Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 9th, '09

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Weak reviews, cranky fans, a pirated version: none of it mattered. 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine' kicked off the spring-summer blockbuster season with $87 million in ticket sales." – Michael Cieply


"It's kind of like throwing a surprise birthday party for a dear friend of yours, and at the end of the night your friend comes over to you and asks you for an appearance fee. And you sit there and you wonder, 'What the hell is this all about?' We have worked real hard with the record labels and the artists. And to be honest with you, a lot of these artists wouldn't be where they are if it wasn't for these radio stations." – SBS VP/GM Frank Flores


"Peer-to-peer file sharing is good for artists and bad for record labels." – Roger McGuinn


"One mile of driving completely dwarfs the cost of a search. Internet usage is part of our consumption, just like TV is, or driving. There is consumption there, but in the grand scheme of things I think it is not the problem." – Urs Hölzle


"I have your [expletive] In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password." – Anonymous


"The Australian Government is now light years ahead of the rest of the Western world when it comes to political censorship." – John Ozimek


"I get cramps." – Crystal Wiski



































May 9th, 2009




Swedish Pirate Party May Get Seat in EU Parliament

Sweden's Pirate Party, which wants to reform copyright law, could ride a wave of discontent over tighter control of computer file-sharing all the way into the European Parliament in June.

The jail sentences handed out last month to the four Swedish men behind The Pirate Bay, one of the world's biggest free file-sharing Web sites, have given a boost to the namesake party among young voters in Sweden, a recent opinion poll showed.

"It is definitely something that has put the spotlight on our issues," Christian Engstrom, the party's top candidate for the European Parliament, told Reuters.

"And it has demonstrated why it is so important, because the legal machine, if it's allowed to continue, is going to crush the Internet, starting with the Pirate Bay and then continuing on to other enterprises."

A DN/Synovate poll ahead of the Europe-wide vote in June showed the party, which is not linked to the Web site though some of its views coincide with those voiced by the Pirate Bay defendants, winning 5.1 percent of the Swedish vote.

That would be enough to secure the party, which wants to deregulate copyright, abolish the patent system and a decrease the level of surveillance of the Internet, a seat in the European parliament.

The party was founded in 2006 and won only 0.6 percent of the vote in the Swedish general elections that year.

The leader of the Pirate Party, Rick Falkvinge, believes that new Swedish laws, that for instance allow copyright holders to track down the IP-numbers of suspected file-sharers, are the main reason for the sudden popularity.

"We're seeing a shockwave of new repressive legislation that is seriously jeopardizing the core of our civil liberties," he said. "People are starting to wake up to that fact."

What will decide the outcome for the party is simply the question of whether its sympathizers will turn up to vote in the election that is usually plagued by low voter turn-out.

Torbjorn Larsson, associate professor of political science at Stockholm University, said there was a risk some of the Pirate Party supporters won't show up.

"Young people have a tendency not to vote. But if this issue stays on the agenda up to election day, it will make a big difference," he said.

(Reporting by Veronica Ek; Editing by Jon Hemming)
http://www.reuters.com/article/inter...e=internetNews





Mininova Filters Copyright Infringing Torrents
Ernesto

Just a few days before their court appearance, Mininova, the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, has started to filter content. The site is using a third party content recognition system that will detect and remove torrent files that link to copyright infringing files.

Starting today, Mininova will use a content recognition system that detects and removes torrent files linking to copyright infringing files. The system will also prevent the torrents from being re-uploaded to mininova later on.

Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that the system will be tested for 12 weeks with only a few titles. With this trial Mininova collaborates with an association representing several TV/movie content owners. Niek couldn’t tell us which one, but our best guess would be that it’s the MPA(A).

The content removal system should be seen as an extension of the existing copyright policy according to Niek, who also said that the current trial will be used to find out whether the content recognition system is a workable and effective solution.

The system was selected by the copyright holders themselves who want an easier way to get torrent files removed than the current notice and takedown policy, and it is operated by an undisclosed third party. Interestingly, this collaboration does not mean that the upcoming court case against BREIN is off the table.

Later this month BREIN hopes to convince the court that Mininova has to filter its search results, so that all .torrent files which may point to unauthorized content are removed. Up until now, Mininova refused to interfere with the search results, claiming that the DMCA take-down procedure they have is good enough. This has clearly changed now.

The response from Mininova’s users is mostly negative, with one commenter saying “Shame to see such a nice site decide to go hang itself,” and another adding “Wow, guess you guys are caving under the pressure. Too bad its all over now.”

The effectiveness of this filtering system, and how it will affect mininova’s popularity is yet to be seen, but it sure is a radical development.
http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-fil...ontent-090506/





IFPI Goes After Torrent Site Hosting Providers
Ernesto

In the aftermath of the Pirate Bay verdict, Sweden has witnessed the demise of many other BitTorrent trackers. But not quite enough according to music industry lobby group IFPI, who are now threatening the hosting providers of torrent sites. The host of private BitTorrent tracker TorrentBytes appears to be one of the first targets.

When the defendants in the Pirate Bay trial were sentenced to one year jail plus a hefty fine, a shock wave went though Sweden’s BitTorrent communities. Several trackers decided to close voluntarily, while others did so after the local anti-piracy bureau applied some pressure.

Despite the fact that the Pirate Bay verdict is to be appealed, the decision is still being used as ammunition by the various anti-piracy outfits, and they have already taken out several trackers across Sweden. More recently, IFPI has discovered a new, more convenient and possibly more effective way to (try to) shut down the remaining torrent sites.

Instead of targeting the tracker owners, IFPI is going directly to the hosting providers with a request to take the sites offline. One of the providers that has received a letter from IFPI is DCP Networks, who rent servers to TorrentBytes - one of the larger BitTorrent trackers.
IFPI goes after TorrentBytes’ Hosting Provider.

In their letter IFPI argues that the tracker they host is making “a large number of” copyright works available to the public, and that the users of the site are infringing the copyright of IFPI members. IFPI ends the letter by asking DCP Networks to take necessary actions to make sure that this activity stops, or else “IFPI intends to take necessary measures.”

IFPI lawyer Magnus Mårtensson told DN.se that the letter received by DCP Networks is not something strange or unusual. IFPI has contacted several other hosting providers and site owners Mårtensson said. What they aim to do here is extend the (yet to be appealed) verdict of “assisting copyright infringement” and apply it to hosting providers as well.

At the moment TorrentBytes seems to be (back) online, indicating that the hosting provider may have not yet given in to IFPI’s demands. Although the Pirate Bay verdict doesn’t apply to anyone but the convicted and their unique circumstances, it is likely that some hosting providers will agree to IFPI’s request, fearful of a costly legal procedure.
http://torrentfreak.com/ifpi-goes-af...viders-090505/





Streaming Video Torrents? Check Out Bitlet
Jolie O'Dell

Illegal movie and TV show downloaders, rejoice. Soon, you will no longer have to wait and hour or two to start watching your favorite obscure dramedy series. Streaming torrent site Bitlet.org is preparing for instant gratification beyond your wildest dreams: Streaming video from torrent files.

About a year and a half ago, we reviewed the site, which then allowed users to download torrents without a BitTorrent client and allowed users to instantly stream audio and other non-video content from those torrents. In the closing remarks from that post, we noted, "Presumably, the same idea can be applied to video -- imagine: streaming video distribution over BitTorrent. Very cool." And behold, Bitlet has made this suggestion very real and quite simple, as well.

For a batch of demo videos, Bitlet has transformed the entire downloading and viewing process into a two-click, 30-second process. Click the link for the video content you want to see, and click the play button. A child or other technologically confounded person could use it with the greatest of ease. Elegant, no?

Although the service is still in an experimental stage, users are invited to test out the service and view sample videos at the Bitlet video page. This page also gives instructions for those "brave enough" to distribute content through the site.

Standard torrent caveats apply: Less bandwidth, higher quality, and fewer peers/seeds will make for more lag time. Nevertheless, it's a great implementation of Bitlet's technology (queuing bits sequentially so users get the first parts of the content first) and the implications are exciting.

As the folks at TorrentFreak wrote, "Although current bandwidth prices are dropping, most video services such as YouTube are paying millions of dollars for traditional server side streaming. Especially high quality video is costly to stream, and peer-to-peer technology can certainly make a huge difference there."

We can't help but wonder how this news will go over with the entertainment industry, especially in the aftermath of the conviction of the Pirate Bay crew. In addition to offering a serious incentive for users who currently use other torrent clients, Bitlet will be in direct competition with legal streaming video sites such as Hulu.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...fers_video.php





Pending P2P Bill Crossing the Line?
Matthew DeCarlo

A hearing was scheduled Tuesday by the US House of Representatives, to determine the need of a law that would require peer-to-peer (P2P) software to warn users that their files may be shared. The focal point of the hearing is expected to involve a bill introduced by Rep. Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack in March, titled the “Informed P2P User Act.” While the bill’s primary target is P2P software, there is speculation that its grasp could ripple out to other frequently used software.

The proposed act will emplace a set of rules that deem it “unlawful” for P2P applications to share files unless a series of notification prompts haunt users. The rules state that consent to a “clear and conspicuous notice” regarding the P2P software’s features would have to be made during installation. Additionally, the program must repeat the cycle of notice-and-consent each time it’s executed. Mack’s vague definition of P2P software is interpreted as any application which allows files to be marked for transfer, transferred and received.

While the bill’s description of P2P applications is accurate, does it not envelope countless other aspects of computing? CNET notes that every copy of Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X sold in recent times incorporates a command-line FTP client which fits the definition. Are Apple, the Free Software Foundation and Microsoft all going to be tagged for “unlawful” practices? Where do Web browsers and IM services stand?
http://www.techspot.com/news/34591-p...-the-line.html





Lime Wire Tells Congress its P2P Software is Safe Now
Elinor Mills

In response to the reopening of an investigation into inadvertent file sharing with peer-to-peer software, an executive for Lime Wire told Congress in a letter on Friday that the new version of the program is "the most secure file-sharing software available."

The main investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives reopened a probe of Lime Wire and other peer-to-peer file-sharing companies last week, citing data breaches blamed on the technology.

In February, a security firm alleged that information about President Obama's helicopter was breached via P2P. There have also been reports of inadvertent exposure of consumer financial data and medical records over peer-to-peer, according to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

In a letter sent Friday to the Committee and congressional members, Mark Gorton, the chairman of Lime Wire parent Lime Group, said LimeWire 5, released on December 8, was designed to eliminate inadvertent file sharing in response to privacy concerns.

LimeWire 5 by default does not share documents, it automatically un-shares documents a user may have shared using an older version of the software, and by default will not share documents regardless of whether they exist in a folder that has been shared or whether a user shared the document in an older version, said Gorton's letter, a copy of which was obtained by CNET News.

"In short, there is absolutely no way to access a LimeWire 5 user's documents unless that user affirmatively elects to make them available," he wrote. "LimeWire 5 does not share any file of any type without explicit permission from the user."

Meanwhile, the company has no specific information about the reports of data breaches that the Committee had mentioned, Gorton said.

The Committee initially launched its probe into inadvertent file-sharing with P2P in mid-2007 and had called Gorton and others to testify.

Meanwhile, another congressional subcommittee is planning to hold a hearing on P2P technology. The House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection has scheduled a hearing for Monday at 2 p.m. EDT on the "Informed P2P User Act," introduced by California Rep. Mary Bono Mack, a Republican, her office said.

Scheduled to testify at the hearing are the Federal Trade Commission, the Business Software Alliance, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Distributed Computing Industry Association, Tiversa, and the Progress and Freedom Foundation.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10232079-93.html





Computer Hard Drive Sold on eBay 'Had Details of Top Secret U.S. Missile Defence System'

Highly sensitive details of a US military missile air defence system were found on a second-hand hard drive bought on eBay.

The test launch procedures were found on a hard disk for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defence system, used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq.

The disk also contained security policies, blueprints of facilities and personal information on employees including social security numbers, belonging to technology company Lockheed Martin - who designed and built the system.

A missile launch in California: Details of the ground-to-air defence system were found on a computer hard drive

British researchers found the data while studying more than 300 hard disks bought at computer auctions, computer fairs and eBay.

The experts also uncovered other sensitive information including bank account details, medical records, confidential business plans, financial company data, personal id numbers, and job descriptions.

The drives were bought from the UK, America, Germany, France and Australia by BT's Security Research Centre in collaboration with the University of Glamorgan in Wales, Edith Cowan University in Australia and Longwood University in the US.

A spokesman for BT said they found 34 per cent of the hard disks scrutinised contained 'information of either personal data that could be identified to an individual or commercial data identifying a company or organisation.'

And researchers said a 'surprisingly large range and quantity of information that could have a potentially commercially damaging impact or pose a threat to the identity and privacy of the individuals involved was recovered as a result of the survey.'

Two disks appear to have been formerly used by Lanarkshire NHS Trust to hold information from the Monklands and Hairmyres hospitals including patient medical records, images of x-rays, medical staff shifts and sensitive and confidential staff letters.

In Australia, one disk came from a nursing home and contained pictures of patients and their wounds.

Confidential material including network data and security logs from the German Embassy in Paris were also discovered on a disk from France.

And the trading performances and budgets of a UK-based fashion company, corporate data from a major motor manufacturing company were discovered along with details of a proposed 50 billion currency exchange through Spain involving a US-based consultant.

Dr Andy Jones, head of information security research at BT, who led the survey, said: 'This is the fourth time we have carried out this research and it is clear that a majority of organisations and private individuals still have no idea about the potential volume and type of information that is stored on computer hard disks.

'For a very large proportion of the disks we looked at we found enough information to expose both individuals and companies to a range of potential crimes such as fraud, blackmail and identity theft.

'Businesses also need to be aware that they could also be acting illegally by not disposing of this kind of data properly.'

Dr Iain Sutherland of the University of Glamorgan said: 'Of significant concern is the number of large organisations that are still not disposing of confidential information in a secure manner. In the current financial climate they risk losing highly valuable propriety data.'

A spokesman for Lockheed Martin, who make the THADD launch system, said: 'Lockheed Martin is not aware of any compromise of data related to the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence programme.

'Until Lockheed Martin can evaluate the hard drive in question, it is not possible to comment further on its potential contents or source.'

A spokesman for NHS Lanarkshire said: 'This study refers to hard disks which were disposed of in 2006. At that time NHS Lanarkshire had a contractual agreement with an external company for the disposal of computer equipment.

'In this instance the hard drives had been subjected to a basic level of data removal by the company and had then been disposed of inappropriately. This was clearly in breach of contract and was wholly unacceptable.'

The spokesman said the trust now destroy equipment containing data on the premises, so no longer use external companies to dispose of IT equipment.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ce-system.html





Octoshape Gets Embedded
Ryan Lawler

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology firm Octoshape Aps is getting to some consumer televisions, with availability of its streaming video plug-in on set-top boxes from CaptiveWorks Inc.

CaptiveWorks, which makes digital set-top boxes that can capture free-to-air satellite signals and Internet video streams, will use the Octoshape technology to enable P2P video streaming on its devices.

"We thoroughly believe that the home is where [over-the-top video] is going to pop," says Scott Brown, CEO of Octoshape's North American operations. "But the thing that's missing from over-the-top is live video."

Octoshape provides live streaming technology for large audiences of online video by reducing the cost of delivery and increasing the possible scale with a P2P client plug-in.

The technology has been used for the Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS)'s Korean broadcaster's Olympics coverage, as well as the European Broadcasting Union (EBU)'s Eurovision Song Contest. Closer to home, the Octoshape plug-in has been chosen by CNN.com for its live video stream.

The CaptiveWorks partnership marks the first public example of Octoshape's technology being embedded on a set-top box, although the company is working with other consumer electronics manufacturers to embed the plug-in on other devices.

"Set-top boxes and CE devices far outnumber the number of viewers that are on computers today," Brown says.

Octoshape isn't the only streaming video firm trying to get its technology into people's living rooms. At NAB last month, Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE) announced a broad initiative to get its Flash player technology embedded on consumer electronics devices.

Move Networks Inc. has also been active in getting its technology embedded, through partnerships with set-top box makers -- like partner NeuLion Inc. -- and mobile Internet device manufacturers.
http://www.contentinople.com/author....&doc_id=176299





Spanish-Language Radio Takes On Performance Royalty
FMQB

Spanish-language broadcasters headed to Washington today to take on the controversial Performance Royalty Radio for radio. A number of leaders in the Spanish-language broadcasting community spoke before Congress about the issue, many of whom said the rate will adversely affect minority-owned radio stations.

Bustos Media Chairman/CEO Amador Bustos told Congress, "The performance tax would be the added and final nail in the coffin for these small broadcasters like ours, and I think that it is just absolutely ludicrous that the record companies are trying to sort of bite the hand that feeds them."

"It's kind of like throwing a surprise birthday party for a dear friend of yours, and at the end of the night your friend comes over to you and asks you for an appearance fee. And you sit there and you wonder, 'What the hell is this all about?'" said SBS VP/GM Frank Flores. "We have worked real hard with the record labels and the artists. And to be honest with you, a lot of these artists wouldn't be where they are if it wasn't for these radio stations."

Not everyone in the Hispanic community opposes the royalty, as the National Hispanic Conference of State Legislators (NHCSL) announced today that it has approved a resolution at their recent quarterly meeting, calling upon Congress to enact the Performance Rights Act.
http://fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1307404





Globe Settles Freelancers' Lawsuit
Richard Blackwell

The Globe and Mail's parent company and two publishers have agreed to pay $11-million to settle a class action lawsuit from freelancers and other contributors who claimed they were not properly compensated for the electronic reproduction of their work.

Thousands of contributors - whose work appeared on electronic databases after 1979 - could share in the settlement. The suit was launched by author Heather Robertson 13 years ago.

The overriding issues were clarified by the Supreme Court of Canada in a 2006 ruling, when the top court said reproductions that are faithful to the original publication - such as the entire pages that appear on a CD-ROM - do not qualify for extra payments. But Ms. Robertson continued to pursue her case for those whose work was resold on databases in a piecemeal text-only form - which the Supreme Court said was not within publishers' reprint rights.

