites for mobile users.

When everything comes together, the results can be impressive. In the United States, the combination of the iPhone's large screen, touch interface and Safari has given mobile users a new way of viewing the Web: the way they're used to seeing it with their PC-based Web browsers. Until now, most users struggled with so-called microbrowsers, which typically access separately created and maintained Web content.

StatCounter reported in March that Safari/iPhone was the No. 1 mobile browser in the United States, and No. 2 globally, trailing the Nokia Web browser. Google released data in January showing that Christmas traffic to its site from iPhone users outstripped all other mobile devices, at a point when the iPhone had just 2% of the smartphone market.

The lesson was clear: Give mobile users a browser they could actually use . . . and they'd use it.

No more second-class browsing

"Mobile browsing was considered a second-class citizen on the Web," says Matt Womer, the Mobile Web Initiative Lead, Americas, with the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C). "You had to serve completely different content, with a different markup [language] and different protocols." Those were the days of such early browsers as Phone.com/OpenWave, and the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP), a markup for creating mobile-friendly Web content.

The iPhone Safari browser, though not the first full Web browser for handhelds, crystallized a huge change in thinking. "There's [now] a convergence of the desktop Web and the mobile device Web," says Mike Rowehl, scalability architect for start-up Skyfire Labs, which is creating a thin-client mobile browser, with most of the heavy-lifting work being done by the core Firefox desktop browser running on servers. "The iPhone really cracked that open, and people are starting to think differently about the services on their device."

"People browsing the Web from a mobile device don't expect an 'alternative universe' which lacks features they're used to," says Jay Sullivan, vice president of mobile for Mozilla, overseeing the Mobile Firefox project, which will shortly release its alpha test version.

Next generation of mobile browsers

There is a range of vendors vying to win the browsing allegiance of mobile users. Opera Software launched one of the earliest of these browsers in 2000, Opera Mobile. The company says the 9.5 release will rival desktop browsing in speed. In early 2006, Opera Mini was introduced for less-capable phones. Another is the browser widely used in Symbian-based mobile phones, such as those from Nokia. Still another offering is Bitstream's two-year-old ThunderHawk browser, which the company earlier this year ported to Qualcomm's Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) , a Java-based application development platform for mobile phones, to make for the first mass-market release of the browser.

In development are Mobile Firefox, a client browser, and Skyfire, with a thin client working with desktop Firefox 3.0 running on servers.

All of them have in common powerful, modern rendering engines, which make it possible for the browsers to display Web sites that look like those you see with a desktop browser. Safari and the Nokia browser use the same rendering engine: the open source WebKit. All Firefox projects use the same rendering engine, Gecko. Opera has over a decade invested in its core engine.

Programs this powerful and complex, even when highly optimized for memory use, need powerful and complex devices to run on. But currently, most mobile phones are low- to midrange designs.

"Lots of people have tried to access their favorite Web sites [with the default microbrowser] and failed," Sampo Kaasila, vice president of R&D for Bitstream, in Cambridge, Mass. "They conclude 'the mobile Web doesn't work for me.' But with Opera Mini, it will work for e-mail, news and social networking. That's key for building the industry as a whole."

Thin browsers emerge

Several vendors are creating thin-client browsers, such as Skyfire, ThunderHawk and Opera Mini. They run the rendering and other processing on server farms, which have fiber connections to the Internet, and send to the lightweight mobile client simply a representation of the Web page on phones that could never run a full mobile browser.

With this approach, the vendors also can consistently implement improvements like data compression. Bitstream uses its own compression technology to create what executives say is a 23-to-1 reduction in over-the-air data sizes.

But many mobile browsers, and the major HTTP server platforms, already support a compression utility called gzip (short for GNU zip), though it apparently is not routinely used, according to Jason Grigsby, vice president and Web strategist for Cloud Four, a Portland, Ore., Web development shop that increasingly focuses on mobile applications.

When activated on both the browser and Web server, Gzip compresses content typically by 75% to 80% on the server before sending it to the browser for decompression. Grigsby, who makes presentation on mobile Web performance, says he constantly hears from Web developers that these kinds of performance issues are new to them.

In the course of creating an online performance test for mobile browsers, Grigsby and another colleague spent 36 hours trying to figure out why some versions of BlackBerry's browser displayed the thumbnail-sized test images and others didn't. It turned out to be a bug in how the browser added an image to the page. "It points to the fact that the [mobile] browser has not been a focus of RIM's development, and it's not up to modern browsing standards," Grigsby says.