The defendants are CTVglobemedia Inc., which owns the Globe, Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd. and The Gale Group Inc. They have made no admission of wrongdoing.

Ms. Robertson, 67, said that the settlement was "fair and reasonable" and she is glad she pursued the case for all these years. "It has really made people aware of the importance of our intellectual property and of getting fair compensation for it," she said.

The Globe and Mail's vice-president general counsel Sue Gaudi said, "We are pleased to have achieved this settlement agreement and agree that it is a fair one. It is primarily a historical matter from the days before The Globe and Mail entered into written contracts with our freelance contributors. We value our relationships with our freelancers and are happy to move on."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl.../National/home





Encyclopedic Knowledge, Then vs. Now
Randall Stross

THIS is the end of the line for Encarta, the encyclopedia that Microsoft introduced in 1993 and still describes boastfully on its Web site as “the No. 1 best-selling encyclopedia software brand for the past eight years.” Microsoft recently announced that sales would soon cease and that the Encarta Web site, supported by advertising, would be shut down later this year.

It’s hard to look at the end of the Encarta experiment without the free and much larger Wikipedia springing immediately to mind. But Encarta arguably would have failed even without that competition. The Google-indexed Web forms a virtual encyclopedia that Encarta never had a chance of competing against.

Encarta was conceived pre-Web and had a long gestation. In 1985, Bill Gates envisioned a CD-ROM encyclopedia as a “high-price, high-demand” product with the potential of becoming as profitable to Microsoft as Word or Excel. Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to license rights to Encyclopedia Britannica’s text, then World Book’s. It finally found a willing licensor in Funk & Wagnalls.

Microsoft’s Encarta team concentrated on developing nontext supplements that would make it a multimedia extravaganza. The team developed illustrations and maps, a timeline and an atlas, assembled and wrote captions for 11,000 photographs and digitized eight hours of sound clips.

Early in the project’s history, a focus group of prospective customers was convened, and participants said they would happily pay $1,000 to $2,000 for a multimedia encyclopedia on CD-ROM. But at the time, no one foresaw the collapse of prices in the information economy. When Encarta was finally ready, Microsoft set its price at $395, the same price as other CD-ROM encyclopedias that had beaten it to the market.

Encarta sold poorly, gaining only 3 percent of the market six months after its release, according to Microsoft. But the leader was Compton’s, which sold its CD-ROM Interactive Encyclopedia, nominally priced at $395, for just $129 to any customer who claimed to own a competing product. Retailers did not ask to see proof, and the boxes flew off the shelf.

Microsoft’s sales managers were frantic, begging the team to give them a “$99 Encarta.” The Encarta team relented, but said it was to be only a temporary reduction for the 1993 holiday sales season. Martin Leahy, a Microsoft sales manager, told any colleague who would listen, “You realize, don’t you, the price is never going up again, right?” It never did.

The $99 Encarta was a smashing success: it quickly sold 350,000 units, making it the best-selling CD-ROM encyclopedia by the end of 1993. Its sales passed a million units the next year.

In 2000, a free Web version, which included less than half the full version, was introduced; to get online access to the complete encyclopedia, one had to buy Encarta on CD-ROM or DVD. Online-only subscription plans came later.

Over time, the price of the product fell even more. Earlier this year, Microsoft sold Encarta as a downloadable product for $29.95; most recently, it was marked down to $22.95.

I contacted some of the people who worked on Encarta during its early days to collect their reflections. Gary Alt, who joined Microsoft in 1995 after working as an editor at World Book and at Encyclopedia Britannica, spoke with pride of the editorial work that he and his Encarta team had done. Fifty people — editors, fact-checkers and indexers — were on the team in 2000, at the peak of Microsoft’s editorial investment in Encarta, he said.

That investment, however, seems to have gone unnoticed by Encarta’s users. Tom Corddry, a senior manager at Microsoft from 1989 to 1996 who headed up its multimedia publishing unit, said, “The editors overestimated the way students would say, ‘This has been carefully edited! And is very authoritative!’”

Encarta would have been discontinued long before now if it hadn’t extended its natural life span by finding a market in international spots beyond the reach of the Internet, Mr. Corddry said. “That bought Encarta some time,” he added.

Encarta could not compete, however, against the Web and Google. The Google search engine is an automated, continuously updated, always-expanding guide to information that is completely free. Authority now comes not from a small group of encyclopedia editors and famous contributors but from Google’s algorithms, which analyze links that point to Web pages elsewhere and other clues to make an educated guess about trustworthiness.

Google has effectively enlisted millions of Web page authors, whose links serve as recommendations for the largest editorial board ever assembled. Many Google search results lead off with a pointer to Wikipedia. The crowd-curated Web may have been what Microsoft had in mind when it vaguely explained Encarta’s closing this way: “People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.”

IN 1985, when Microsoft was turned down by Britannica, the conventional wisdom in the encyclopedia business held that a sales force that knocked on doors was indispensable, that encyclopedias were “sold, not bought.” Encarta showed that with a low-enough price — it was selling for $99 when Britannica introduced its own CD-ROM encyclopedia in 1994 for $995 — it could become the best-selling encyclopedia.

But the triumph was short-lived. Microsoft soon learned that the public would no longer pay for information once it was available free. Other information businesses, of course, are now confronting the same fact, but without the Windows and Office franchises to fall back upon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/business/03digi.html





MPAA Website, Now With Torrents
Ernesto

If it was up to the MPAA, every website with links to copyright infringing files would be banned from the Internet. Perhaps they should take a closer look at their own website first though, since it’s vulnerable to an XSS attack, making it possible to browse The Pirate Bay directly from the MPAA website.

It is no secret that the MPAA and other anti-piracy outfits rather spend their money on lawyers than web-designers or coders. Unfortunately for them this sometimes leads to awkward situations. For example, it turns out that the MPAA website is vulnerable to XSS attacks allowing the public to inject images, frames and all sorts of random code into the site.

About a year ago the RIAA website suffered from a similar vulnerability and was wiped clean. The RIAA fixed the problem within a few hours and eventually all the ‘lost’ content was restored, but not before thousands of people had fun with it.

The XSS vulnerability on the MPAA website was found on the about page where visitors can submit their favorite movie. In the screenshot below it says “thank you for taking the time to share your favorite movie,” which is the actual text that people get to see when they fill out the form. The Pirate Bay logo and the links to the latest movie torrents are obviously not supposed to be there.

It is “a proof of concept that demonstrates an XSS attack on mpaa.org website,” writes Vektor who covered the details in a blog post, adding that it should be taken as a joke. No lies there, as it made us smile indeed.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-website...rrents-090502/





Jacqui's Secret Plan to 'Master the Internet'

'Climb down' on central database was 'a sideshow'
Chris Williams

Spy chiefs are already spending hundreds of millions of pounds on a mass internet surveillance system, despite Jacqui Smith's announcement earlier this week that proposals for a central warehouse of communications data had been dumped on privacy grounds.

The system - uncovered today by The Register and The Sunday Times - is being installed under a GCHQ project called Mastering the Internet (MTI). It will include thousands of deep packet inspection probes inside communications providers' networks, as well as massive computing power at the intelligence agency's Cheltenham base, "the concrete doughnut".

Sources with knowledge of the project said contacts have already been awarded to private sector partners.

One said: "In MTI, computing resources are not measured by the traditional capacities or speeds such as Gb, Tb, Megaflop or Teraflop... but by the metric tonne!.. and they have lots of them."

The American techology giant Lockheed Martin is understood to have bagged a £200m deal. The BAE-owned British firm Detica, which has close links to MI5 and MI6, as well as to GCHQ, has also been signed up to help on MTI.

A spokeswoman for GCHQ said the agency does not comment on individual contracts. "GCHQ works with a broad range of industry partners to deliver a complex portfolio of technical projects," she said. Detica also declined to comment, and Lockheed Martin did not return calls.

Sources said MTI received approval and funding of more than £1bn over three years in the October 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review. GCHQ, like MI5 and MI6, is funded out of the opaque Single Intelligence Account. For 2007/8 the planned budget for the three agencies was over £1.6bn.

GCHQ began work on MTI soon after it was approved. Records of job advertising by the agency show that in April 2008 it was seeking a Head of Major Contracts with "operational responsibility for the ‘Mastering the Internet’ (MTI) contract". The new senior official was to be paid an annual salary of up to £100,000.

The advertisment also indicated that the head of Major Contracts would be in charge of procurement on MTI and be expected to forge close links with the private sector.

According to sources, MTI is a core piece of the government's Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). On Monday of last week, the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced that under IMP, rather than build a central warehouse, responsibility for storing details of who contacts whom, when and where will be imposed on communications providers.

The news was welcomed by privacy advocates and civil liberties campaigners, but sources described it as a "side show" compared to the massively increased surveillance capability that MTI will deliver. It will grant intelligence staff in Cheltenahm complete visibility of UK Internet traffic, allowing them to remotely configure their deep packet inspection probes to intercept data - both communications data and the communication content - on demand.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: "We opposed the big brother database because it gave the state direct access to everybody’s communications. But this network of black boxes achieves the same thing via the back door."

GCHQ's spokeswoman said: "GCHQ does not discuss 'how' we use data, as this may lead to revelations about our capability which damage national security.

"GCHQ is constantly updating its systems in order to maintain and renew its capability."

Advocates of MTI and IMP say they are essential if intelligence agencies are to maintain their capability to monitor terrorist and other criminal networks.

A Home Office consultation on the storage of communications data is now open. Meanwhile, work and spending on the all-seeing system to intercept and retrieve it is already underway.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/03/gchq_mti/





Police to Destroy DNA Profiles of 800,000 Innocent People
Jamie Doward

DNA profiles of almost a million innocent people are to be destroyed as part of a major overhaul of the police national database. They include people who have been arrested and never charged, and those taken to court but found not guilty.

Civil rights groups gave a cautious welcome to the proposals - which will be announced by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, this week - but said more needed to be done.

An estimated 800,000 of the 5.1m DNA profiles on the database belong to people in England and Wales who have no criminal conviction.

A Home Office consultation paper will also outline plans to delete all physical DNA samples on the database, including mouth swabs, hair and blood. The move follows widespread concerns that the samples could be shared with third parties.

The campaign group Genewatch, which opposes the DNA database, has warned that health and drug companies want access to the samples to create profiles to predict who is genetically susceptible to different illnesses and diseases. There have also been fears the samples could one day be used for racial profiling or even to predict criminal behaviour.

The proposal to scale back the database and destroy the samples comes after a landmark judgment by the European court of human rights last December that ruled the government was wrong to hold the DNA profiles - the genetic codes that identify individuals - of innocent people indefinitely.

Yesterday Smith told the Observer that there were genuine concerns over the size and scope of the DNA database. "It is crucial that we do everything we can to keep the public safe from crime and bring offenders to justice," she said.

"The DNA database plays a vital role in helping us do that. However, there has to be a balance between the need to protect the public and respecting their rights. Based on risks versus benefits, our view is that we can now destroy all samples."

Legal experts said the government had little choice but to comply with the human rights court ruling.

"This is not a privacy-friendly Home Office," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty. "Any developments in this area are because the Home Office has been dragged here by the European court of human rights."

But the Home Office insists that in deciding to destroy all samples on the database it has gone much further than it was compelled to by the court's ruling.

Last night privacy campaigners said the consultation must answer the crucial question of how long the police would be allowed to retain the DNA data of innocent people before being forced to delete them. There were also claims the proposals did not go far enough.

"The DNA database is already too big," said Simon Davies, director of the campaign group Privacy International. "We would argue that the samples of anyone convicted of even minor offences should be removed."

Despite mounting outrage over the use of the DNA database, the government insists that DNA can play an essential role in fighting crime. The Home Office says that between April 1998 and September 2008 there were more than 390,000 crimes with DNA matches.

DNA has played an essential part in solving thousands of cases, including finding Mark Dixie guilty of the murder of Sally Ann Bowman, the 18-year-old model murdered close to her home in Croydon, south London, in 2005, and the conviction of Steve Wright for the murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich.

It has also played a crucial role in proving innocence and overturning miscarriages of justice. Earlier this year DNA was a vital factor in proving the innocence of Sean Hodgson, who spent nearly 30 years in prison for the death of a young woman in 1979.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...iles-destroyed





Audit Finds Celebrity Records Improperly Checked
Glen Johnson

It turns out Massachusetts law enforcement officers have been engaging in a bit of star search themselves — on the likes of Tom Brady [stats] and Matt Damon.

A new audit says police officers, court officers, probation officers or court employees have conducted hundreds of criminal record searches on Massachusetts celebrities. A state official briefed on the findings says personal information for Brady, the New England Patriots [team stats] quarterback, was checked on 968 occasions.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of privacy concerns, says other celebrities checked include Oscar-winning actor Damon, singer James Taylor and Boston Celtics [team stats] captain Paul Pierce [stats].

Criminal Systems History Board Director Curtis Wood said Wednesday agencies know exactly who ran the checks and when. Now they’re determining if the queries were legitimate. He says illegitimate checks will be punished.
http://www.bostonherald.com/track/ce...perly_checked/





Austrian Breakthrough in Quantum Cryptography: Report

Austrian physicists say a breakthrough in next-generation quantum cryptography could allow encrypted messages to be bounced off satellites, the British journal Nature reported Sunday.

A team from Austria's Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) managed to send entangled photons 144 kilometres (90 miles) between the Spanish islands of Las Palmas and the Balearics.

Because of the success of the test, the IQOQI team said it was now feasible to send this kind of unbreakable encrypted communication through space using satellites.

Quantum cryptography works by sending streams of light particles, or photons, making it entirely secure, as any eavesdropping would leave traces and immediately be detected.

In quantum cryptography, photons are used as the key for the encrypted communication -- just as mathematical formula are used in conventional cryptography.
http://www.physorg.com/news160593524.html





U.S. Media See a Path to India in China’s Snub
Tim Arango

After many years of fervent lobbying and deal-making in China, American media companies have little to show for their efforts there and are increasingly shifting their attention instead to India.

Media executives still believe that Chinese audiences are receptive to Western culture — “SpongeBob SquarePants” is a big hit in China — but many companies have been pulling back out of frustration over censorship, piracy, strict restrictions on foreign investment and the glacial pace of its bureaucracy.

In recent weeks, America Online shut its operations in China, for the second time. Warner Brothers, the movie studio that shares a corporate parent with AOL in Time Warner, had plans as recently as 2006 to open more than 200 retail stores throughout China, with a local partner. Today there are no such plans.

“No one really has a decent-size presence there, and no one seems to know how to get one,” said Michael Del Nin, senior vice president for international and corporate strategy at Time Warner. “In terms of priorities, the focus is elsewhere.”

Increasingly, that focus is India, a country with a fast-growing economy and fewer government impediments for foreign media companies. In March, the Motion Picture Association of America opened an office in India for the first time, in Mumbai. A little over four years ago, Dan Glickman became the head of the association, and he has visited China several times.

“The feeling was that there were greater opportunities then than there are now,” he said.

This is a stark reversal. For many years, American media executives have extolled the potential of China, wooing executives and promoting the potential goldmine of reaching its one billion-plus population. Sumner M. Redstone, who controls Viacom and CBS, entertained Chinese officials in his Beverly Hills mansion over meals prepared by Wolfgang Puck.

But for media companies, frustrations have been growing. For several years, China has capped the number of foreign films that can be shown in theaters at 20.

Sometimes studios back away from even seeking the approval of Chinese authorities, as Warner Brothers did last year with “The Dark Knight,” because of a belief that the movie would not pass muster with government censors. “The Dark Knight” is the second-highest grossing movie of all time, with more than $1 billion at the worldwide box office, after “Titanic” (in dollars not adjusted for inflation).

In November, Warner became the first studio to announce it would make new movies available in China over a video-on-demand at prices low enough — about 60 cents to $1 — to compete with pirated versions. The service still is not under way.

Even with access, it is possible to reach only a tiny portion of the Chinese. In China, for example, CNN International is available only in hotels that cater to foreign business travelers and in embassies. Viacom has an MTV China, but it reaches only about 14 million homes in the Guangdong Province.

“It seemed like China captured everyone’s imagination,” said William H. Roedy, chairman of MTV International. “I think everyone expected too much, too soon. You have to be patient.”

Rupert Murdoch engaged in a decade-long odyssey — some say obsession — to entertain China’s vast populace. Mr. Murdoch found a wife, but very little revenue. His wife, Wendi Murdoch is paid $100,000 a year to “provide strategic advice” on the development of MySpace China, a joint venture operated by the News Corporation, according to regulatory filings.

Other than that, Mr. Murdoch’s activities in China are minimal. His Star TV, a pan-Asian satellite service, has channels in Chinese, but reaches only a small presence on mainland China. The company has significantly cut its staff in China in recent years.
Troubles with Chinese investments have even reached back to American shores. Yahoo and Google have been criticized in the United States for cooperating with Chinese censors.

When Jack Cafferty, the CNN commentator, insulted China last year by saying its products were “junk” and its leaders “goons,” Time Warner quickly apologized. But the episode has lingered in the minds of executives.

Their gradual disenchantment puts media companies at odds with many industries, like consumer products, that still look for large-scale growth in China. Nike recently said China was its primary area of growth in Asia, as revenues there increased 29 percent through the first nine months of its fiscal year. Coca-Cola is planning to increase its business there, despite a recent ruling by Chinese regulators that shut down the takeover of a juice company. And despite its problems elsewhere, General Motors remains a force in China.

In India, American-owned networks can reach far bigger audiences than in China, because of fewer government restrictions. Recently, Turner Broadcasting and its movie studio, Warner Brothers, which are part of Time Warner, established a new English-language channel called WB in India. Turner Broadcasting Systems, another unit of Time Warner, has started a Hindi-language pay-TV channel, REAL.

“We’re certainly focusing on India,” said Louise Sams, executive vice president for and general counsel of Turner networks. “There’s been a huge amount of growth in the number of networks in India over the last couple of years.”