Trade-offs and frustrations

For developers the advent of such browsers can bring constant and frustrating trade-offs between industry standards and vendor innovations and extensions. "The iPhone has a whole slough of iPhone-specific Cascading Style Sheet extensions, which let you do things that you can't do with CSS on other browsers," says Grigsby. ThunderHawk makes use of Bitstream's patented font technology, substituting its own fonts and creating several magnification levels to increase the legibility of text on mobile screens.

"More standardization is needed," Grigsby says.

The W3C's Mobile Web Initiative has created a set of best practices for optimizing Web site design to improve browsing for mobile users. It's expected to become a formal W3C recommendation in the next two months, says Matt Womer

But there's a limit to standardization. Browsing on a given mobile device is highly individualized by the device capabilities, the browser design decisions, and the user's interaction with both. Every vendor in this article displays a full Web page on a phone screen. But after that, how you work with it can vary widely.

The iPhone's touch interface clearly has made browsing easy for users but it's just as clearly a high-end phone. Mozilla's Mobile Firefox project is crafting both a touch and a nontouch user interface.

Bitstream's ThunderHawk shows at the top of the screen what the company calls a "minimap" of the entire Web page, outlining the section of the page being viewed by the user, with clickable "hotspots" to other parts of the page. The minimap is an aid to navigating the full page quickly.

Opera Mobile 9.5 borrows from Opera Mini to now show a full Web page, then let users pan and zoom to find and focus on specific areas. A grayed-out upside down "V" on the bottom right of the screen gives one-click access to an overlay page of standard browser buttons and actions.

It all adds up to new opportunities, and new headaches. "The browser wars are back and this time the battlefield is mobile," says Grigsby.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...b=&story=ts_mb





Fallon Will Start ‘Late Night’ on the Web
Bill Carter

With a new round of shake-ups in late-night television set to begin next year, Lorne Michaels has decided to try to get a jump on things by starting NBC’s next edition of “Late Night,” with its new host Jimmy Fallon, as a nightly entry on the Internet.

Mr. Fallon has been named as the replacement for Conan O’Brien when Mr. O’Brien takes over the “Tonight” show from Jay Leno next year, and Mr. Michaels, the long-time boss of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” who also serves as executive producer of “Late Night,” told television reporters here Sunday that he wants Mr. Fallon to work out as many of the rough spots in his presentation as possible in performances on a website.

Mr. Michaels said he did not know yet which site he will use to post the shows with Mr. Fallon, but he was sure of several of the plans:

The web performances will likely begin in the fall, long before the transition from Mr. Leno for Mr. O’Brien is set to take place. The entries will not constitute anything like an entire hour-long show. “I expect that we’ll do something like five or 10 minutes,” Mr. Michaels said.

But he said they most likely will be on every night, to try to establish the rhythm of a nightly show. And he said, “I’m going to post them at 12:30 every night, so people will begin to look for Jimmy at that time.”

NBC is expected to announce the schedule for the transition from Mr. Leno to Mr. O’Brien and from Mr. O’Brien to Mr. Fallon here tomorrow. NBC executives have previously said that Mr. O’Brien will probably stop production on his “Late Night” show in February, while he moves west and prepares to lead “Tonight” from a new stage now being built on the lot of the NBC Universal studio.

Mr. Leno is expected to continue until perhaps June. Mr. Michaels said Sunday that Mr. Fallon will definitely get some time on the air following Mr. Leno before Mr. O’Brien takes over “Tonight.” He pegged the likely start date for Mr. Fallon on the television version of the show as “sometime in the spring.”

One reason for trying out the show online, Mr. Michaels said, is that the Internet will allow Mr. Fallon more freedom in terms of what he can say and do, “more opportunity for experimentation,” Mr. Michaels said. But he added that he didn’t expect the show to push the line too far in terms of content. “I think we’re our own censors,” he said.

But the main reason for the idea, he said, was the experience of Mr. O’Brien, who endured a long period of uncertainty about whether he would survive after he assumed the desk on “Late Night” succeeding David Letterman. “Conan needed time to find his show,” Mr. Michaels said. “I think this will help Jimmy to do that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/ar.../21fallon.html





In Hollywood, Bad Times May be Good News for TV Biz
Paul Thomasch

All the worries about a lousy housing market, sky-high gasoline prices and job losses should make this a natural time for Americans to grab the remote and seek solace in front of the television set.