Viacom, meanwhile, made a significant investment in India last year with Colors, which has become the top-rated entertainment network there in recent weeks. Its top show, “Balika Vadhu,” is a drama about a girl who marries at age 8. Another popular show is a locally based reality show with a premise like that of “Fear Factor.” MTV India of Viacom reaches 30 million homes, more than twice that of the network’s China outpost.

But executives remain alert to any signs of a thaw in China. When “Slumdog Millionaire,” which was filmed in India, won an Academy Award for best film this year, it caused a stir in China’s film community and raised hopes that China, out of regional rivalry and envy, might become more open to American studios.

“Now that they’ve seen ‘Slumdog,’ they want more movies produced in China,” said Jeanette Chan, a lawyer who represents United States film studios in Asia. “There’s this undercurrent, this competition, between China and India. Particularly when they see Bollywood do well.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/bu...a/04media.html





The Price of Staying Connected
Michelle Higgins

WIRELESS Internet access is no longer a rarefied luxury. It’s free in cafes, parks, fast-food chains, campgrounds and gas stations — yes, gas stations.

Yet in some places travelers still must pay for Wi-Fi access, and perhaps nowhere is that more disturbing than in an upscale hotel room.

While many budget and midscale hotel chains have largely given up on charging guests for Wi-Fi, fees persist at more luxurious sister hotels — typically about $9.95 to $19.95 a day.

Wi-Fi is free, for example, for travelers staying at Starwood’s Aloft. At Starwood’s W Hotels, the service costs roughly $12.95 to $16.95 for 24 hours. This disparity has long perplexed travelers. But in this economy, with expense accounts drying up and vacationers increasingly looking for deals, having to pay to use the Internet at your hotel seems increasingly absurd.

“As far as I am concerned it is one of the most annoying of hotel charges,” said Randall Stempler, a lawyer in Manhattan who travels often on business. The fee is “exorbitant,” he added, considering the time he usually spends logged in to check e-mail or go online. “It should just be built into the rate, like electricity.”

Many guests agree. Free in-room Internet access ranked as the most desired guest-room amenity in a national survey of 800 affluent travelers conducted in August by Ypartnership, a travel marketing firm in Orlando, Fla. That was above premium bedding and flat-screen TVs. A January survey of 6,300 people across 10 countries by the research firm Synovate found that 47 percent of respondents said a hotel must cater to their technology needs before they book it, with wireless access a top priority.

“We are finding that it is now no longer an added feature to have wireless Internet in hotels, but rather it is expected,” Sheri Lambert, a Synovate senior vice president for travel and leisure research, said in a statement. “Travelers, whether for business or leisure, need to be connected.”

Budget hotels, which have been offering free Wi-Fi for some time, are increasingly calling attention to the service as a way to stand out from more expensive hotels as travelers look for bargains in the recession.

Starwood’s new extended-stay brand, Element, has been highlighting its free Wi-Fi in local advertising campaigns for recently opened hotels in Las Vegas and Lexington, Mass. Homewood Suites by Hilton is running an advertisement that lists “all the little extras that would otherwise eat into your expenses” starting with high-speed Internet access.

Recognizing the resentment, a few upscale hotels have begun to drop Internet charges — at least for some of their guests.

Hyatt announced last month that it would waive the charge for in-room Internet access for members of its loyalty program at platinum and diamond levels. In March the luxury Liberty Hotel in Boston did away with the $10.99 fee it had been charging for Internet access and began offering free Wi-Fi throughout the hotel.

Some hotels, however, have taken the opposite direction. Thompson Hotels, a small group of boutique hotels that used to boast about free Wi-Fi, started charging $10 per 24-hour period earlier this year. “As rates of all of the hotels have decreased,” said Jennifer Walters, a publicist for the hotel group, “certain services that don’t affect all guests had to be altered — one such item being Wi-Fi. Not all guests use it, so to include it complimentary in the rate no longer makes sense with the consumer wanting the most attractive rates.”

Yet on the whole, more hotels do seem to be moving away from the fees. Over all, 15 percent of hotels charge for Internet service in a guest room, down from 22 percent in 2004, according to a 2008 survey by the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Those that still require payment for the service are overwhelmingly at the high end: 49 percent of luxury or upscale hotels charge for in-room Internet service compared with just 16 percent of economy or budget properties. Only 5 percent of midprice hotels require payment.

Some major chains that charge for Internet service in guest rooms have been offering free Wi-Fi in lobbies, but travelers say it’s not the same.

“Everyone has to line up in the computer room, and the hotel lobby becomes an Internet cafe, which is rather unappealing,” Kevin Leibel, president of a brand strategy company in Chapel Hill, N.C., wrote in an e-mail message from the business center at the Westin Palace in Madrid while on vacation. For in-room Internet, that hotel charges 18 euros for 24 hours (about $24 at $1.33 to the euro) or 12 euros an hour, but users are allowed 30 minutes at a time free in the business center.

So why do many upscale hotels continue to charge for Internet access while more affordable brands do not? The guest bending over a keyboard could be forgiven some impatience at hearing one explanation: the role of hotels’ legal agreements on branding.

“In the management contract scenario, the brands would like to maximize revenue because all of that is subject to base management fees,” said Bjorn Hanson, an associate professor at the Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University. When the ownership is through a franchise, as is typical with less expensive hotels, the hotel brands “let the owners pay for installation and providing the service.”

Hotels say Internet charges are driven by what the market will bear. Because travelers have been willing to pay extra at high-end properties, those hotels continue to charge. But that doesn’t much change the experience for travelers who have paid for in-room Internet service at a Hilton, for example, but received it for free at a Hilton Garden Inn.

“That’s the big disconnect” said Juliana Shallcross, senior editor at HotelChatter.com, where hotel Wi-Fi has become a frequent topic. HotelChatter issues an annual Wi-Fi report detailing hotel policies across various brands. This year, the report focused not just on which hotels were charging and which weren’t, but also on reliability.

“What brings out the most ire,” Ms. Shallcross said, is finding that not only is there a fee for the Internet connection, but also that “it’s not working.” She recently paid $14.99 for in-room Internet at the Mirage in Las Vegas. First, she tried using the wireless option, but the connection was “so terrible,” she said in a post on HotelChatter, that she tried using the ethernet cable she found in a drawer. Still no luck.

“After trying for about an hour to send an e-mail,” she wrote, “we got on the horn with the technician who said the modem looked zapped and that a technician would arrive to fix it. We waited for 45 minutes, and no one came. At 11:30 at night, we decided we could not afford to wait for someone to come as we needed to be up and working by 5:30 a.m. We called the front desk and asked for a different room.”

At checkout, the Mirage removed the Internet charge from her bill.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/tr...0pracwifi.html





Wi-Fi to Go, No Cafe Needed
David Pogue

Someday, we’ll tell our grandchildren how we had to drive around town looking for a coffee shop when we needed to get online, and they’ll laugh their heads off. Every building in America has running water, electricity and ventilation; what’s the holdup on universal wireless Internet?

Getting online isn’t impossible, but today’s options are deeply flawed. Most of them involve sitting rooted in one spot — in the coffee shop or library, for example. (Sadly, the days when cities were blanketed by free Wi-Fi signals leaking from people’s apartments are over; they all require passwords these days.)

If you want to get online while you’re on the move, in fact, you’ve had only one option: buy one of those $60-a-month cellular modems from Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile or AT&T. The speed isn’t exactly cable-modem speed, but it’s close enough. You can get a card-slot version, which has a nasty little antenna protuberance, or a U.S.B.-stick version, which cries out to be snapped off by a passing flight attendant’s beverage cart.

A few laptops have this cellular modem built in, which is less awkward but still drains the battery with gusto.

But imagine if you could get online anywhere you liked — in a taxi, on the beach, in a hotel with disgustingly overpriced Wi-Fi — without messing around with cellular modems. What if you had a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a private hot spot, that followed you everywhere you go?

Incredibly, there is such a thing. It’s the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.

The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network. If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don’t travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: $15 for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs $270.

In essence, the MiFi converts that cellular Internet signal into an umbrella of Wi-Fi coverage that up to five people can share. (The speed suffers if all five are doing heavy downloads at once, but that’s a rarity.)

Cellular wireless routers, as they’re called, have been available for years. The average person hasn’t even heard of this product category, but these routers are popular on, for example, Hollywood movie shoots. On-location cast and crew can kill their downtime online, sharing the signal from a single cellular card that’s broadcast via Wi-Fi.

Those machines, however, get no cell signal on their own; you have to supply your own cellular modem. They’re also big and metal and ugly. But the real deal-killer is that they have to be plugged into a power outlet. You can’t use one at the beach or in the woods unless you have a really, really long extension cord.

The MiFi is remarkable for its tiny size, its sleek good looks, its 30-foot range (it easily filled a large airport gate area with four-bar signal) — and the fact that it’s cordless and rechargeable.

How is this amazing? Let us count the ways.

First, you’re spared the plug-and-unplug ritual of cellular modems. You can leave the MiFi in your pocket, purse or laptop bag; whenever you fire up your laptop, netbook, Wi-Fi camera or game gadget, or wake up your iPhone or iPod Touch, you’re online.

Last week, I was stuck on a runway for two hours. As I merrily worked away online, complete with YouTube videos and file downloads, I became aware that my seatmate was sneaking glances. As I snuck counter-glances at him, I realized that he had no interest in what I was doing, but rather in the signal-strength icon on my laptop — on an airplane where there wasn’t otherwise any Wi-Fi signal. “I’m sorry,” he finally said, completely baffled, “but how are you getting a wireless signal?” He was floored when I pulled the MiFi from my pocket, its power light glowing evilly.

If he’d had a laptop, I would have happily shared my Wi-Fi cloud with him. The network password is printed right there on the bottom of the MiFi itself. That’s a clever idea, actually. Since the MiFi is in your possession, it’s impossible for anyone to get into your cloud unless you show it to them. Call it “security through proximity.”

The second huge advantage of the MiFi is that, as with any wireless router, you can share its signal with other people; up to five road warriors can enjoy the same connection. Your youngsters with their iPod Touches in the back of the van could hop online, for example, or you and your colleagues could connect and collaborate on a corporate retreat.

Verizon points out how useful the MiFi could be for college students working off-campus, insurance adjusters at a disaster site and trade show booth teams. (Incredibly, Verizon even suggests that you could use the MiFi at home as your primary family Internet service. Sharing a cellular-modem account was something it strenuously discouraged only two years ago.)

Some footnotes: First, the MiFi goes into sleep mode after 30 minutes of inactivity, to prolong its battery life.

Yes, it means that a single charge can get you through a full day of on-and-off Internet noodling, even though the battery is supposed to run for only four hours a charge (it’s rated at 40 hours of standby). But once the MiFi is asleep, your Wi-Fi bubble is gone until you tap the power button.

It’s probably the height of ingratitude to complain about having to press a single button to get yourself online. But if the MiFi is flopping around somewhere in the bottom of your bag, just finding it can be a minor hassle.

Fortunately, you can turn off that sleep feature, or even change the inactivity interval before it kicks in. This gizmo is a full-blown wireless router with full-blown configuration controls. If you type 192.168.1.1 into your Web browser’s address bar — a trick well known to network gurus — the MiFi’s settings pages magically appear. Now you can do geeky, tweaky tasks like changing the password or the wireless network name, limiting access to specific computers, turning on port forwarding (don’t ask) .

A final note: If your laptop has a traditional cellular modem, you can turn on a Mac OS X or Windows feature called Internet Sharing, which rebroadcasts the signal via Wi-Fi, just like the MiFi.

But the MiFi is infinitely easier to use and start up, doesn’t lock you into carrying around your laptop all the time, has better range and works even when your laptop battery is dead. (The MiFi recharges from a wall outlet; it still works as a hot spot while it’s plugged in.)

It’s always exciting when someone invents a new product category, and this one is a jaw-dropper. All your gadgets can be online at once, wherever you go, without having to plug anything in — no coffee shop required. Heck, it might even be worth showing the grandchildren.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/te...h/07pogue.html





Mini-Links to Web Sites Are Multiplying
Jenna Wortham

If you have spent any time on the Internet in the last few months, chances are you have clicked on a shortened link Web address.

URL shorteners, which abbreviate unwieldy Web addresses into bite-size links, have been around for years. The most popular service, TinyURL.com, was started in 2002 by a unicyclist named Kevin Gilbertson.

But the tools have soared in popularity recently, in part because of microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, where messages are limited in length and every character counts.

URL shorteners are easy to build, and dozens of competitors have proliferated, with minimalist, character-conserving names like Bit.ly, Is.gd and Tr.im. Most of them are simple tools created as a labor of love with no real business model behind them.

Shorteners, however, could have real value beyond making Web addresses more manageable, said Danny Sullivan, editor of the blog Search Engine Land.

They have the ability to keep track of use — how many times a particular link was clicked and the geographic location of the clickers — which could be valuable to marketers, news outlets and companies looking to measure the impact of a link, tweet or mention online.

“The tracking element is very important,” said Mr. Sullivan. Some tools even highlight comments posted to Facebook or FriendFeed about a particular link — features that standard tools like Google Analytics may not be able to provide.

One popular link shortening service, Bit.ly, is trying to build a business around that kind of data.

Betaworks Studios is a New York technology incubator that has invested in Tumblr, a microblogging tool; OMGPOP, a social gaming site; and Outside.in, a hyperlocal news aggregator. It developed Bit.ly as an internal tool for its portfolio of companies to use.

“It emerged as much more than that,” said John Borthwick, the chief executive of Betaworks. “Everyone from Dell to Demi Moore is on Twitter and could want to track their emerging social system.”

Since Bit.ly was introduced last year, its volume has soared. The company says that now 50 million Bit.ly links are clicked each week — more than double the rate of early April. “And next week, we’re expecting to hit 60 million,” said Andrew Weissman, the chief operating officer of Betaworks.

The growth has attracted venture financing. Bit.ly recently announced that it had raised $2 million from investors that included Alpha Tech Ventures, the software industry pioneer Mitch Kapor and the early Google investor Ron Conway.

“The Web has been devoid of a feedback loop for a while,” said Christopher Sacca, an investor who has financed several Web start-ups, including Bit.ly, Twitter and Photobucket.

Because Bit.ly tracks its clipped URLs in real time, no matter where they are posted — instant messages, Twitter, Facebook, blogs or e-mail — the service could become “a real source for extracting information about how people are using the Web,” Mr. Sacca said.

In addition to tracking links, Bit.ly uses a service called Calais, developed by Thomson Reuters, that can extract semantic terms from the Web pages that Bit.ly users are redirected to. This allows Bit.ly track the most popular topics being shared across the Web, as well as zero in on a specific category like finance or health care and retrieve the most popular Web sites shared on that subject in the last 24 hours.

The company hopes that being able to track the “social distribution of information in real-time,” as Mr. Borthwick describes it, could potentially be relevant to the future of Web search.

Although Bit.ly is not yet sure how to make money from all this data, “there’s a business model here,” Mr. Borthwick said. “We can smell it.”

For all the convenience of short URLs, some Internet security experts worry that they could be used to camouflage spam and phishing attacks and redirect people to malicious Web sites.

“People have no way to know where they’re going,” said Patrik Runald, chief security advisor at F-Secure Security Labs, a maker of security software. “These services are great and they serve a purpose, but at the same time, there is a darker side.”

And if a shortening site shuts down, any links funneled through it would be lost forever, Mr. Runald said.

Bit.ly says it is developing an archive system to keep links from decaying and employs several filters and a preview function in Firefox and TweetDeck, a desktop application for Twitter, to help cut back on spam.

Given the ease of use, the bigger threat to start-up companies like Bit.ly is that major corporations will create their own custom URL shorteners to bolster their brands. Digg, StumbleUpon and FriendFeed recently unveiled shortening services, and it would be easy for the big social networks, like Facebook or Twitter, to create their own. And there is always the chance that a heavyweight like Google will step in and obliterate the competition.

“That’s always a risk, but we’re racing to establish ourselves in the market,” said Mr. Weissman. “We’re willing to bet that innovation comes from weird little corners of the Internet, like this.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/te...s/04short.html





Aussie Censors Implement Six Degrees of Separation Policy
John Ozimek

The Australian Government yesterday broke new records for web censorship by requiring the takedown not just of a page containing harmful content, nor even a page linking to harmful content, but a page linking to a link to allegedly harmful content.

The content that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) originally deemed to be inappropriate was to be found on a US site – Abortion TV. The site is political in nature, clearly coming down on the anti-abortion side of that debate – and the page in question features pictures of aborted foetuses.

Back in January of this year, ACMA wrote back to a complainant: "ACMA is satisfied that the internet content is hosted outside Australia, and that the content is prohibited or potential prohibited content.

"The Internet Industry Association (IIA) has a code of practice for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which, among other things, set out arrangements for dealing with such content. In accordance with the code, ACMA has notified the above content to the makers of IIA approved filters, for their attention and appropriate action. The code requires ISPs to make available to customers an IIA approved filter."

Despite this, the link continued to be published by popular news site, Whirlpool. In March, ACMA upped the ante, by sending to Whirlpool’s ISP - Bulletproof Networks - an "interim link-deletion notice", warning them that they were in breach of the law – and that failure to block access to the link in question could cost them $11,000 a day.

Bulletproof pulled the link. This sequence of events was then reported on by Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc (EFA), who describe themselves as "a non-profit national organisation representing Internet users concerned with on-line freedoms and rights".

In a report that included the now infamous link, they wrote: "This demonstrates not only that the blacklist targets a wider range of material than child abuse (where the Minister’s rhetoric has been focused) but also that the lines between art, obscenity and political speech are not as bright and clear as politicians would have us imagine... Viewing or possession [of] RC content is not in itself illegal unless the content falls afoul of some other statute, such as those governing child-abuse material".

They added: "Despite the Minster’s (ridiculous) assertions that he means well and we should take it on faith that the filter will be effective and benign, this latest episode demonstrates how serious run-ins with the censors can be, that it does not only happen to purveyors of the ‘filth’ politicians rail against. These sorts of incidents will multiply as mandatory filtering is introduced, more controversial content is prohibited, and mirroring, linking and circumvention become common."

It was therefore drearily predictable that ACMA would descend on EFA like the proverbial ton of bricks – and lo, yesterday they did exactly that, serving their latest "link-deletion notice" on EFA.

This time, EFA pointed out the cost of this sort of action. They said: "This system, which costs Australian taxpayers millions each year, is clearly unworkable". However, there are also clear political dangers. As they further observed: "If a link to a prohibited page is not allowed, what about a link to a link? At what number of hops does hyperlink become acceptable?"

It is also pretty pointless, as sites such as "Somebody think of the Children", which look at censorship and moral panic in Australia, remain hosted in the US, where they are beyond the reach of Australia's censors.

On this latest evidence, the Australian Government is now light years ahead of the rest of the Western world when it comes to political censorship. Whether a less draconian regime will at some point emerge is now a hot topic for debate amongst Ozzie ISP’s.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/07/oz_link_ban/





Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press
Brad Stone

The iPod stemmed losses in the music industry. The Kindle gave beleaguered book publishers a reason for optimism.

Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens.

Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

Such e-reading devices are due in the next year from a range of companies, including the News Corporation, the magazine publisher Hearst and Plastic Logic, a well-financed start-up company that expects to start making digital newspaper readers by the end of the year at a plant in Dresden, Germany.

But it is Amazon, maker of the Kindle, that appears to be first in line to try throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies. As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer’s plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.

An Amazon spokesman would not comment, but some news organizations, including The New York Times, are expected to be involved in the introduction of the device, according to people briefed on the plans. A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said she could not comment on the company’s relationship with Amazon.

These devices from Amazon and other manufacturers offer an almost irresistible proposition to newspaper and magazine industries. They would allow publishers to save millions on the cost of printing and distributing their publications, at precisely a time when their businesses are under historic levels of pressure.

“We are looking at this with a great deal of interest,” said John Ridding, the chief executive of the 121-year-old, salmon-colored British newspaper The Financial Times. “The severe double whammy of the recession and the structural shift to the Internet has created an urgency that has rightly focused attention on these devices.”

Perhaps most appealing about this new class of reading gadgets is the opportunity they offer publishers to rethink their strategy in a rapidly evolving digital world. The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions. And publishers have found that they were not prepared to deal with the recent rapid decline of print advertising revenue.

Publishers could possibly use these new mobile reading devices to hit the reset button and return in some form to their original business model: selling subscriptions, and supporting their articles with ads.

The current version of the Kindle has proved in a limited way that this is possible. Even though its six-inch black-and-white screen is made for reading books, Amazon offers Kindle owners subscriptions to more than 58 newspapers and magazines, including The Times, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. (The Journal subscription costs $9.99 a month, The Times is $13.99 a month and The New Yorker is $2.99 a month.)

Subscribers get updates once a day over a cellular network. Amazon and other participating publishers say they are satisfied with the results, although they have not released data on the number of subscriptions that have been sold.

For the all the hope publishers are placing in dedicated electronic reading devices, they will be encumbered at the start with some serious shortcomings. Most use display technology from E Ink, a company in Cambridge, Mass., that was founded in 1997 based on research started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology M.I.T. Media Lab to develop thin electronic displays capable of mimicking the readability of regular paper, while using a minimum amount of battery power.

The screens, which are currently in the Kindle and Sony Reader, display no color or video and update images at a slower rate than traditional computer screens. That has some people in the magazine industry, in particular, keeping their hopes in check until E Ink evolves.

“I don’t think we would be anywhere near as excited about anything in black and white as we would about high-definition color,” said Tom Wallace, the editorial director of Condé Nast, publisher of glossy magazines like Vogue and Wired. “But technology changes at a pretty high clip these days, and if we are now in the Farmer Gray days, it will be only a very short while until we are in the video game era.”

Another hitch is that some makers of reading devices, like Amazon, want to set their own subscription prices for publications and control the relationship with the subscriber — something media companies like Condé Nast object to. Plastic Logic and Hearst have said publicly that they will take a more open approach and let media companies deal directly with readers and set their own prices.

Then there is the looming presence of Apple, which seems likely to introduce a multipurpose tablet computer later this year, according to rumor and speculation by Apple observers. Such a device, with a screen that is said to be about three or four times as large as the iPhone’s, would have an LCD screen capable of showing rich color and video, and people could use it to browse the Web.

Even if such a device has limited battery life and strains readers’ eyes, for many buyers it could be a more appealing alternative to devices dedicated to reading books, newspapers and magazines.

Such a Web-connected tablet would also pose a problem for any print publications that hope to try charging for content that is tailored for mobile devices, since users could just visit their free sites on the Internet. One way to counter this might be to borrow from the cellphone model and offer specialized reading devices free or at a discount to people who commit to, say, a one-year subscription.

Then there is the possibility that all these devices from Amazon, Apple and the rest have simply not appeared in time to save many players in the troubled realm of print media.

“If these devices had been ready for the general consumer market five years ago, we probably could have taken advantage of them quickly,” said Roger Fidler, the program director for digital publishing at the University of Missouri, Columbia. “Now the earliest we might see large-scale consumer adoption is next year, and unlike the iPod it’s going to be a slower process migrating people from print to the device.”

“And all of us are very worried about how newspapers are going to survive in the next few years if we don’t see any turnaround in the economy,” Mr. Fidler said.

Whether or not the situation is hopeless, newspapers and magazines now find themselves weighing offers of aid from outsiders. When asked at the debut of the Kindle 2 in February whether the Kindle could help the print media, Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, said he thought there were “genuine opportunities” to save journalism.

“And we’re excited about helping with that,” he added.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/te.../04reader.html





Big News on E-Readers: A Larger Kindle Screen
Mike Musgrove

Gadget-makers usually like to boast that the latest version of their device is smaller than its predecessor.

Yesterday, Amazon made waves by doing the opposite, showing off a larger version of its Kindle e-reader in the hopes of luring college students and newspaper readers.

Newspapers have been an "absolute bestseller" on previous models, said Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos. His company is hoping that a larger 9.7-inch screen will make the Kindle that much more appealing to that audience.

"People love waking up in the morning to find that their New York Times, their Washington Post, their Wall Street Journal have been 'automagically' delivered overnight," Bezos said at a news conference in New York. "They like the fact that when they travel, their subscription follows them around."

Like its predecessor, the new Kindle DX will be able to wirelessly download books or periodicals from Amazon's online store and display its contents in shades of gray, not color. But the new generation of the wireless book reader will have a larger screen and cost quite a bit more, $489 compared to the current $360.

Amazon's ambitions for the new device are to shake up a few industries at once, as Apple's iPod did. Newspaper companies such as The Post, a partner with Amazon, are hoping to attract new, paying subscribers. Universities, meanwhile, are looking for ways to cut their paper expenses and free their students from having to lug around backpacks filled with heavy, expensive textbooks.

This summer, The Post plans to launch a trial program in an area of Baltimore where home delivery of the newspaper isn't available. The idea is that Kindle-using subscribers would pay a reduced price for the device in return for a commitment to a Post download subscription, said Stephen P. Hills, the paper's president and general manager.

"Our hope is to understand how people experience our brand on this relatively new type of device and how we might take advantage of the increased adoption of e-readers," he said. Many of the program's details are still in the works.

The Times and the Boston Globe, which was threatened with the prospect of bankruptcy this week, have also partnered with Amazon to offer a similar type of trial program.

Newspaper industry analyst John Morton said that such experiments may be "an encouraging development" for a struggling industry, but that the device is too expensive. "Even half that price would be a big barrier" to mainstream consumers, he said.

Tech industry analysts said that the new reader could be an early example of a wave of similar gadgets to come.

"This is an important experimental milestone for Amazon and the publishing and newspaper industry," said Tim Bajarin, a tech analyst with Creative Strategies. Still, he said, "it's way too early to tell how successful this will be."

Five universities will soon be trying out the device on their campuses in limited test runs. This fall, the University of Virginia will make the Kindle DX available to MBA students at its Darden School of Business, said Ken White, vice president of communication and marketing at the school.

Students typically have to use stacks of books and paper in their studies, he said, "and if we could eliminate all that paper, we would be extremely happy."

Princeton University's chief information officer, Serge Goldstein, said that as more academic material is available online, more students are hitting the "print" button because they still prefer reading long texts on paper, rather than on a computer screen. The school's paper costs totaled $5 million last year.

Princeton is still deciding which students and classes will be the beneficiaries of its upcoming Kindle test program, but it might not announce that information ahead of time. The school's administrators don't want to risk nudging students into taking a class just because they want the gadget.

"We want to reach students interested in the course, not students interested in the Kindle," said Goldstein.

Other universities taking part in the program are Arizona State, Case Western Reserve and Pace, where yesterday's news conference took place.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...?hpid=sec-tech





Boston Globe Could File Shutdown Notice Monday
Robert MacMillan

Talks between The Boston Globe and its unions to prevent the U.S. newspaper from shutting down stopped early Monday morning after a midnight deadline passed, and it was unclear when they would resume.

An hour after the midnight deadline passed, negotiations had broken down, but likely will resume sometime during the night, a source familiar with the matter, but not authorized to discuss it, told Reuters.

That source and another source familiar with the matter indicated that the bargaining process likely will continue throughout the night, and that word on a decision about what will happen to the Globe will wait until after daybreak in the United States.

Just before the deadline, the Globe's parent company, The New York Times Co (NYT.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), ratcheted up the pressure on unions at the Globe, threatening to close the paper within weeks if they do not deliver big cost cuts.

The Times, the Globe's parent company, said it would file a notice with the U.S. government on Monday that says it will shut down the paper if it cannot get millions of dollars in concessions from its unions.

It had set a Sunday midnight deadline for four unions to find $20 million in cost cuts at the Globe. Earlier it had set Friday as the deadline, but extended it after reporting Saturday that it had made progress.

If the Globe's management and the unions fail to reach an agreement, one of the most well known and largest U.S. newspapers could close, leaving Boston without a daily, full-service general newspaper of comparable size.

The 137-year-old Globe is a mainstay of New England news consumers. The paper is the 17th largest in the United States by daily paid circulation, according to the U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulations. On Sundays, a day that many U.S. residents spend reading their papers, it ranks 13th.

The Times said it would file notice under the Workers Readjustment and Retraining Notification act, which requires 60 days advance notice before closing a business. The move is the toughest pressure yet that the Times has applied.

"Filing the WARN notice is a difficult step that we would like to avoid," said a statement issued by the Globe. "But, unfortunately, given the state of the negotiations, it is one we must be prepared to take."

The Globe was once one of the top U.S. papers in its scope, with a strong international, national and local reporting staff that rivaled that of the biggest U.S. dailies, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The New York Times.

In recent years it was forced to cut back on operations, as advertising declines that have affected nearly every U.S. paper hit the Globe particularly hard.

The Boston Newspaper Guild, the Globe's biggest union, said earlier Sunday evening that it proposed cuts that exceed the $10 million that the Times has demanded of it.

"This proposal was the product of arduous deliberations," a guild statement said, calling its offers "tremendous sacrifices." It declined to make details available until its members had a chance to review them.

Negotiations have become tangled over some benefits that the Times wants to erase, including some lifetime job guarantees, the Globe reported on its website on Sunday.

Management has told the leaders of three of the paper's major unions to "enter negotiations or receive a message from the company," The Globe quoted union officials as saying in an article on its website Sunday night.

The Boston Herald reported that large numbers of layoffs could be on the table. The Guild, pressmen and mailers unions have some members with lifetime job guarantees.

The Globe wants $10 million in concessions from the Boston Newspaper Guild, its largest union, with the balance coming from the others.

The Times said the paper would lose $85 million this year and the cuts were essential to keeping the Globe open.

The guild said it is optimistic that the Times Co is "genuinely committed to reaching agreement."

The Boston Newspaper Guild is one of the largest of about a dozen unions at the Globe, and represents about 600 people in editorial, advertising and other business roles.

While The Times and the union cited progress, the deadline extension came after the union said the Times Co made a math error that would result in the union having to make bigger sacrifices. (Reporting by Robert MacMillan; Editing by Maureen Bavdek, Richard Chang and Kim Coghill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...30446320090504





Communities Turn To Website SeeClickFix.com To Fix Problems
Regine LaBossiere

When residents of New Haven's Eld Street noticed odd behavior in their neighborhood recently, they called the police to report the problem. But they also sought help through another avenue.

Residents went to SeeClickFix.com to report sightings of suspicious vehicles parking on their street, observations that the police department used to track down and arrest people who they said were dealing heroin.

SeeClickFix has come to the rescue of New Haven residents, but also of residents throughout the country who use the site to complain about problems in their cities and towns. Philadelphia recently fixed a pothole problem and San Francisco cracked down on illegal parking after officials in both cities saw complaints on SeeClickFix.com.

The idea was born of frustration in 2007 when New Haven native Ben Berkowitz was on hold with a city department looking for help in combating the graffiti problem on his street. Perhaps it was the heat, too many days of seeing the graffiti or too many voice messages that were never returned. While on hold, Berkowitz had a thought: If everyone in the city could see his complaint and how many times he had contacted city hall, perhaps the city would be pressured torespond.

Over the next several months, Berkowitz worked with three New Haven friends to create an Internet program partially inspired by a successful British program called FixMyStreet. SeeClickFix allows anyone to publicly document non-emergency issues such as potholes, graffiti and drug dealing via their computer or mobile Web browser and report them to accountable officials. Once a "clicket" is reported on SeeClickFix, a user may comment on it, add a photo or video to it, click that they want it fixed or close the issue if they believe it has been resolved.

The company began in March 2008 and since then has spread throughout the country with residents, city departments and officials paying attention to what gets put on the website. Newspapers also have added SeeClickFix widgets to their websites, including the New Haven Independent, The Boston Globe, The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"I feel like we've given people a lot of power," Berkowitz said one recent afternoon.

Berkowitz said that the program was intended to create transparency in government and to teach residents that city agencies can help them. He knew the "see" and "click" aspects of the program would attract ordinary citizens. What he didn't expect was that residents also would join in on the "fix" aspect. Groups have come together in various cities and towns to clean up litter and deal with other minor problems that they've read about on the website, he said.Berkowitz said he is especially excited about the ability to create a "watch area." Anyone can create a watch area by clicking on a town map and making a polygon encompassing a specific neighborhood and then attaching an e-mail address to it. Residents then can add the e-mail address of a city official or whoever is responsible for fixing a problem. Whenever a ticket is formed in that watch area, everyone on the e-mail list gets notified. That's how New Haven Police Chief James Lewis first heard about SeeClickFix.

He was receiving e-mails about watch areas at all times of the day and night, prompting him to call the SeeClickFix team to give a demonstration to the lieutenants of the city's 10 policing districts. Now, they're all using SeeClickFix, which helped in the recent heroin bust, Lewis said.

"I think this is true community policing. The community is talking directly to us. When we do respond, we send them feedback with what we've done," Lewis said.

He called it a cost-effective tool because it helps city departments and residents and is free.

"I think it's the tool of the future," Lewis said.

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano also is praising SeeClickFix.

"SeeClickFix has turned out to be a powerful, citizen-driven tool to help get neighborhood problems seen and fixed. We got introduced to it almost a year ago and decided from the outset to make sure our agency directors routinely scanned the SeeClickFix site," DeStefano said. "What I like best about it is it's a vibrant sign of neighborhoods taking ownership."
http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc...,6557229.story





Roger McGuinn Carving A Niche As A Folk Hero In His Own Right
Eric R. Danton

Whatever else he's done in his lengthy career — pop, psychedelic and country rock with the Byrds, even blues — Roger McGuinn never has strayed far from his earliest influence: folk.

McGuinn wanted to perform since he was a teenager and first saw Pete Seeger. Banjo lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, his hometown, sealed it.

"It gave me a lifelong love of folk music," McGuinn says by phone from Worcester, on a tour that stops Wednesday in Norfolk's Infinity Hall. "I fell in love not just with the songs and the technique of playing the banjo but with the lore."

That love prompted "Folk Den Songs," a folk-preservation project sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and available via his website, mcguinn.com. Every month since November 1995, McGuinn has recorded an old folk song and made it available free online, along with lyrics and a brief history of the tune. He's posted more than 160 songs so far, many of which he released in 2005 on the four-CD set "The Folk Den Project."

The project has drawn attention from far-flung places.

"I got an e-mail from the former Soviet country Kyrgyzstan, and they asked for permission to use the 'Folk Den' in their school curriculum," McGuinn says. "I said, 'Of course, that's what it's all about'."

He also recently came across a bootlegger selling CDs of songs from the "Folk Den" website, though he figures that means people are at least hearing the music.

"It's a violation of the creative commons license, but if it gets it out there, it's a good thing," he says. "Peer-to-peer file sharing is good for artists and bad for record labels."

When he's not recording old folk songs, he's playing his own tunes on the road. Part of his spring itinerary included filming a recent concert for a DVD of his autobiographical show of music from throughout his career, from his days writing pop songs to fronting the Byrds through his post-Byrds solo material.

His years with the Byrds yielded some of the most enduring and influential music of the past 50 years, including the landmark 1969 country-rock album "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," which was reissued a few years ago with a bonus CD of outtakes, and repressed on vinyl.

"We did it out of pure love of the genre and threw caution to the wind," McGuinn says. "It was despised by our rock audience, and we were not accepted by the country audience, so it kind of fell through the cracks. It was a commercial disaster, but some 20 years later, it's an artistic success. People love it now; it's in Rolling Stone's top 500 albums. I guess it was just ahead of its time, but we weren't thinking of it in terms of commercial value."

•ROGER MCGUINN performs Wednesday at Infinity Music Hall, 20 Greenwoods Road, Norfolk. Tickets are $45, $35 and $30 for the 7:30 p.m. show. Information: 860-542-5531 and www.infinityhall.com.
http://www.courant.com/entertainment...0,305161.story





"Angels & Demons" Director Sees Vatican Meddling
Phil Stewart

Director Ron Howard accused the Vatican on Sunday of trying to hamper the filming and the Rome roll-out of his new movie "Angels & Demons," and challenged Catholic critics to see the film before condemning it.