As TV executives prepare for the 2008-09 broadcast season, they can only hope audiences will be looking for an extra dose of escapism.

After all, the industry is coming off a rocky year, marred by a 14-week writers strike, a lack of new breakout hits and the proliferation of digital video recorders that have rendered the old notion of "appointment television" virtually obsolete.

All that was reflected in another season of year-to-year ratings declines as more viewers seemed to gravitate toward cable TV, YouTube and video games.

"There's no doubt that this was a challenging year," Dawn Ostroff, the fledgling CW network's entertainment president, recently told a gathering of TV writers and critics.

But Ostroff is betting that her network's 2008-09 lineup -- including bubble gum fare like "Gossip Girl" and "One Tree Hill" -- will resonate with those who want to lose themselves for an hour or two in a good old-fashioned melodrama.

"It's interesting because when you look at when shows like this were very popular, 'Dynasty' and 'Dallas' back in the day, it was when there were economic hard times," she said, referring to two programs popular in the 1980s.

"A lot of times when the country goes through times like these, where we're in what is perceived by many people as a recession, having entertainment be escapist is what our viewers look for," Ostroff added.

Sports May Score

Sports also appear to be a shelter from the economic storm, at least judging from the big audiences that tuned into the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open golf tournament.

A clear test case for the TV industry will be the Olympic Games starting next month, carried exclusively in the United States by NBC Universal. Across its broadcast, cable TV and online outlets, NBC Universal is planning a record 3,600 hours of coverage of the games, though about a third of that will be streamed over the Internet.

"I think the country is really ready for this," NBC Universal Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol told TV writers. "It isn't exactly a joyful time; $4 gasoline, people who can't afford vacations; wild prices on food. Audiences are really looking for something to cheer."

The TV industry is hardly in the clear. U.S. audiences have numerous options when it comes to escapism, from DVDs and movies to video games and the Web.

What's more, the TV industry is still recovering from the screenwriters' strike that began in late 2007 and ended in February. Labor jitters persist over stalemated contract talks between actors and the studios, but the two sides are expected to reach a deal without another strike.

One lingering result of the walkout by screenwriters was a shorter TV development season, so networks reduced the number of series pilots they ordered to save time and money. That could be risky, particularly given the pressure executives are under to find new hit shows.

"It was really important to give (audiences) something to look forward to, something to anticipate," said CBS programming chief Nina Tassler. "We all know what the hype of Heath Ledger and 'Batman' -- I mean, my son was at the movie theater last night at midnight because he had to see it. But there is (also) the anticipation of the fall (television) season, which is really important."

At ABC, Entertainment President Stephen McPherson vowed to spend "a lot of money and effort" promoting his fall schedule. That goes for both its new drama, "Life on Mars," taken from the BBC hit of the same, and returning shows like "Eli Stone" that the network believes need more time to catch fire with viewers.

Indicating just how concerned executives are about the upcoming TV season, McPherson told writers he was cheering for big ratings increases for the entire industry, not just his network.

"I'm rooting for all of broadcast television in the fall," he said. "More than ever, we all need to take a step back and root for the industry."

ABC is owned by the Walt Disney Co; NBC Universal is majority owned by General Electric Co; Fox is part of News Corp; CBS is part of CBS Corp; and The CW is a joint venture of CBS Corp and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Brothers and CBS.

(Editing by Steve Gorman, Leslie Gevirtz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...29951520080722





EZTV Trials TV-Torrent Streaming
Ben Jones

Last week, we wrote about the new attempt to invigorate video distribution, by mixing torrents with streaming video. Our piece piqued the interest of the leading TV-torrent distribution group – EZTV – and just a few hours ago, they launched a live-beta test of the technology for their ‘warez’.

TorrentFreak likes to be right there reporting important news, but it’s not that often that we are the catalyst for P2P developments. This, however, is one of those times. EZTV administrator ‘Novaking’ told TorrentFreak that the decision to start experimenting with Swarmplayer came after reading about the technology here last week, and it left him “intrigued”.

The Swarmplayer EZTV is experimenting with uses slightly modified torrent files (.tstream), which make it possible to stream video files using the BitTorrent protocol. This new technology allows publishers to offer video steams without having to pay for expensive bandwidth. Theoretically, you can watch all torrent files with the player but it’s recommended to use newer releases, as they often offer a higher swarm speed. Streaming the typical TV show will run to around 100kb/sec, a speed unattainable with their older television torrents due in part to the low peer numbers, as much as the larger piece size used in the pre-stream torrents.

Novaking isn’t too worried about the sequential piece transfer, and loss of the tit-for-tat impacting the speeds of the swarm for those not trying to stream. “The spread will be so wide in the first week,” he tells us, “that it won’t affect it greatly. Of course it’s impossible to tell until it’s fully live and working.” Currently, only their own torrents will be available via .tstream files, but the hope is that should the test prove successful during the next week, to have them for the torrents from their partner sites, such as MVgroup as well.

BitTorrent streaming is the ideal low-cost distribution model for online video. Here at TorrentFreak we have been testing out the Swarmplayer since its very early beta days with Mininova, and it does look to be a very promising development. However, the client does not (yet) have an option to keep a fully saved copy of the file on your system for later re-watching, and it also doesn’t allow you to change the port it uses. But these are minor issues that should be solved easily.

It is interesting to see that this multi-million dollar research project collaborates with torrent sites like Mininova, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC. Could this be the future of television? It is at least a possibility, and something for major networks to look at, as some already are (the BBC is a member of the group behind P2PNext, for example). EZTV’s Novaking certainly seems to think so. “We are hoping that TV networks start seeing this as a method to provide people with what they want”.
http://torrentfreak.com/eztv-trials-streaming-080726/





Networks Fight Shorter Olympic Leash
Brian Stelter

For several years now NBC has meticulously planned all the details for its coverage of the many sports events at the Summer Olympics in China.

But with the Games only 19 days away, many at the network are concerned about how they will be permitted to cover any unscheduled events, like political protests or government crackdowns — or whether the Chinese government will allow them to cover such things at all.

One of the most common hypothetical questions NBC officials have bandied about involves the opening ceremonies on Aug. 8.

Hundreds of athletes will parade into a stadium in front of world leaders, including President Bush, and a huge global television audience. If an athlete holds a protest sign or waves a Tibetan flag, how will the Chinese hosts react? Will the television networks show the scene? How will the Chinese handle the media for the rest of the Games?

The stakes are high for both the network, which paid $900 million for broadcast rights for the Olympics, and the reputation of NBC News. If it covers any controversies aggressively, it risks drawing the ire of the Chinese and interfering with coverage of sports events. But if it shies from coverage of any protests, NBC risks being criticized in the West for kowtowing to China — particularly since its corporate parent, General Electric, is aggressively expanding its investments in China.

One thing is for sure, vows Steve Capus, the president of NBC’s news division: “If there’s news, we’re going to cover it.”

NBC and other broadcasters have been at odds with Chinese authorities over what, where and when they will be allowed to film. During the last seven years, broadcasters had been assured that they would receive the same freedoms they have had at previous Olympics, but in the last few months, those promises have been contradicted by strict visa rules, lengthy application processes and worries about censorship.

Seeking to defuse growing tension, network executives met face to face two weeks ago with representatives of the International Olympic Committee and Chinese officials. At an eight-hour meeting in the International Broadcast Center in Beijing, the Chinese organizing committee relented slightly, saying that broadcasters like NBC that have paid for rights to the Olympic Games may transmit live from Tiananmen Square — but for only six hours a day, from 6 to 10 a.m. and 9 to 11 p.m.

The broadcasters, which include the BBC in Britain, the CBC in Canada, the Seven Network in Australia and SABC in South Africa, unanimously pressed for further access, according to minutes of the meeting obtained by The New York Times. According to two people at the meeting, when the Beijing vice mayor, Cao Fuchao, remarked that his country’s authorities would not reverse their decision to restrict access, Alex Gilady, an I.O.C. commissioner and NBC vice president, pointed his finger and said: “We still have one month to go. We will pursue this to the end.”

But time is not on the broadcasters’ side. Nineteen days from now, when the torch is lighted in Beijing, journalists and viewers could be facing the most restrictive environment for an Olympics in modern times.

At the meeting, on July 9, after months of uncertainty, Chinese officials said that all applications for live broadcasting would be approved throughout Beijing and the other cities where Olympic competitions were planned. Furthermore, the committee said that all broadcasters could tape reports from Tiananmen Square.

But the broadcasters say they will not believe it until they see it. One I.O.C. commissioner, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid further complicating the situation, said matter-of-factly that Chinese officials had “put a tourniquet” on the Olympics.