The movie sequel to author Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" will premiere in Rome on Monday, with fictional symbologist Robert Langdon returning to the big screen to help the Vatican rescue kidnapped cardinals and find a ticking time-bomb.

The Vatican was outraged by "The Da Vinci Code" and the Rome archdiocese made no secret about denying Howard authorization to film parts of the follow-up inside its churches.

Howard said the Vatican also exerted its influence "through backchannels" to try to prevent him from shooting in areas around certain churches and got an event related to the film's premiere canceled, he said.

"There was supposed to be a reception or screening here in Rome that had been approved and I suppose that the Vatican had some influence over that," Howard told a news conference.

A Vatican spokesman declined to comment.

Fanning controversy, a 102-year-old Italian bishop was quoted in Italian media over the weekend calling the film "highly denigrating, defamatory and offensive to Church values and the reputation of the Holy See."

"My only frustration as a film-maker is that we actually reached out a couple of times, going back to March, to sort of offer opportunities for bishops and others just to see the film. And those opportunities have all been declined," Howard said.

"So far all the criticism, all of the complaints about the film have been coming from people who haven't seen it."

Secret Bloodline

"The Da Vinci Code" upset the Vatican and some Catholics because of its storyline that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children, creating a royal bloodline that Church officials kept secret for centuries.

Christians are taught that Jesus never married, was crucified and rose from the dead.

The storyline of "Angels & Demons" does not raise questions about Jesus Christ. It is billed as a "science-vs-religion" thriller that deals with an attempt to hijack a papal election.

Despite some criticism in Italy and the United States, reaction so far by Catholics to "Angels & Demons" has not been as thunderous as it was with the release of "The Da Vinci Code."

Tom Hanks, who again stars as Langdon, acknowledged that films thrive on controversy.

"The marketing department of any studio would love to create controversy over their films, but they can't do it on their own. They need a shared partner," Hanks said.

Dan Brown refused to discuss his next novel about Langdon's adventures, which publisher Random House has said will be called "The Lost Symbol" and will be released in September.

But Brown suggested that Howard was the ideal director for a film adaptation of the new book. Howard's adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code," which was panned by critics, earned more than $750 million at the box office worldwide.

"I am very certain that someday, in the hands of Ron Howard, it is going to make an absolutely terrific movie," he said.

(Editing by Janet Lawrence)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...5401TA20090503





Trent Reznor Rips Apple, Rates Smartphone OSes
Thomas Ricker

Why should you care about what Trent Reznor has to say about Apple or smartphones in general? Well, for one thing, the front-man for Nine Inch Nails is a digital music visionary who's gone it alone and found gold in the deep coffers of the Internet. And that little device in your pocket just happens to be the future of mobile computing and converged media players.

The story begins last week when Apple rejected an update to the official Nine Inch Nails iPhone application on the grounds of "objectionable content" (read: too many F-bombs). In this case, as it was in the rejected Tweetie update, the offensive content isn't actually part of the application; Apple's concern is with the song "The Downward Spiral" that can be streamed to the updated NIN iPhone App. The stupidity of this is palpable, but the hypocrisy is best described by Trent himself in a forum post over at NIN.com. Steel yourselves: unlike Apple we haven't censored the material -- so if naughty words can hurt you then by all means, don't click through to the full quote after the break. But Mr. Jobs, old pal, if you're listening... Trent may not be Bob Dylan, but he is the voice of the digital music generation.

As posted by Trent himself in response to Apple's rejection eMail:

...I'll voice the same issue I had with Wal-Mart years ago, which is a matter of consistency and hypocrisy. Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and "clean" versions be made for them to carry. Bands (including Nirvana) tripped over themselves editing out words, changing album art, etc to meet Wal-Mart's standards of decency - because Wal-Mart sells a lot of records. NIN refused, and you'll notice a pretty empty NIN section at any Wal-Mart. My reasoning was this: I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any "indecent" material for sale - but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film "Scarface" completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense? You can buy The Downward Fucking Spiral on iTunes, but you can't allow an iPhone app that may have a song with a bad word somewhere in it. Geez, what if someone in the forum in our app says FUCK or ####? I suppose that also falls into indecent material. Hey Apple, I just got some SPAM about fucking hot asian teens THROUGH YOUR MAIL PROGRAM. I just saw two guys having explicit anal sex right there in Safari! On my iPhone!

Come on Apple, think your policies through and for fuck's sake get your app approval scenario together.

Later in the threaded discussion, Trent clarifies his position with this little gem:

Everyone - let me be clear. I love Apple products and as goofy and out-of-touch as their app approval process / policy is, I will still use them because they work 1000X better than the competition. This is not a debate, it's a fact. The iPhone is THE most elegant, modern smartphone at this point in time and it's perfect for what we want to do with the NIN app - except for the ludicrous approval process, and that's what I want to draw attention to.

Android is cool, but nobody has an Android phone. Blackberry is OK but the hardware is inconsistent and WinMo straight-up sucks balls. If Apple doesn't get it together, we will most certainly make it available to the jailbreak community. I didn't invest in this app to see it languish on the sidelines from an idiotic policy while this tour is in full swing.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/04/t...ses/#continued





Apple Does U-Turn on Nine Inch Nails App

The age old concern with Apple rejecting submitted applications to the iTunes App Store may well just get easier now that iPhone 3.0 beta features parental controls.

According to a post on i4u, an application submitted by band Nine Inch Nails was rejected due to “objectionable content” found in some of Nine Inch Nails tracks.

The problem here was the songs Apple objected to were apparently separate from the application, and even host those songs on iTunes. However, response from Nine Inch Nails fans has been so great that Apple has now done a U-turn and as of today the Nine Inch nails app has been accepted without alteration.
http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2009/0...nch-nails-app/





Apple’s Popular Electronic Playground
Seth Schiesel

Apple announced recently that iPhone and iPod users had downloaded an impressive one billion programs from the company’s online App Store in a mere nine months. Meanwhile, 15 of the 20 most popular paid downloads since the service opened have been games.

These two facts are not unrelated. Apple hasn’t been this relevant in video games — and video games have not been so relevant to Apple — since the early 1980s, when the Apple II was a major platform for computer games.

It is about time. Even as Apple has spent most of the last 25 years trying to cast itself as the creative, youthful alternative to dour, dowdy Microsoft, it is Microsoft that has become a dominant power in video games, through both the Xbox and Windows. By contrast, Apple has historically acted as if it were embarrassed to be associated with gamers.

I should know, because I was a Macintosh loyalist who tried to hold out as top game after top game went to PCs, only arriving on the Mac months or years later, if ever. I finally capitulated about 10 years ago and bought my first Windows computer.

So when I heard last summer that Apple was extolling the iPhone’s new ability to download games, I was skeptical, skittish and fearful of being burned by Apple again. Yet by this spring the buzz in the industry about the potential for iPhone games had become so strong — with some evangelists for Apple claiming that the iPhone is a better game machine than even Nintendo’s hugely popular DS line — that I submitted to the hype and got an iPhone.

After carrying it around for several weeks, a few things are clear. At its best, the iPhone delivers a casual, often delightful, frequently whimsical gaming experience. Most of the best iPhone games, like Flight Control from Firemint and Pocket God from Bolt Creative, use the device’s colorful touch-sensitive screen in the service of intuitive game play accessible to almost anyone.

(In Flight Control that means using your finger to trace the flight path of planes and helicopters landing at an airport. In Pocket God that means using your fingers to “grasp” one of the inhabitants of the island kingdom you rule.)

Yet purely as a game machine, it would be ludicrous to compare the iPhone to the DS series or even to the Sony PlayStationPortable. Those searching for a deep, meaningful, narrative-driven experience will generally have to look elsewhere. And because of its design, control options and, perhaps most significant, its outrageously bad battery life, the iPhone cannot possibly replace a DS or PSP in the bag or pocket of anyone who actually plays games on the go more than a couple of days a week.

But perhaps it is not meant to. Perhaps it is sufficient for the iPhone to be the best phone for gaming rather than the best overall portable game console. What the iPhone offers that the DS and PSP lack is its huge library of downloadable games among the more than 35,000 total programs available on the App Store.

Most of the top games on the iPhone cost less than $5 and can be downloaded in a matter of minutes. They are designed, like arcade games, to be consumable in bites of only a few minutes each. And as in an arcade, if the iPhone user gets bored, it is easy and cheap to find another momentary diversion.

In that sense, the iPhone represents gaming as a notional activity rather than as a destination activity. Rather than playing games while sitting in a cafe, iPhone users could just as easily be checking Facebook or the latest sports scores. Browsing the App Store for a new 99-cent diversion, they could just as easily buy the Moron Test as a game like StickWars (two of the top paid downloads this week).

By contrast, DS or PSP users are usually going to a physical store, paying $20 or $30 and then spending dozens of hours over many months exploring their new game.

For those players, extra features like being able to edit pictures and manipulate music on Nintendo’s DSi are secondary to actually playing games.

Not that the iPhone is capable of delivering sustained mobile game play anyway. Because it does so much, the iPhone 3G that I have been using cannot last even one full day of intensive use without being plugged in, which for me sort of defeats the purpose of a mobile device.

For example, I can sit down on a plane to California with my DSi with every confidence that I will be able to play Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars the entire time if I want to. Yet while downloading and playing games on the iPhone, I hardly made it in a car to Woodstock, N.Y., barely two hours and 100 miles from Times Square, before the battery conked out. That’s when I started noticing that iPhone devotees always carry chargers with them.

Yet the battery is typical of the iPhone’s few shortcomings: they only highlight how I want to use it more, not less. The real question is not whether the iPhone can replace a DS or PSP. The real question is whether the iPhone provides a unique, unparalleled gaming experience for a phone, which it surely does. After Apple’s many years in the gaming wilderness, it is a pleasure to say welcome back.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/ar...on/09phon.html





Web Providers Must Limit Internet's Carbon Footprint, Say Experts

Soaring online demand stretching companies' ability to deliver content as net uses more power and raises costs
Bobbie Johnson

The internet's increasing appetite for electricity poses a major threat to companies such as Google, according to scientists and industry executives.

Leading figures have told the Guardian that many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs of delivering billions of web pages, videos and files online – in a "perfect storm" that could even threaten the future of the internet itself.

"In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption," said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers.

Bapat said the network of web servers and data centres that store online information is becoming more expensive, while profits come under pressure as a result of the recession.

"We need more data centres, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more," he said. "If you compound all of these trends, you have the perfect storm."

With more than 1.5 billion people online around the world, scientists estimate that the energy footprint of the net is growing by more than 10% each year. This leaves many internet companies caught in a bind: energy costs are escalating because of their increasing popularity, while at the same time their advertising revenues come under pressure from the recession.

One site under particular scrutiny is YouTube — now the world's third-biggest website, but one that requires a heavy subsidy from Google, its owner. Although the site's financial details are kept under wraps, a recent analysis by Credit Suisse suggested that it could lose as much as $470m (£317m) this year, as it succumbs to the high price of delivering power-intensive videos over the internet.

And while the demand for electricity is a primary concern, a secondary result of the explosion of internet use is that the computer industry's carbon debt is increasing drastically. From having a relatively small impact just a few years ago, it is now leapfrogging other sectors like the airline industry that are more widely known for their negative environmental impact.

However, tracking the growth of the internet's energy use is difficult, since internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.

"A lot of this internet stuff is fairly secretive," Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, told the Guardian.

"Google is probably the best example: they see it as a trade secret: how many data centres they have, how big they are, how many servers they have."

One study by Brown, commissioned by the US environmental protection agency, suggested that US data centres used 61bn kilowatt hours of energy in 2006. That is enough to supply the whole of the UK for two months, and 1.5% of the entire electricity usage of the US.

Brown said that despite efforts to achieve greater efficiency, internet use is growing at such a rate that it is outstripping technical improvements – meaning that American data centres could account for as much as 80bn kWh this year.

"Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services," he said. "It's a common story … technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand."

Among the problems that could result from the internet's voracious hunger for electricity are website failures and communications disruption costing millions in lost business every hour – as well as power cuts and brownouts at plants which supply data centres with electricity.

To combat this, initiatives are taking place across the industry to cope with the problem, including new designs for data centres, innovative cooling methods and more investment in renewable energy.

Researchers at Microsoft's £50m research lab in Cambridge are even turning to older technology in an attempt to turn the clock back – by replacing energy-hungry new machines with the systems used in older, less powerful laptops.

"It turns out that those processors have been designed to be very energy efficient, basically to make batteries last," said Andrew Herbert, the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge.

"We found we can build more energy-efficient data centres with those than with the kind of high performance processors you find in a typical server."

Google was among the first internet companies to take action to reduce its footprint by developing its own data centres — but even though it pumped an estimated $2.3bn into infrastructure projects last year, it remains unclear whether it is winning the battle.

The company's vice-president of operations, Urs Hölzle, told the Guardian that it was struggling to contain energy costs. "You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don't have exponential growth of revenue to go with it," he said.

"With good engineering we're trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up."

Despite mounting evidence that the internet's energy footprint is in danger of running out of control, however, Hölzle dismissed concerns about the environmental impact of using the web as "overblown".

"One mile of driving completely dwarfs the cost of a search," he said. "Internet usage is part of our consumption, just like TV is, or driving. There is consumption there, but in the grand scheme of things I think it is not the problem."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...rbon-footprint





Estonia Has Been 100% Connected for a Year. Next, 100MBPS !

It’s been over a year since Estonia announced every inch of the nation was connected via WiFi.

While muni wifi languishes in larger American cities, and US rural coverage is spotty at best, former Soviet state Estonia now has Wifi service reaching any location within its boundaries. Quite a feat from a country that was in total financial and technological melt down a couple of decades ago. This has been accomplished the without support of, or more importantly, without interference from the government.

Often called E-stonia by geeks, every one of its 1.4 million residents, half of which live in the suburban and rural areas, are connected by wireless Internet. More than two-thirds of the population conduct their personal banking transactions and file their taxes online. And school children access the school’s servers and connect to national libraries from home — or anywhere for that matter. In Estonia it is even possible to travel between cities by trains and busses and maintain Wi-Fi Internet access.

Above all, much of this access comes virtually free. Users do not pay any access charges directly in most locations. And interestingly, this wireless deployment through the whole country has been achieved with almost no government support. Barring a few schools and libraries that have been set up by the Estonian government, the 1100-plus Wi-Fi hotspots that span the country, covering every nook and corner, have been set up by local small businesses, such as hotels, cafes, groceries and gas stations, along with the four national telecom companies. And the whole effort has been and still is driven largely by just one man: Veljo Haamer, a technology geek who conceived this dream of wiring - or rather unwiring — his country about 6 years ago. (Government Technology)

What’s next? 100 MBPS for all by 2015. It’s good to have decisive leadership that hasn’t sold out to a duopoly.

Tallinn - Estonia unveiled ambitious plans Friday to get high-speed internet access to every one of the Baltic state’s 1.3 million residents by 2015. An agreement reached by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and an industry group - the Association of Estonian Information Technology and Telecommunications Companies - promises to turn the entire country into a super-high speed internet hotspot by means of a project called EstWin.

“If the 19th century was the era of railways, and the 20th century saw the development of electricity grids, the 21st century is the era of development of communications networks,” said Economy Minister Juhan Parts. Getting the whole country online would have major economic benefits, Parts said. EstWin will make available an internet connection of at least 100 megabits per second across the country by means of nearly 7,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cabling and 1,400 wireless hotspots. (Earth Times)

http://thirdpipe.com/2009/04/24/esto...t-100mbps/?hai





UK ISP Virgin Media Pilots Real-World 200Mbps Broadband Service
MarkJ

UK ISP Virgin Media , which can already call itself a provider of the country's fastest nationwide broadband service thanks to its 50Mbps package , has stunned industry observers by starting a customer pilot to test real-world deployments of up to 200Mbps speeds via its latest DOCSIS3 technology!

Following successful lab trials, the pilot started last week in Ashford, Kent, and will build to 100 "lead adopters" who will have the unique chance to help test "the most advanced broadband service in the UK". Cisco will be providing the technology and support to help deploy the service.

Virgin Media will also use the pilot to test future online consumer applications, which includes High Definition Internet TV (HD IPTV), video conferencing, home surveillance and the ability to deliver applications and support for home IT needs through its network.

Neil Berkett, chief executive officer at Virgin Media said, "We’re really excited to be embarking on this journey of discovery. With the only true next generation network in the UK, we’re at the forefront of innovation and understanding when it comes to ultrafast broadband services and the 200Mbps pilot will give us further insight into how true ‘wideband’ services might be used by consumers."

The pilot will be running for at least six months before results are analysed to understand potential consumer usage and to assess the commercial viability of such ultrafast services. A significant part of the pilot will also involve assessing related in-home technologies.

Virgin Media will be working with a range of suppliers to help ensure advancements in broadband technology can keep pace. For example, to date, there are presently no wireless (Wi-Fi) routers able to deliver throughput of speeds at 200Mbps, and computers require very high specification in order to be able handle rates like that.

Typically Virgin Media has previously spoken about the lack of mainstream consumer demand for such services and thus isn't expected to launch a nationwide 200Mbps product just yet. Indeed if it did then the cost would be very high and could push the service into business-only territory.

Instead what today's announcement allows Virgin Media to do is claim yet another victory over its arch rival, BT, which has yet to even finish deploying up to 24Mbps ADSL2+ services let alone their plans for future 40 to 100Mbps fibre optic based products over the coming few years.

Presently J:Com in Japan supplies broadband at up to 160Mbps and Cablevision in the US supplies broadband at up to 101Mbps. Like Virgin Media, both companies use DOCSIS3 technology for broadband over cable networks.

UPDATE - 11:07am:

We've managed to gain some more little details from Virgin Media about its 200Mbps pilot. The testing will take place in Ashford because it was also the test-bed for 50Mbps, so the trials team are familiar with the test environment. Likewise pilot customers will not have to pay for the service (200Mbps for free, yes please!).