“Had the I.O.C., and those vested with the decision to award the host city contract, known seven years ago that there would be severe restrictions on people being able to enter China simply to watch the Olympics, or that live broadcasting from Tiananmen Square would essentially be banned, or that reporters would be corralled at the whim of local security, then I seriously doubt whether Beijing would have been awarded the Olympics,” the commissioner said.

The contentious negotiations are particularly perilous for NBC, part of NBC Universal, which is trying to produce 3,600 hours of coverage. The company paid a record amount for the broadcast rights, and it expects to generate $1 billion in advertising revenue. The coverage will be produced by NBC Sports under the direction of Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports and Olympics.

But the network could find itself covering news outside the track or swimming pools if there are political protests or another government crackdown. Mr. Capus of NBC acknowledged that these Games were arguably the most newsworthy Olympics in a generation, since they have put a spotlight on China’s environmental problems and human-rights abuses.

He was diplomatic about the recent negotiations. “We are encouraged by the progress that we saw last week, and the potential for the cooperation that has been pledged,” Mr. Capus said.

NBC has good reason to cross its fingers. Its owner, GE, has had its sales in China grow rapidly this decade, to a projected $10 billion by 2010, from around $1 billion in 2000. The company is involved in more than 300 projects related to these Games, including technology for the new National Stadium. Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chief executive of G.E., has said the Olympics will create “decades of good will in China.”

NBC Universal has taken out an insurance policy to protect itself against the disruption or cancellation of the Games. This is a standard precaution: an NBC spokesman said that networks covering the Games had taken out such insurance since 1980, when the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics.

“It’s pretty much a given that this is not Barcelona, and this is definitely not Atlanta,” one of the correspondents said on the condition of anonymity, because the network prohibits speaking to the news media without authorization. “So how much access will we get? I don’t think we’ll know until we’re there.”

“Today,” NBC’s morning show, is traditionally the news division’s signature Olympic program, and a co-host, Matt Lauer, will be in China before the Games, broadcasting from the Great Wall and other cultural icons. Then his colleagues Meredith Vieira, Al Roker and Ann Curry will join him at the program’s set at the Olympic Green in Beijing. Because of the 12-hour time difference, the sun will be setting during the American morning show.

“NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” will originate from Beijing for the first week of the Games. Tom Brokaw, the network’s senior correspondent, will be in Beijing, as will Richard Engel, NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, who spends most of his time in war zones and hot spots.

But NBC officials are not eager to discuss the peculiarities of broadcasting from China. Mr. Ebersol would not respond to a request for an interview, the network said.

Some news organizations have had to leap through hoops merely to rent office space, order phone lines and set up satellite dishes. Stations that reserved locations for live shots later have had their permissions revoked, and journalists have speculated that the bureaucratic hurdles have been put in place to discourage free reporting, despite the country’s promises.

Once the staff is in place in China, many of the hypothetical situations about the Olympics will hinge on a single question: what is sports and what is news?

Broadcasters expect that the country’s security apparatus will work hard to prevent a repeat of the early stages of the Olympic torch relay, where pro-Tibet protesters disrupted the run and extinguished the flame several times.

The primary television feed of the sporting events is produced by Beijing Olympic Broadcasting, a partnership between China and the I.O.C. If a demonstration occurs at an Olympic site, the official broadcast may not capture it. But networks like NBC have their own cameras in place that could film spontaneous developments at the events. In such cases, the responsibility falls to NBC to decide what to show the American audience.

“Those are decisions that will be made on the fly when it happens, and you hope they make the right decision,” one of the NBC correspondents said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/sp...ics/21nbc.html





As Papers Struggle, News Is Cut and the Focus Turns Local
Richard Pérez-Peña

Almost two-thirds of American newspapers publish less foreign news than they did just three years ago, nearly as many print less national news, and despite new demands on newsrooms like blogs and video, most of them have smaller news staffs, according to a new study.

The study, by the Pew Research Center and Tyler Marshall, a former foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, is based on a written survey of the top editors at 259 newspapers of all sizes and interviews with a sampling of those editors.

The findings come as no surprise to anyone following the travails of the newspaper industry, racked every few days by new reports of layoffs, falling revenue, credit downgrades, shrinking page counts and declining circulation. But the Pew study appears to be the broadest attempt yet to measure how widespread the changes have been.

Sixty-four percent of the newspapers reported cutting the space given to foreign news over three years, making that the area that has suffered at the most papers as the business contracts. Only 10 percent of the editors said they considered foreign news “very essential” to their papers.

“It’s really concerning when we have two wars overseas, our economy is more global, we’re competing with economies that are growing faster than ours, and our dependence on foreign oil is one of the biggest stories,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Almost half the papers said they had cut the human resources devoted to covering news from abroad, a striking figure given that most newspapers are small and historically have not had any reporters or editors working full time on foreign news.

“In many cases, the resource they had for foreign news was an editor pulling material from the wire services, or they were willing to send a reporter overseas in limited cases, and they’re doing less of that now, or none at all,” Mr. Rosenstiel said.

Three-fifths of the papers reported having less space for news over all, as newspapers try to save money by shifting to smaller pages and printing fewer of them. The only area cut nearly as often as foreign news was national news, which declined at 57 percent of the papers. Business coverage ranked next, reduced by one-third of the papers.

Large-circulation papers have been far more likely to reduce the space given to business, the arts, features and opinions — areas that historically have not been central to small papers.

Half of all papers said they had increased the amount of state and local news they published, especially “hyper-local” community news.

At 59 percent of the newspapers, editors said news staffing had declined over the previous three years, and that was true at 85 percent of the large papers. In the months since the survey was taken, the nation’s major newspaper chains have made some of the deepest newsroom cuts on record.

Yet the shrunken newsrooms have taken on added duties in feeding their Web sites, like producing subsites covering specific towns or neighborhoods, or posting articles in the morning and updating them throughout the day. And most papers report that their reporters’ blog posts are not edited before going online.

A majority of the editors who took part in the study said they worry about a loss of institutional memory and journalistic standards, as experienced people leave the business and a younger crew of reporters publishes more news quickly online. But almost half the editors said they were more excited than fearful about the possibilities of the Internet.

“One thing that surprised me was how optimistic the editors are,” Mr. Rosenstiel said. “They’re convinced that they can still make their newspapers better, because otherwise I’m not sure they could go to work in the morning.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/bu.../21papers.html





How to Save Local Newspapers: Cellphones
Claire Cain Miller

Verve’ Wireless’s mission is to save the local paper by making it mobile. It provides publishers with the technology to create mobile Web sites, so readers can read the paper on their cell phones. Verve or the newspaper then sell ads on those sites. Verve already powers mobile versions of 4,000 newspapers from 140 publishers, including the Associated Press, McClatchy, and the New York Times Regional Media Group.

The A.P. started using its Verve-powered Mobile News Network in May. It apparently liked it enough to invest in the company. Verve Wireless has raised $3 million in its second round of fundraising, led by its biggest customer, the Associated Press. Iron Capital and a third investor, not yet disclosed because the deal is still being finalized, also participated in the round.

Since May, 728 A.P. member newspapers have joined the network. Its iPhone application, which delivers daily headlines and photos and lets users watch slideshows or videos and text or email stories to friends, took the runner-up spot in the Apple Design Award competition. The investment in Verve is rare for the news organization.

Verve’s chief executive, Art Howe, is the first to admit that he’s betting on an industry that’s under siege. Newspapers’ strength is providing local news and information and the mobile Web is the logical outlet for local content, argues Mr. Howe, who is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and is himself owner of 50 local papers. “Mobile is actually a better way to reach people than print or even Web. It’s versatile, immediate, travels and is just as compelling–if it’s done right–as a Web site or a printed page.”

People are increasingly using their phones to surf the Web. Of the 95 million mobile Internet subscribers, 40 million actively use their phones to go online, double the number two years ago, according to Nielsen Mobile. Thirteen million use their phones to read the news, and a cell phone version of a Web site extends a site’s reach by 13 percent.

Local plus mobile is a winning formula for advertisers too, says Tom Kenney, Verve’s president. There is still no better way for the local florist or bakery to reach potential customers than the daily newspaper, he argues, and mobile makes that even easier. A Mexican restaurant can send a reader a coupon for a free margarita when they are walking nearby during happy hour, for example, or a car dealer could deliver an ad with a map and walking directions when a user types in an auto-related search.