Testers will be chosen based on previous experience (working on 50Mbps trials) and some staff. There'll be lots of hardware on test with the pilot, from gigabit routers, to multi-channel wireless, and of course Macs/PCs. The pilot itself will be more about technology and thus it is too early to know whether a new traffic management policy will be tested.

Virgin Media informs us that they reached the full 200Mbps utilising 4 bonded channels during initial lab trials. We also asked them whether this move signified that Virgin Media were actively developing a roadmap for the introduction of a 200Mbps product:

Virgin Media told us: "Too early to say - key out-take is that with our new next-generation network, we are now in a position to drive forward UK broadband market, but also lead be right up there on a global scale to explore how such wideband services might be used in the future."
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/200...d-service.html





An Invention that Could Change the Internet for Ever

Revolutionary new web software could put giants such as Google in the shade when it comes out later this month. Andrew Johnson reports

The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.

The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.

Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. "It is really impressive and significant," he wrote. "In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.

Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: "What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly... I think this could be big."

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is "curated", meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.

"I've wanted to make the knowledge we've accumulated in our civilisation computable," he said last week. "I was not sure it was possible. I'm a little surprised it worked out so well."

Dr Wolfram, 49, who was educated at Eton and had completed his PhD in particle physics by the time he was 20, added that the launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month would be just the beginning of the project.

"It will understand what you are talking about," he said. "We are just at the beginning. I think we've got a reasonable start on 90 per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library."

The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. Dr Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and information.

He also added that he would not go down the road of storing information on ordinary people, although he was aware that others might use the technology to do so.

Wolfram Alpha has been designed with professionals and academics in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment, comparatively poor. The term "50 Cent" caused "absolute horror" in tests, for example, because it confused a discussion on currency with the American rap artist. For this reason alone it is unlikely to provide an immediate threat to Google, which is working on a similar type of search engine, a version of which it launched last week.

"We have a certain amount of popular culture information," Dr Wolfram said. "In some senses popular culture information is much more shallowly computable, so we can find out who's related to who and how tall people are. I fully expect we will have lots of popular culture information. There are linguistic horrors because if you put in books and music a lot of the names clash with other concepts."

He added that to help with that Wolfram Alpha would be using Wikipedia's popularity index to decide what users were likely to be interested in.

With Google now one of the world's top brands, worth $100bn, Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names on the planet.

Dr Wolfram, however, did not rule out working with Google in the future, as well as Wikipedia. "We're working to partner with all possible organisations that make sense," he said. "Search, narrative, news are complementary to what we have. Hopefully there will be some great synergies."

What the experts say

"For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for." Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com

"If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha." Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com

"It's like plugging into an electric brain." Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com

"This is like a Holy Grail... the ability to look inside data sources that can't easily be crawled and provide answers from them." Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com

Worldwide network: A brief history of the internet

1969 The internet is created by the US Department of Defense with the networking of computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute.

1979 The British Post Office uses the technology to create the first international computer networks.

1980 Bill Gates's deal to put a Microsoft Operating System on IBM's computers paves the way for almost universal computer ownership.

1984 Apple launches the first successful 'modern' computer interface using graphics to represent files and folders, drop-down menus and, crucially, mouse control.

1989 Tim Berners-Lee creates the world wide web – using browsers, pages and links to make communication on the internet simple.

1996 Google begins as a research project at Stanford University. The company is formally founded two years later by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

2009 Dr Stephen Wolfram launches Wolfram Alpha.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...r-1678109.html





Milestones

Pete Seeger Celebrates 90th With a Concert
Jon Caramanica

The celebrant who made the most noise and aroused the strongest sentiment during the celebration of Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night was the one who couldn’t make it.

In an updated version of the 1930s labor anthem "Which Side Are You On?" Ani DiFranco sang, "Now there’s folks in Washington that care what’s on our minds." Bruce Springsteen told of rehearsing for the recent presidential inauguration with Mr. Seeger, who had relayed the story of "We Shall Overcome," crucial to both the labor and civil rights movements. Watching the transfer of presidential power, Mr. Springsteen said, "was like, ’ Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man.’ It was so nice."

President Obama was nowhere to be seen, but he did send a letter, praising Mr. Seeger for voicing "the hopes and dreams of everyday people."

And, as was evident throughout this four-hours-plus event — a birthday party masquerading as a fund-raiser for Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, a preservation charity founded by Mr. Seeger — many have attempted to follow in that path, or at least capture some of his refracted glow. More than 40 performers gathered here to pay tribute to Mr. Seeger — one of the lions of American folk music and, at 90, indefatigable — who, save for a handful of exceptions, outworked them all.

Here, rising to the occasion (formally called "The Clearwater Concert: Creating the Next Generation of Environmental Leaders") meant more than showing up and breezily soldiering through a classic protest tune or two, as plenty of singers — John Mellencamp, Roger McGuinn, Emmylou Harris — gladly did, in performances that often felt dutiful, not exuberant.

Some, though, shook off the oppressive nature of good intentions to create transcendent moments. Richie Havens revisited the "Freedom/Motherless Child" hybrid he performed at Woodstock 40 years ago in devastating fashion, closing with a high kick and a twirl of his guitar. Billy Bragg fiercely sang part of his revised version of "The Internationale," lyrics he wrote at Mr. Seeger’s behest and which now appear in the Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbook alongside the originals.

In group settings — most performances included several singers — Rufus Wainwright and Abigail Washburn stood out, as did Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock and her daughter Toshi, as well as Ben Bridwell and Tyler Ramsey of Band of Horses.

In one of the night’s most riveting moments, Bela Fleck and Tony Trischka played dueling banjos, closing with a clever variation on "Happy Birthday to You." In the postwar era Mr. Seeger helped popularize the banjo, which was as much an object of celebration here as Mr. Seeger himself, with at least a half dozen musicians picking at their weathered five-strings.

This show’s lineup showcased folk’s topical range, if not always its emotional range. There were union songs; anti-war songs (the still-relevant "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" and "Bring Them Home"); a Bob Dylan song, "Maggie’s Farm," but no Dylan; and songs about the river (lighting was strung above the stage in the shape of sails). And, as with any show of this scale, there were plenty of rough patches: awkward letdowns (Ben Harper, Michael Franti), questionable pairings (Tom Morello, barely keeping up with Mr. Springsteen on "The Ghost of Tom Joad"), and moments of overindulgence, as with Dave Matthews’s overly precious rendition of "Rye Whiskey."

There was also Oscar the Grouch singing "Garbage," a reminder of Mr. Seeger’s belief that no voice should go unheard. His commitment to singalongs was refortified throughout the night, decentering the authority of those on stage in true folk style. Encouraging those in the sold-out arena to chime in with their voices, the actor Tim Robbins assured them, "Nothing would make Pete happier on his birthday."

Mr. Seeger led the crowd in "Amazing Grace," calling out lines in a spooky, hole-filled, appealingly weathered voice. It was one of several brawny, moving exercises in mass vocalizing: "We Shall Overcome," "This Land Is Your Land," "Well May the World Go," "This Little Light Of Mine." (No "Kumbaya," though — something of a relief.) Ninety years after Mr. Seeger’s birth, 50 or so years after the height of the folk music movement, 40 years after the civil rights movement, and 104 days after the swearing in of the country’s first black president, those songs no longer sound defiant or expectant, but instead matter-of-fact.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/ar...ic/05seeg.html





A Battle to Preserve a Visionary’s Bold Failure
William J. Broad



In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all.

It was the inventor’s biggest project, and his most audacious.

The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. One midsummer night, it emitted a dull rumble and proceeded to hurl bolts of electricity into the sky. The blinding flashes, The New York Sun reported, “seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand.”

But the system failed for want of money, and at least partly for scientific viability. Tesla never finished his prototype tower and was forced to abandon its adjoining laboratory.

Today, a fight is looming over the ghostly remains of that site, called Wardenclyffe — what Tesla authorities call the only surviving workplace of the eccentric genius who dreamed countless big dreams while pioneering wireless communication and alternating current. The disagreement began recently after the property went up for sale in Shoreham, N.Y.

A science group on Long Island wants to turn the 16-acre site into a Tesla museum and education center, and hopes to get the land donated to that end. But the owner, the Agfa Corporation, says it must sell the property to raise money in hard economic times. The company’s real estate broker says the land, listed at $1.6 million, can “be delivered fully cleared and level,” a statement that has thrown the preservationists into action.

The ruins of Wardenclyffe include the tower’s foundation and the large brick laboratory, designed by Tesla’s friend Stanford White, the celebrated architect.

“It’s hugely important to protect this site,” said Marc J. Seifer, author of “Wizard,” a Tesla biography. “He’s an icon. He stands for what humans are supposed to do — honor nature while using high technology to harness its powers.”

Recently, New York State echoed that judgment. The commissioner of historic preservation wrote Dr. Seifer on behalf of Gov. David A. Paterson to back Wardenclyffe’s preservation and listing in the National Register of Historic Places.

On Long Island, Tesla enthusiasts vow to obtain the land one way or another, saying that saving a symbol of Tesla’s accomplishments would help restore the visionary to his rightful place as an architect of the modern age.

“A lot of his work was way ahead of his time,” said Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center, a private group in Shoreham that is seeking to acquire Wardenclyffe.

Dr. Ljubo Vujovic, president of the Tesla Memorial Society of New York, said destroying the old lab “would be a terrible thing for the United States and the world. It’s a piece of history.”

Tesla, who lived from 1856 to 1943, made bitter enemies who dismissed some of his claims as exaggerated, helping tarnish his reputation in his lifetime. He was part recluse, part showman. He issued publicity photos (actually double exposures) showing him reading quietly in his laboratory amid deadly flashes.

Today, his work tends to be poorly known among scientists, though some call him an intuitive genius far ahead of his peers. Socially, his popularity has soared, elevating him to cult status.

Books and Web sites abound. Wikipedia says the inventor obtained at least 700 patents. YouTube has several Tesla videos, including one of a break-in at Wardenclyffe. A rock band calls itself Tesla. An electric car company backed by Google’s founders calls itself Tesla Motors.

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, sees the creator’s life as a cautionary tale. “It’s a sad, sad story,” Mr. Page told Fortune magazine last year. The inventor “couldn’t commercialize anything. He could barely fund his own research.”

Wardenclyffe epitomized that kind of visionary impracticality.

Tesla seized on the colossal project at the age of 44 while living in New York City. An impeccably dressed bon vivant of Serbian birth, he was widely celebrated for his inventions of motors and power distribution systems that used the form of electricity known as alternating current, which beat out direct current (and Thomas Edison) to electrify the world.

His patents made him a rich man, at least for a while. He lived at the Waldorf-Astoria and loved to hobnob with the famous at Delmonico’s and the Players Club.

Around 1900, as Tesla planned what would become Wardenclyffe, inventors around the world were racing for what was considered the next big thing — wireless communication. His own plan was to turn alternating current into electromagnetic waves that flashed from antennas to distant receivers. This is essentially what radio transmission is. The scale of his vision was gargantuan, however, eclipsing that of any rival.

Investors, given Tesla’s electrical achievements, paid heed. The biggest was J. Pierpont Morgan, a top financier. He sank $150,000 (today more than $3 million) into Tesla’s global wireless venture.

Work on the prototype tower began in mid-1901 on the North Shore of Long Island at a site Tesla named after a patron and the nearby cliffs. “The proposed plant at Wardenclyffe,” The New York Times reported, “will be the first of a number that the electrician proposes to establish in this and other countries.”

The shock wave hit Dec. 12, 1901. That day, Marconi succeeded in sending radio signals across the Atlantic, crushing Tesla’s hopes for pioneering glory.

Still, Wardenclyffe grew, with guards under strict orders to keep visitors away. The wooden tower rose 187 feet over a wide shaft that descended 120 feet to deeply anchor the antenna. Villagers told The Times that the ground beneath the tower was “honeycombed with subterranean passages.”

The nearby laboratory of red brick, with arched windows and a tall chimney, held tools, generators, a machine shop, electrical transformers, glass-blowing equipment, a library and an office.

But Morgan was disenchanted. He refused Tesla’s request for more money.

Desperate, the inventor pulled out what he considered his ace. The towers would transmit not only information around the globe, he wrote the financier in July 1903, but also electric power.

“I should not feel disposed,” Morgan replied coolly, “to make any further advances.”

Margaret Cheney, a Tesla biographer, observed that Tesla had seriously misjudged his wealthy patron, a man deeply committed to the profit motive. “The prospect of beaming electricity to penniless Zulus or Pygmies,” she wrote, must have left the financier less than enthusiastic.

It was then that Tesla, reeling financially and emotionally, fired up the tower for the first and last time. He eventually sold Wardenclyffe to satisfy $20,000 (today about $400,000) in bills at the Waldorf. In 1917, the new owners had the giant tower blown up and sold for scrap.

Today, Tesla’s exact plan for the site remains a mystery even as scientists agree on the impracticality of his overall vision. The tower could have succeeded in broadcasting information, but not power.

“He was an absolute genius,” Dennis Papadopoulos, a physicist at the University of Maryland, said in an interview. “He conceived of things in 1900 that it took us 50 or 60 years to understand. But he did not appreciate dissipation. You can’t start putting a lot of power” into an antenna and expect the energy to travel long distances without great diminution.

Wardenclyffe passed through many hands, ending with Agfa, which is based in Ridgefield Park, N.J. The imaging giant used it from 1969 to 1992, and then shuttered the property. Silver and cadmium, a serious poison, had contaminated the site, and the company says it spent some $5 million on studies and remediation. The cleanup ended in September, and the site was put up for sale in late February.

Real estate agents said they had shown Wardenclyffe to four or five prospective buyers.

Last month, Agfa opened the heavily wooded site to a reporter. “NO TRESPASSING,” warned a faded sign at a front gate, which was topped with barbed wire.

Tesla’s red brick building stood intact, an elegant wind vane atop its chimney. But Agfa had recently covered the big windows with plywood to deter vandals and intruders, who had stolen much of the building’s wiring for its copper.

The building’s dark interior was littered with beer cans and broken bottles. Flashlights revealed no trace of the original equipment, except for a surprise on the second floor. There in the darkness loomed four enormous tanks, each the size of a small car. Their sides were made of thick metal and their seams heavily riveted, like those of an old destroyer or battleship. The Agfa consultant leading the tour called them giant batteries.

“Look up there,” said the consultant, Ralph Passantino, signaling with his flashlight. “There’s a hatch up there. It was used to get into the tanks to service them.”

Tesla authorities appear to know little of the big tanks, making them potential clues to the inventor’s original plans.

After the tour, Christopher M. Santomassimo, Agfa’s general counsel, explained his company’s position: no donation of the site for a museum, and no action that would rule out the building’s destruction.

“Agfa is in a difficult economic position given what’s going on in the global marketplace,” he said. “It needs to maximize its potential recovery from the sale of that site.”

He added that the company would entertain “any reasonable offer,” including ones from groups interested in preserving Wardenclyffe because of its historical significance. “We’re simply not in a position,” he emphasized, “to donate the property outright.”

Ms. Alcorn of the Tesla Science Center, who has sought to stir interest in Wardenclyffe for more than a decade, seemed confident that a solution would be worked out. Suffolk County might buy the site, she said, or a campaign might raise the funds for its purchase, restoration and conversion into a science museum and education center. She said the local community was strongly backing the preservation idea.

“Once the sign went up, I started getting so many calls,” she remarked. “People said: ‘They’re not really going to sell it, are they? It’s got to be a museum, right?’ ”

Sitting at a reading table at the North Shore Public Library, where she works as a children’s librarian, Ms. Alcorn gestured across a map of Wardenclyffe to show how the abandoned site might be transformed with not only a Tesla museum but also a playground, a cafeteria and a bookshop.

“That’s critical,” she said.

Ms. Alcorn said the investigation and restoration of the old site promised to solve one of the big mysteries: the extent and nature of the tunnels said to honeycomb the area around the tower.

“I’d love to see if they really existed,” she said. “The stories abound, but not the proof.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05tesla.html





Blu-Ray Player Sales Surge
Thomas K. Arnold

Despite the down economy, first-quarter sales of stand-alone Blu-ray Disc players in the United States rose 72 percent from the first quarter of 2008, according to the NPD Group's latest Blu-ray Report update.

NPD Group research also shows that overall consumer awareness of the Blu-ray Disc format in the United States has reached 90 percent over the last six months.

"Blu-ray Disc video technology is moving further into the mainstream," the marketing research company's report says.

U.S. consumers bought more than 400,000 stand-alone Blu-ray Disc players between January 1 and March 31, spending $107.2 million, an increase of 14 percent from what they spent on Blu-ray Disc players in the first quarter of last year, according to NPD's retail tracking service.

"The rising penetration of high-definition televisions and lower Blu-ray player prices are broadening the format's market opportunity," said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD. "Even as options expand for accessing movies digitally, Blu-ray is carrying forward the widespread appeal of DVD into the high-definition marketplace."

Purchase intent for Blu-ray Disc players also is up, with 6 percent of respondents saying they would be "extremely or very likely" to buy a player in the next six months, compared with 5 percent who responded that way in the previous report, issued in August 2008.

Even so, more than half of adults surveyed (58 percent) said they are still "not very familiar" with Blu-ray.

According to NPD's retail tracking service, the average selling price for a stand-alone Blu-ray Disc player during the first quarter of this year fell nearly 34 percent to $261 from $393 in the first quarter of 2008.

Data for NPD's Blu-ray Report was collected through an online survey of 6,994 consumers between February 25 and March 6.

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...54615720090507





X-Men Return to Motivate Moviegoers
Michael Cieply

Weak reviews, cranky fans, a pirated version: none of it mattered.

“X-Men Origins: Wolverine” kicked off the spring-summer blockbuster season with $87 million in ticket sales, continuing the year’s box office boom and keeping a core franchise alive for 20th Century Fox and Marvel Entertainment.

The fourth in a series that began in 2000 with “X-Men,” “Wolverine” stopped short of the performance by another superhero movie, “Iron Man,” which took in about $98.6 million when it was released by Paramount Pictures and Marvel on the same weekend last year.

But the new Fox film, which was directed by Gavin Hood with Hugh Jackman in the lead role, became an instant hit in the face of obstacles that have included boycott calls — some of them set off by Fox’s earlier threat to block Warner Brothers from releasing “Watchmen” in a legal dispute — and a still-smarting leak that put a pirated version of “Wolverine” on the Internet a month before its release.

The performance was particularly impressive in that “Wolverine” opened without the advantage of the supersize Imax screenings — demand for the big-screen technology has exceeded supply — that have boosted the opening weekend of fantasy thrillers like “The Dark Knight.”

“If you had to nail it down to one thing, it would be the affection and appetite for Hugh and the character he’s created,” said Chris Aronson, a senior vice-president of Fox’s distribution unit, said of the resilience shown by “Wolverine.” Mr. Aronson called the concern over the online leak “agonizing” and added that even as late as Saturday night a heavily viewed NBA playoff game had bitten into audiences in Chicago and Boston. And the critics did not help: one of many to pan the film, A. O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, said it showed that the superhero genre “is suffering from serious imaginative fatigue.”

But an unexpectedly large female audience — nearly 50 percent of the total — and a possible return of fans who were distracted by the basketball game boosted Fox’s expectations for the film’s continued strength. Returns from 101 foreign territories reached about $73 million, to give the film a global box office take of about $160 million, Mr. Aronson said.

“Ghosts of Girlfriends Past,” a romantic comedy with Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner, took in about $15.3 million to place No. 2 for Warner Brothers and its New Line Cinema division, according to a studio estimate.

Last weekend’s No. 1 film, “Obsessed,” a thriller from Sony Pictures and its Screen Gems unit, placed third this weekend, with about 12.2 million in sales, and a total of $47 million since opening on April 24.

Other pictures in the Top 5 were “17 Again” from Warner Brothers and New Line, with about $6.4 million in ticket sales and $48.5 million since opening on April 17, and “Monsters vs. Aliens” from Paramount and DreamWorks Animation, with $5.8 million, and $182.4 million since its release on March 27.

In all, the weekend’s top 12 films took in about $152.2 million, up about 1 percent from $150.7 million last year, when “Iron Man” — which eventually took in more than $318 million to become last year’s second biggest hit, after “The Dark Knight” — turned in an exceptionally strong performance, according to the Hollywood.com Box-Office tracking service.

For the year to date, the total box office is about $3.2 billion, up 16.4 percent from about $2.8 billion last year, Hollywood.com Box-Office said.

The continuing surge in ticket sales appears to show an audience drawn to diversion in tough economic times and the growing power of the ultra-large-screen and 3-D technologies that pulled viewers to “Monsters vs. Aliens” and will support a number of forthcoming pictures, including the science-fiction thriller “Avatar,” expected from Fox and the filmmaker James Cameron later this year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/movies/04box.html





Studio Ups Download Figure for Pirated "Wolverine"
Paul Bond

An unfinished pirated version of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" that hit the Internet March 30, well before the film's No. 1 debut in theaters, has been downloaded some 4 million times, News Corp's. 20th Century Fox said Wednesday.

Whether such online attention hurt "Wolverine" at the box office is debatable, but Fox's assertion of 4 million is about four times greater than previous estimates.

At last year's average ticket price of $7.18, the piracy could conceivably -- though not likely -- have cost Fox $28.7 million.

"Piracy is a serious issue for us. We now estimate that there are above 4 million downloads of that stolen 'Wolverine' movie that was up there," News Corp. COO Peter Chernin told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday.

Chernin and chairman/CEO Rupert Murdoch were speaking on a conference call. A News Corp. spokeswoman later confirmed that the statistic was 4 million and not 1 million, the smaller number having been conventional wisdom for several days.

Chernin said on the call that many Internet sites illegally trading "Wolverine" have been shut down.

Piracy of intellectual property including movies, said Chernin, is "as big an act of industrial espionage, industrial sabotage, as we have seen in terms of its economic impact."

Nevertheless, "Wolverine" scored a better opening weekend than any other movie this year.

Said Murdoch on the call Wednesday: "At Fox, we couldn't be happier with last weekend's $85 million opening of 'Wolverine.'"

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...54614N20090507





A Franchise Goes Boldly Backward
Manohla Dargis

A bright, shiny blast from a newly imagined past, “Star Trek,” the latest spinoff from the influential TV show, isn’t just a pleasurable rethink of your geek uncle’s favorite science-fiction series. It’s also a testament to television’s power as mythmaker, as a source for some of the fundamental stories we tell about ourselves, who we are and where we came from. The famous captain (William Shatner, bless his loony lights) and creator (Gene Roddenberry, rest in peace) may no longer be onboard, but the spirit of adventure and embrace of rationality that define the show are in full swing, as are the chicks in minis and kicky boots.

Initially aired in 1966, “Star Trek” was a utopian fantasy of the first order, a vision of the enlightened future in which whites, blacks, Asians and one pokerfaced Vulcan are united by their exploratory mission (“to boldly go”), a prime directive (do no harm) and the occasional dust up. An origins story directed with a sure touch and perfect tone by J. J. Abrams, the fully loaded film — a showcase for big-studio hardware, software, muscled boys who can act and leggy girls who aren’t required to — turns back the narrative clock to the moment before the main characters first assembled on the deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise, a sleek spacecraft that invariably sails into intergalactic storms. Even Utopia needs a little bang.

Apparently so do franchise reboots, which explains why the movie opens with a loud, somewhat chaotic scene filled with fireballs, airborne bodies, heroically clenched male jaws and a squawking pregnant woman about to pop out the future James Tiberius Kirk. Born in space (literally a shuttle craft), Kirk is destined to return to its embracing darkness (future “Trek” scholars will be working the Oedipal angle hard). But this being an origins story, first there’s a peek at a boy (Jimmy Bennett as the young Kirk) tearing down an Iowa highway in a stolen hot rod, a paradigmatic character moment that’s juxtaposed with images of a young brainiac (Jacob Kogan as the wee Spock) problem-solving with intelligence and a few punches.

Kirk and Spock don’t meet in person until they’re adults — now played by Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto — at Starfleet Academy, which, in keeping with the show’s liberal leanings, is in San Francisco. At school, Kirk flirts with Uhura (Zoë Saldana), a hot number who coolly brushes him off and makes friends with a doctor, McCoy a k a Bones (Karl Urban, wild eyed and funny). Kirk also comes smack up against Spock, an officious instructor. In the tradition of many great romances, the two men take almost an instant dislike to each other, an antagonism that literalizes the Western divide between the mind (Spock) and body (Kirk) that gives the story emotional and dramatic force as well some generous laughs.

Those laughs never slide into mockery. Mr. Abrams doesn’t treat “Star Trek” as a sacred text, which would be deadly for everyone save the fanatics. But neither does he skewer a pop cultural classic that, more than 40 years after its first airing, has been so lampooned (there are probably more “Saturday Night Live” parodies than original episodes) it was difficult to see how he was going to give it new life. By design or accident, he has, simply because in its hopefulness, “Star Trek” reminds you that there’s more to science fiction (and Hollywood blockbusters) than nihilism. Mr. Abrams doesn’t venture into politics as boldly as Mr. Roddenberry sometimes did, though it’s worth noting he does equate torture with barbarism.

The barbarians here are the Romulans, who at one point in television time used to look a lot like Spock, but here resemble a Maori motorcycle gang complete with facial tattoos and Goth threads. Led by the glowering psychopath Nero (Eric Bana, an actor who knows how to take villainy seriously), the Romulans are mainly on hand to provoke the Starfleet cadets into space. There, Mr. Abrams shows off some expensive-looking special effects, including an enemy warship that, with its enormous, grasping tendrils, by turns resembles a monstrous jellyfish and a malignantly blooming flower. The film comes down on the side of hope, but its apocalyptic visions, including the image of a planet imploding into gray dust, collapsing like a desiccated piece of fruit, linger.
Despite these visions, the flashing lasers and latex aliens, “Star Trek” is fundamentally about two men engaged in a continuing conversation about civilizations and their discontents. Hot and cold, impulsive and tightly controlled, Kirk and Spock need each other to work, a dynamic Mr. Abrams captures with his two well-balanced leads. Mr. Quinto lets you see and hear the struggle between the human and the Vulcan in Spock through the emotions that ripple across his face and periodically throw off his unmodulated phrasing. Mr. Pine has the harder job — he has to invoke Mr. Shatner’s sui generis performance while transcending its excesses — which makes his nuanced interpretation all the more potent. Steering clear of outright imitation, the two young actors instead distill the characters to capture their essence, their Kirk-ness and Spock-ness.

Written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the story has plenty of chatter, but Mr. Abrams keeps the talk moving, slowing down only intermittently, as when Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) or the wryly smiling Leonard Nimoy (!), unload some paternalistic advice on Kirk. A television veteran (“Lost”), Mr. Abrams handles the action scenes better than he did in his only other big-screen outing (“Mission: Impossible 3”), largely by not lavishing too much time on them. By far, his finest moments take place on the brightly lighted deck of the Enterprise, where against the backdrop of limitless space, Kirk, Spock and the rest of the young crew fumble with roles that — much like the young actors playing them, including Anton Yelchin as Chekov and John Cho as Sulu — they ultimately and rather wonderfully make their own.


“Star Trek” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some intense but bloodless action.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/05/08...08trek.html?hp





E.U. to Hear Proposal for Cross-Border Net Copyright
Kevin J. O’Brien

Two European commissioners are proposing the creation of a Europewide copyright license for online content that could clear the way for cross-border sales of digital music, games and video — and lower prices for consumers.

The plan, to be offered Tuesday by Viviane Reding, the European telecommunications and media commissioner, and Meglena Kuneva, the consumer affairs commissioner of the bloc, would allow consumers to shop online for media from any retailer in the 27-nation European Union.
The two commissioners intend to outline their plan in Strasbourg, where the European Parliament is meeting this week, according to a copy of the proposal obtained by the International Herald Tribune. The commissioners would introduce legislation to create the license this year.

Currently, most online retailers limit sales of media — both digital and in the more traditional formats — to the countries in which they are based because of the complexity of satisfying varying domestic copyright rules and fees.

“The offer of content online is growing more and more but the current regime is still locked into national territorial licensing, with the result that E.U. consumers are often prevented from legally watching content anytime, anywhere and on any platform,” the commissioners’ proposal said.

Cross-border sales of online film and music is rare in the E.U. because most retailers generally do not want to deal with the complexity of satisfying 27 different national copyright systems, which are administered by semi-autonomous collecting societies that levy and collect fees on each sale.

To avoid selling abroad, online retailers often required customers to use a credit card issued in the same country as they are based.

Whether Ms. Reding, a conservative legislator from Luxembourg who authored the E.U.’s price limits on cross-border mobile roaming fees, and Ms. Kuneva, a Bulgarian lawyer who negotiated her country’s admission into the E.U., could overcome the resistance expected from E.U. collection societies remained to be seen.

Depending on how the commissioners seek to have the license granted, a single E.U. license would force collecting agencies to make themselves a more attractive place to do business or else lose the copyright fees to another country.

Isabel Palmtag, a spokeswoman for GEMA, the German collecting agency for music rights, said the association would await details before commenting on the proposal.

The complexity of national copyrights systems is one reason the BBC limits its iPlayer online video service to consumers in Britain, and why online retailers like Fnac in France sell only to holders of French credit cards.

It is also the reason why some global retailers like Apple, which do sell music and video across E.U. borders, have been required to sell the songs at different prices in different countries, a reflection of varying copyright fees.

If the obstacles are removed, a third of E.U. consumers in a recent survey said they would be willing to purchase digital content online from a retailer in another E.U. country. Only 12 percent of E.U. consumers did so in 2008, according to European Commission statistics.

Marcel Avargues, the executive director of the Electronic Retailing Association Europe, a group in Brussels representing 75 retailers with a combined €4.5 billion, or $6 billion, in annual sales, said his members had been pushing for the change and are more than ready to expand their online sales to other markets in the European Union.

Greater competition would lead to lower prices for consumers, he said.

“There is a feeling that many countries use different consumer protection and licensing laws to protect domestic businesses,” Mr. Avargues said. “But there is a pretty unanimous desire on the part of retailers that these artificial barriers to commerce be lowered.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/bu...copyright.html





RIAA: "We Have No Choice" But to File More Named Lawsuits

The RIAA said it would file no more "new" lawsuits against individual file-swappers, but it filed more such lawsuits in April. How to explain the apparent contradiction? By defining "new" in a particular way.
Nate Anderson

The RIAA's lawsuit campaign against individual file-sharers never quite seems to wrap up, and as long as the music labels continue filing their suits, stories about how the RIAA is a lying collection of lying liars (who lie) aren't going to die either.

Such a story came yesterday from Ray Beckerman, the lawyer who runs the Recording Industry vs. The People blog. Beckerman noted that the music labels had filed new cases in April, despite their claim to Congress (and Ars) that they had stopped "initiating new lawsuits" in August 2008. That claim, says Beckerman, was a "total fabrication," and the continued court filings prove it.

There aren't many of these "new" cases; Beckerman found three in New York. But why are they being filed at all?
It depends on what "new" means

The answer remains (as it has every time we've covered this issue) that the RIAA did not pledge to stop filing legal documents. The group's own definition of "new cases" does not include those that were already in process as "John Doe" cases or where settlement letters had already gone out.

This was the case in March, when the RIAA filed a case against an Omaha resident for file-swapping. Those hypocrites! But the case had been detected in 2007, a John Doe lawsuit was filed months later, and once the necessary account information was subpoenaed from the ISP, the John Doe suit was replaced with a named lawsuit in March 2009.

An RIAA spokesperson told us at the time that the issue was about fairness (though we raised some obvious questions about just how fair it was). "We're obviously pleased to transition to a new program going forward but that doesn't mean we can give a free pass to those who downloaded music illegally in the past," we were told. "How fair would it be to the thousands of individuals who took responsibility for their actions and settled their case while others are let off the hook? We're still in the business of deterrence and it must be credible."

We checked in with the RIAA about the cases filed in April and were told that the group is "making a diligent, good faith effort to settle existing cases (see Santangelo, for example). But in instances where the defendant flat-out refuses to accept responsibility for their actions and settle, or ignores repeated overtures, we have no choice but to move forward with the legal process. As we have said since December, no new cases are being filed."

The lawyers we've spoken with don't see any legal necessity for the labels to continue with these cases, but the labels have decided that they will press ahead with them, regardless.

The interesting questions

It does make one wonder just how many more of these lawsuits could yet be filed or converted to named suits. The RIAA has terminated its relationship with P2P investigator MediaSentry, but it appears to be reserving the right to bring every case identified by MediaSentry to completion. Most such cases are settled for a few thousand dollars, but we don't know how many outstanding cases there might be.

But the truly interesting question isn't about whether the RIAA will file a couple dozen more named lawsuits in the upcoming months—nor about whether the group will be "hypocritical" when it does so. No, the interesting questions are about whether existing lawsuits like the Joel Tenenbaum and Jammie Thomas cases will deal the legal campaign a fatal blow in court, and about just how well the RIAA is doing at lining up ISPs for its voluntary graduated response program.

This, after all, is the future as the RIAA sees it. The lawsuits are the past, but "three strikes and you're off the Internet" offers a way forward. Unfortunately for the music labels, ISPs are supremely skeptical. We give the idea a few more months before the labels basically abandon the voluntary approach and try to lean on Congress—probably the only realistic way to convince ISPs to disconnect paying customers.

But as the Time Warner Cable data caps issue showed, nothing makes the grassroots angrier than a massive corporation interfering with their Internet. And nothing gives a Congressman or Senator more incentive to stand up to corporations than an angry mob of voters.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...d-lawsuits.ars





RIAA Site Features TorrentFreak’s Latest News
enigmax

Just a couple of days ago we reported that the MPAA’s website was vulnerable to an XSS attack, which left it displaying torrents from The Pirate Bay. This time a flaw has been discovered in the RIAA’s site, which now allows it to display TorrentFreak’s latest articles.

A cross-site scripting (XSS) attack is a kind of security vulnerability typically found in web applications which allows code to be injected into web pages. The ‘cross site’ element explains how a malicious website could load another site into a frame, giving the appearance that the data all originates from the target site.

Last year we reported that the RIAA’s website had suffered an XSS attack and just a couple of days ago we revealed how the MPAA site was vulnerable to an XSS attack too, one which left it embarrassingly displaying torrents from The Pirate Bay.

Now it is the RIAA’s turn (again) to suffer the same fate. Vektor, who also discovered the MPAA site exploit, told TorrentFreak that he had managed to find a security hole in RIAA.com too. He demonstrated this by using an iframe - an HTML element which makes it possible to embed an HTML document inside another HTML document - TorrentFreak for example.

As with the MPAA site exploit, Vektor explains that his work on the RIAA site is a proof of concept and should be taken as a joke.

We’re sure the RIAA and MPAA coders will be laughing heartily as they try to plug these holes.
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-site-fe...t-news-090504/





Hackers Break Into Virginia Health Professions Database, Demand Ransom
Brian Krebs

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

Wikileaks reports that the Web site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was defaced last week with a message claiming that the database of prescriptions had been bundled into an encrypted, password-protected file.

Wikileaks has published a copy of the ransom note left in place of the PMP home page, a message that claims the state of Virginia would need to pay the demand in order to gain access to a password needed to unlock those records:

"I have your [expletive] In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password."

The site, along with a number of other Web pages related to Virginia Department of Health Professions, remains unreachable at this time. Sandra Whitley Ryals, director of Virginia's Department of Health Professions, declined to discuss details of the hacker's claims, and referred inquires to the FBI.

"There is a criminal investigation under way by federal and state authorities, and we take the information security very serious," she said.

A spokesman for the FBI declined to confirm or deny that the agency may be investigating.

Whitley Ryals said the state discovered the intrusion on April 30, after which time it shut down Web site site access to dozens of pages serving the Department of Health Professions. The state also has temporarily discontinued e-mail to and from the department pending the outcome of a security audit, Whitley Ryals said.