Mr. Howe and Mr. Kenney founded Verve in 2005 with $2.5 million in seed funding. They spent two years building the Web-based software platform, which lets publishers customize their mobile sites and add features like text messages with breaking news alerts. Verve gives publishers the software and help designing their mobile sites for free, in exchange for a cut of ad revenue. Verve functions as a mobile ad network, providing technology to publish ads on cell phones and connecting national and local advertisers with small publishers who wouldn’t otherwise have the sales force to sell mobile ads. Its biggest competitor is Crisp Wireless, whose customers include Tribune Interactive, Gannett Digital and Hearst.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...nes/index.html





Stoooopid .... Why the Google Generation Isn’t as Smart as it Thinks

The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate
Bryan Appleyard

On Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages. It was a quiet day but, then again, I’m not including the telephone calls. I’m also not including the deafening and pointless announcements on a train journey to Wakefield – use a screen, jerks – the piercingly loud telephone conversations of unsocialised adults and the screaming of untamed brats. And, come to think of it, why not include the junk e-mails? They also interrupt. There were 38. Oh and I’d better throw in the 400-odd news alerts that I receive from all the websites I monitor via my iPhone.

I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”. This is, you might think, a pretty standard, vaguely comic vignette of modern life – man harassed by self-inflicted technology. And so it is. We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are! But, listen carefully, it’s killing me and it’s killing you.

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

The same thing happens if you talk on a mobile phone while driving – even legally with a hands-free kit. You listen to language on the phone and lose the ability to take in the language of road signs. Worst of all is if your caller describes something visual, a wallpaper pattern, a view. As you imagine this, your visual channel gets clogged and you start losing your sense of the road ahead. Distraction kills – you or others.

Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.

Meyer tells me that he sees part of his job as warning as many people as possible of the dangers of the distracted world we are creating. Other voices, particularly in America, have joined the chorus of dismay. Jackson’s book warns of a new Dark Age: “As our attentional skills are squandered, we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming and a dehumanising merger between man and machine.”

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, has just written The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future. He portrays a bibliophobic generation of teens, incapable of sustaining concentration long enough to read a book. And learning a poem by heart just strikes them as dumb.

In an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr, a chronic distractee like the rest of us, noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing to think, to absorb. He feels himself being hollowed out by “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”.

“The important thing,” he tells me, “is that we now go outside of ourselves to make all the connections that we used to make inside of ourselves.” The attending self is enfeebled as its functions are transferred to cyberspace.

“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist.

McKibben’s hero is Henry Thoreau, who, in the 19th century, cut himself off from the distractions of industrialising America to live in quiet contemplation by Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He was, says McKibben, “incredibly prescient”. McKibben can’t live that life, though. He must organise his global warming campaigns through the internet and suffer and react to the beeping pleading of the incoming e-mail.

“I feel that much of my life is ebbing away in the tide of minute-by-minute distraction . . . I’m not certain what the effect on the world will be. But psychologists do say that intense close engagement with things does provide the most human satisfaction.” The psychologists are right. McKibben describes himself as “loving novelty” and yet “craving depth”, the contemporary predicament in a nutshell.

Ironically, the companies most active in denying us our craving for depth, the great distracters – Microsoft, Google, IBM, Intel – are trying to do something about this. They have formed the Information Overload Research Group, “dedicated to promoting solutions to e-mail overload and interruptions”. None of this will work, of course, because of the overwhelming economic forces involved. People make big money out of distracting us. So what can be done?

The first issue is the determination of the distracters to create young distractees. Television was the first culprit. Tests clearly show that a switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a thousandfold. Paradoxically, the supreme information provider also has the effect of reducing information intake.

Bauerlein is 49. As a child, he says, he learnt about the Vietnam war from Walter Cronkite, the great television news anchor of the time. Now teenagers just go to their laptops on coming home from school and sink into their online cocoon. But this isn’t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”.

“They don’t,” says Bauerlein, “grow up.” They are “living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are now”.

The hyper-connectivity of the young is bewildering. Jackson tells me that one study looked at five years of e-mail activity of a 24-year-old. He was found to have connections with 11.7m people. Most of these connections would be pretty threadbare. But that, in a way, is the point. All internet connections are threadbare. They lack the complexity and depth of real-world interactions. This is concealed by the language.

Join Facebook or MySpace and you suddenly have “friends” all over the place. Of course, you don’t. These are just casual, tenuous electronic pings. Nothing could be further removed from the idea of friendship.

These connections are severed as quickly as they are taken up – with the click of a mouse. Jackson and everyone else I spoke to was alarmed by the potential impact on real-world relationships. Teenagers are being groomed to think others can be picked up on a whim and dropped because of a mood or some slight offence. The fear is that the idea of sticking with another through thick and thin – the very essence of friendship and love – will come to seem absurd, uncool, meaningless.

One irony that lies behind all this is the myth that children are good at this stuff. Adults often joke that their 10-year-old has to fix the computer. But it’s not true. Studies show older people are generally more adept with computers than younger. This is because, like all multitaskers, the kids are deluding themselves into thinking that busy-ness is depth when, in fact, they are skimming the surface of cyberspace as surely as they are skimming the surface of life. It takes an adult imagination to discriminate, to make judgments; and those are the only skills that really matter.

The concern of all these writers and thinkers is that it is precisely these skills that will vanish from the world as we become infantilised cyber-serfs, our entertainments and impulses maintained and controlled by the techno-geek aristocracy. They have all noted – either in themselves or in others – diminishing attention spans, inability to focus, a loss of the meditative mode. “I can’t read War and Peace any more,” confessed one of Carr’s friends. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The computer is training us not to attend, to drown in the sea of information rather than to swim. Jackson thinks this can be fixed. The brain is malleable. Just as it can be trained to be distracted, so it can be trained to pay attention. Education and work can be restructured to teach and propagate the skills of concentration and focus. People can be taught to turn off, to ignore the beep and the ping.

Bauerlein, dismayed by his distracted students, is not optimistic. Multiple distraction might, he admits, be a phase, and in time society will self-correct. But the sheer power of the forces of distraction is such that he thinks this will not happen.

This, for him, puts democracy at risk. It is a form of government that puts “a heavy burden of responsibility on our citizens”. But if they think Paris is in England and they can’t find Iraq on a map because their world is a social network of “friends” – examples of appalling ignorance recently found in American teenagers – how can they be expected to shoulder that burden?

This may all be a moral panic, a severe case of the older generation wagging its finger at the young. It was ever thus. But what is new is the assiduity with which companies and institutions are selling us the tools of distraction. Every new device on the market is, to return to Eliot, “Filled with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration”.

These things do make our lives easier, but only by destroying the very selves that should be protesting at every distraction, demanding peace, quiet and contemplation. The distracters have product to shift, and it’s shifting. On the train to Wakefield, with my new 3G iPhone, distracted from distraction by distraction, I saw the future and, to my horror, it worked.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle4362950.ece





Just looking

Idol Socialization
Jeff Lippold

Japanese companies are always looking to meet the needs of the "niche-ist" of niche markets. For example, top-selling record label Avex has discovered a new way to reach extremely anti-social sets — the NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), and the most reclusive of the recluses, the hikikomori. Most believe that these groups’ refusal of social participation stems from their lack of social skills. The hikikomori almost never socialize with other people and prefer to spend their time in their bedrooms, completely locked away from the world. The total numbers of NEET and hikikomori may have been overestimated in the past, but they do exist to some extent and are mostly male.

Avex is trying to reach these groups with a new DVD — part "corporate social responsibility," part traditional content delivery, and part talent blog/model promotion. The DVD is called Miteiru dake (Just Looking), and it features various talent/models just staring straight ahead. That’s right, the models on the DVD do very little other than stare straight at the camera. According to the website, the idea is to get young males who aren’t used to socializing with women to become more accustomed to making eye contact and/or handle the fact that a sentient being sits across from them and awaits interaction. The DVD hopes to cure those afflicted with shyness so that they may rejoin society.

The result, from what one can see on the website, is strangely disconcerting. A girl will stare back at you for an extended period of time, expressionless and periodically blinking (the blinks are eerily profound). Once in a while the model will utter a phrase like "ohayoo" (good morning) or make a move to say something, but for the most part there is just an uncomfortable silence. Most of the women on the DVD are jimusho-based talento (most have blogs on Ameba and other DVDs of their own to sell), but there are also foreign women, young girls, and older women thrown in the mix to give the viewer experience in handling long, uncomfortable silences with those of different races and ages.

Without even broaching the logic of creating a product expressly for a niche that doesn’t have a whole lot of money, Miteiru Dake is a bold new experiment in combination idol promotion and social charity, using a conventional Japanese content business model (nothing’s free, but you can buy it on DVD and follow up with the stars through their blogs). And one of the payoffs is that the reformed NEET and hikikomori may just become lifelong fans of the female idols who saved them from the hells of an asocial existence.
http://clast.diamondagency.jp/en/