"We do have some of systems restored, but we're being very careful in working with experts and authorities to take essential steps as we proceed forward," she said. "Only when the experts tell us that these systems are safe and secure for being live and interactive will that restoration be complete."

She added that the department does have a page online at www.dhp.virginia.gov that lists the phone and fax numbers for various state health boards, and that the state would continue issuing health care licenses and investigating violations of the law or regulations of state health licensees.

This is the second major extortion attack related to the theft of health care data in the past year. In October 2008, Express Scripts, one of the nation's largest processors of pharmacy prescriptions, disclosed that extortionists were threatening to disclose personal and medical information on millions of Americans if the company failed to meet payment demands. Express Scripts is currently offering a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual(s) responsible for trying to extort money from the company.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/sec...irginia_he.htm





Nuclear option

Botnet Master Hits the Kill Switch, Takes Down 100,000 PCs

Those behind the Zeus botnet recently decided to press the big red button, bluescreening 100,000 computers around the globe. Security experts aren't sure why yet, although they have some ideas.
Jacqui Cheng

Botnets aren't just dangerous because they can steal massive amounts of personal data and launch denial-of-service attacks—they can also self-destruct, leaving the owners of affected machines in the dust. The controllers of one such botnet recently hit the kill switch for one reason or another, taking down some 100,000 infected computers with it.

The Washington Post recently profiled the case of Zeus/Zbot—a software kit that sprung up in March that harvests financial and personal data from PCs through the use of a Trojan. Zeus, unlike many other malware programs, managed to make each installation appear different to virus trackers so that it would be more difficult to remove. But Zeus had another interesting feature—one that isn't terribly uncommon among botnet software, it turns out. A command was built into the software to kos—or "kill operating system"—and it was apparently executed some time last month.

The reason for BSODing 100,000 machines isn't quite clear, but several security experts have offered up their opinions. S21sec wrote on its blog that those behind Zeus might have wanted more time to exploit the financial data they had harvested by removing the user's ability to get online and see that money was being transferred. On the other hand, 21-year-old Roman Hüssy had just begun running Zeustracker, a website (that is apparently down right now thanks to a DDoS attack) meant to track the servers being used by the Zeus botnet, when he saw the kos command get issued. "Maybe the botnet was hijacked by another crime group," Hüssy told the Post. Or, he postulated, perhaps those behind Zeus were just dumb. "Many cyber criminals...using the Zeus crimeware kit aren't very skilled."

S21sec notes, however, that invoking the kos command only results in a bluescreen and subsequent difficulty booting the OS. There appears to be no significant data loss and neither the Trojan binaries nor the startup registries are removed, indicating that Zeus isn't trying to keep itself from being dissected by researchers. It could also mean that, once those hundred thousand or so users manage to get back online, Zeus will get back to work stealing passwords and credit card info.
http://arstechnica.com/security/news...100000-pcs.ars





Windows 7 on an Entry Level Netbook: First Look
David M Williams

You've read all about Windows 7RC, but how does it really perform in practice? I wanted to know too so I loaded it on a modern Acer Aspire One netbook.

The Acer Aspire One isn’t cutting edge by any means, but nor is it aimed at the young, sporting an 8.9” screen and a keyboard suitable for fat fingered adults like myself.

It has an Intel Atom N270 processor running at 1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard disk drive.

Video is powered by an onboard Mobile Intel 945 express chipset running at 1024x600 resolution. This chip is not DirectX 10 compliant, but that’s no deal-breaker. You won’t be running Crysis on this machine!

I made a fresh Windows 7 installation instead of opting to upgrade the existing Windows XP, but started clean. The installation was successful without errors or problems arising and without any missing hardware drivers afterwards.

I timed a boot from power on to the login prompt being displayed, which came in at just over 48 seconds. That’s fairly respectable.

Windows 7 assigned the Acer Aspire One a rating of 2.1 (out of 7.9, up from Vista’s limit of 5.9.) Of these, the Aero graphics performance was the weakest factor, rating 2.1. The processor only fared slightly better with a rating of 2.2. The 3D and gaming graphics performance rated 3.0, RAM 4.4 and hard disk data transfer rate 5.4.

Upon logging in, and without any other programs installed or running, 7.73GB of the hard drive was used already. On a roomy 160GB hard drive that’s not a problem but if your netbook uses a solid state hard disk then space may be more of a premium.

The task manager’s performance tab showed 33 processes running and 465MB of RAM – or about 45% – in use while sitting idle. While nearly half the RAM being consumed without actually doing anything useful may be concerning it’s not actually a big deal. Microsoft claim that Windows 7 (and Vista too, but its success is arguable) pre-loads parts of programs it expects you to use.

This means that if you do use these programs they will start up faster. It also means the amount of free RAM is less than you would expect.

How does it perform in actual use?

The sorts of things you’d expect people to do with their netbooks are fairly regular tasks: surfing the web, playing music and videos, playing games, checking e-mail, word processing and other things along these lines.

Firing up Internet Explorer and loading its default MSN home page takes RAM use up to 52%. Launching Windows Media Centre causes it to skyrockets up to 75%, or 762MB.

Similarly, while installing Adobe Flash Player the CPU rises to 70%. Playing music in Windows Media Player causes the CPU to fluctuate between 16% and 25%, almost like it is visualising the music, bouncing up and down as the music hits its deep and high notes. Meanwhile, playing a video makes the processor flail wildly between 52% and 80%.

I loaded PassMark’s PerformanceTest 7.0 benchmarking software which evaluated the Acer Aspire One, under Windows 7.0, at 204.2. As with the Windows rating, the hard drive was the star performer and the video card was the weak spot, rendering complex 3D graphics at an uninspiring 2.3 frames per second.

To give a comparison, the current top rated computer on PassMark has a rating of 5588.62, but that machine is a monster with four CPU cores.

You wouldn’t use this netbook to play 3D games, but you would use it to manage your files and media and e-mail. The Windows 7 experience was surprisingly pleasant for the most part, but while the machine was doing one task (like playing a movie) any attempts to start something else took noticeably longer.

Once I had loaded Microsoft Office 2007 the 1GB of RAM became insufficient and the computer started page faulting. However, at all times it was a stable experience, just increasingly slower as I attempted to do more simultaneously.

The screen size was a little too short for my liking; even something trivial like FreeCell went slightly off the screen. I’d advocate auto-hiding the Windows taskbar along the bottom of the screen or moving it to either the left- or right-hand borders instead.

So there you have it. Windows 7 worked, but I can’t help but feel it wanted a bit more RAM and processor space to spread its wings.
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/24805/1231/





Mozilla, Opera Blast Microsoft Over IE8 Upgrade Practice

Opera wants the EU to make Microsoft download other browsers to PCs with Windows Update
Gregg Keizer

Browser makers Mozilla and Opera accused Microsoft yesterday of force feeding Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) to users with Windows Update and silently changing the default browser on PCs.

Both companies, which make Firefox and Opera, respectively, are involved in the European Union's antitrust action against Microsoft, which was accused in January of "shielding" IE from competition by bundling the browser with Windows.

"Using the Windows Update channel to update Internet Explorer in any way that undermines user choices is a clear example of how Microsoft uses its monopoly position to damage competition in related products," said Mitchell Baker, the chairman of Mozilla, in an e-mail Thursday. Baker was traveling and not immediately available for an interview.

Hakon Wium Lie, Opera Software's chief technology officer, echoed Baker, citing his company's long-standing issue with Microsoft's distribution method for IE. "We're concerned both about the bundling of IE with Windows, and about Microsoft using Windows Update to reset user choice," said Lie.

Baker and Lie took exception to the process that Microsoft is using to offer IE8 to customers running the older IE6 and IE7 editions. When users receive an upgrade offer to IE8 via Windows Update, accept the offer and install the browser, then select the "Use express settings" option, IE8 becomes the default browser on the machine, even if a rival had been previously pegged as such.

Microsoft has defended the practice. "Users continue to have complete control over IE8 settings and behavior throughout the first-run experience and ongoing use," argued Eric Hebenstreit, IE lead program manager, in an entry to a company blog last week. "For example, if IE is not the default browser in Windows, the option to change this setting is presented in a wizard that runs the first time IE8 is launched."

(Hebenstreit included a modified screenshot of the IE8 setup dialog that omitted the "Default Browser: Internet Explorer" item from the seven-item list. Microsoft was not immediately able to explain why Hebenstreit used an edited screenshot.)

Lie countered Hebenstreit's claims. "[Express settings] does show that IE8 will become the default browser, but only if you read the small print," Lie said. "And it's the second-to-last item. Most users will use express, which has clearly been designed by Microsoft so [users] shouldn't even think about those things."

The alternative, which is to pick "Choose custom settings," is, added Lie, "a laborious series of questions." Among the questions that appear when a user chooses custom settings is one that explicitly asks whether to make IE8 the default browser.

Microsoft began pushing the new browser to users via Automatic Updates last week; Hebenstreit's defense was prompted by multiple blog posts, including this one on PCWorld, a Computerworld sister publication, that criticized the practice.

The EU's Competition Commission case against IE stemmed from a December 2007 complaint by Opera, which said IE "harmed the Web" and demanded Microsoft unbundle the browser and adhere to Web standards.

Since January, several rivals, including Mozilla and Google -- the latter because of its Chrome browser -- joined the case as third-party participants. Several weeks ago, a trade group that includes other competitors, among them Adobe, IBM and Oracle, were also given access to the allegations.

Although EU regulators have not spelled out what they may demand of Microsoft, the agency has hinted it could fine the company, force it to allow users to choose alternate browsers or require it to disable IE.

Opera wants the commission to make Microsoft offer alternate browsers using the same Windows Update service the latter relies on to upgrade IE. "That's one possible remedy," said Lie, who called it a "must-carry" solution, meaning Windows would have to provide multiple browsers, not just IE.

In Lie's scenario, Windows Update would offer a number of choices as optional downloads by providing small executables that would in turn download and install Firefox, Chrome, Opera or other browsers. "Or Windows Update could pre-fetch all those browsers," Lie said, and have them ready to install when the user chooses which browser to run.

"We've suggested this to the EU," Lie confirmed.

Microsoft will have the opportunity to defend itself against the antitrust charges in a hearing before the commission June 3-5. It has already filed a lengthy written response to the accusations.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9132732





Board Ties at Apple and Google Are Scrutinized
Miguel Helft and Brad Stone

The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether the close ties between the boards of two of technology’s most prominent companies, Apple and Google, amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according to several people briefed on the inquiry.

Apple and Google share two directors, Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and Arthur Levinson, former chief executive of Genentech. The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 prohibits a person’s presence on the board of two rival companies when it would reduce competition between them. The two companies increasingly compete in the cellphone and operating systems markets.

Antitrust experts say the provision against “interlocking directorates,” known as Section 8 of the act, is rarely enforced. Nevertheless, the agency has already notified Google and Apple of its interest in the matter, according to the people briefed on the inquiry, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because the inquiry was confidential.

F.T.C. officials declined to comment. Spokespeople for Apple and Google also declined to comment. A spokesman for Genentech declined to make Mr. Levinson available for comment.

The inquiry, which appears to be in its early stages, is the second antitrust examination involving Google to have surfaced in recent days. It suggests that despite the company’s closeness to the Obama administration, Google will not escape scrutiny from regulators.

Mr. Schmidt campaigned for then-Senator Barack Obama during his presidential campaign and advised the transition team and the administration on various matters. He was recently appointed to President Obama’s advisory council on science and technology.

Christine A. Varney, who was recently confirmed as the head of the antitrust division of the Justice Department, last year singled out Google as a probable source of future antitrust concerns because of its near monopoly on Internet search and advertising.

Some antitrust experts said they did not expect Google’s ties to the administration to play a role in antitrust issues.

“I expect the administration to be aggressive, generally, on antitrust enforcement,” said Sanford Litvack, a partner at Hogan & Hartson. Last year, while working for the Justice Department, Mr. Litvack built a case to block a prominent advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo. “I don’t expect Google to either be singled out or to receive a free pass because of Schmidt’s relationship with the administration,” he said.

Antitrust experts say that investigations of interlocking directorates rarely lead to major confrontations between companies and the government. Executives typically choose to resign from the board of a competitor if it poses a problem rather than face a lengthy investigation or a bruising legal fight.

Like many companies in the technology industry, Google and Apple are both allies and competitors. Google, for instance, worked with Apple to design early versions of some its services, like Gmail and Google Maps, for Apple’s iPhone.

But the areas in which the companies are bumping up against each other as rivals have been increasing.

Mobile phones, in particular, loom large in the future of both Google and Apple. Much of Apple’s fortunes these days are tied to the success of the iPhone. Google, for its part, has said repeatedly that one of its biggest strategic opportunities is to expand its online advertising empire into mobile phones.

While Google benefits from the success of the iPhone, which drives more traffic to its mobile services than any other device, it also produces the Android operating system for mobile phones that compete with the iPhone. The system currently powers the T-Mobile G1, a phone that some analysts say is the most capable of a number of rivals.

Other phone makers are planning to roll out devices powered by Android later this year. And the Android operating system is being built into lightweight portable computers known as netbooks, which may compete with some Apple laptops.

Google and Apple compete in a variety of other areas. Apple makes the Safari Web browser while Google makes the competing Chrome. Apple’s iTunes and Google’s YouTube are increasingly competing as venues for distribution of music and videos. And the two companies have photo-editing services.

It is not clear whether regulators have singled out any of these areas of competition as particularly troubling. Under the Clayton Act, interlocking directorates are not considered a problem if the revenue from products in which the companies compete is less than 2 percent of either company’s sales.

“Government actions under Section 8 are rare, but they are brought under circumstances when the presence of a common director on competing boards is likely to be anticompetitive,” said Andrew I. Gavil, an antitrust expert and a professor at the Howard University School of Law.

Both Google and Apple share a rival in Microsoft, which competes with the two companies in some areas. But Professor Gavil said regulators were not likely to see that as a problem, even if the two Silicon Valley companies were discussing ways to compete more effectively with Microsoft.

Mr. Schmidt joined Apple’s board in 2006, about five months before it unveiled the iPhone. Google announced its plans for Android, its mobile phone operating system, nearly a year later. Since then, analysts have speculated that Mr. Schmidt’s position on Apple’s board could become untenable. Google has said he recuses himself when Apple’s board discusses mobile phones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/te...s/05apple.html





BlackBerry Curve Outsells iPhone: Research Group

Research in Motion Ltd's BlackBerry Curve moved past Apple Inc's iPhone in the first quarter to become the best-selling consumer smartphone in the U.S., research group NPD said on Monday.

RIM, which already dominates the corporate smartphone market in the United States, also had three of the top five best-selling consumer smartphones in the period, with the Storm at No. 3 and the Pearl at No. 4, NPD said.

T-Mobile's G1 ranked No. 5.

The iPhone was the top-selling consumer smartphone in the U.S. in both the third and fourth quarters of 2008. The Curve was second and the Palm Inc's Centro was third.

NPD credited a "buy-one-get-one" promotion by Verizon Wireless -- a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group Plc -- for helping push the Curve past the iPhone.

"The more familiar, and less expensive, Curve benefited from these giveaways and was able to leapfrog the iPhone, due to its broader availability on the four major U.S. national carriers," said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD, in a news release.

The iPhone is only available through AT&T Inc. Apple launched its second-generation 3G iPhone last July.

RIM's consumer smartphone market share climbed 15 percent from the previous period to nearly 50 percent in the first quarter, as Apple's and Palm's share both fell 10 percent.

More than half of RIM's 25 million subscribers now fall into the non-corporate category, according to the company.

But the smartphone battle is just starting to heat up. Apple is widely expected to unveil a new iPhone in the next few months, while Palm's highly-anticipated Pre smartphone is set to launch during the second quarter.

The smartphone market as a whole continues to grow, even as the larger handset market stagnates. The devices made up 23 percent of U.S. handset sales in the first quarter, NPD said, up from 17 percent in the year-ago quarter.

Shares of Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM rose 3 percent in late afternoon trading on the Nasdaq to $74.43. Shares of Cupertino, California-based Apple were up 3.4 percent to $131.63 on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5435WH20090504





Immorality and Twitter

The other week headlines were crying out that Twitter, the microblogging platform, makes us immoral, but the study on which the claim was made, made no mention of social media.
Christie Nicholson

The other week saw people climbing the walls of the “twittersphere” with some claiming that Twitter—the brief blogging platform—makes us immoral.

The controversy was a good example of the danger of popculture references when explaining science. You’ve got to make sure it’s accurate in these days of Susan-Boyle-instant-stories.

The research in question, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that emotions of compassion and admiration are triggered deep within the brain, where anger and fear resides. The study also found that the brain takes four to six seconds longer to process compassion for social pain, than for physical pain.

This is where Twitter comes in: any so-called painful Tweets may literally arrive and disappear too fast for our brain to register the appropriate deep-felt emotion. Or so claimed some press coverage. Facebook and Twitter may thus make us bad people; instant messaging makes us mean, the headlines read. To be sure, the original “leap” to Twitter came from the university’s own press release. (The reference has since been removed.)

Blogs erupted: Neurocritic, Language Log, Bad Science, and others, all posted pieces correcting the hype. Because of a research embargo, the actual paper was released to journalists a week before release to the public and other scientists. And the paper makes zero mention of Twitter or social media. It’s most interesting finding, in fact, is that the neural source for such complex emotions is well below the cortex, and thus far from the influence of “cultural artifacts.”

Which sort of says it all, doesn’t it? Tweet, tweet.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/po...itter-09-05-04





Why Text Messages are Limited to 160 Characters
Mark Milian

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

That became Hillebrand's magic number -- and set the standard for one of today's most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

"This is perfectly sufficient," he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. "Perfectly sufficient."

The communications researcher and a dozen others had been laying out the plans to standardize a technology that would allow cellphones to transmit and display text messages. Because of tight bandwidth constraints of the wireless networks at the time -- which were mostly used for car phones -- each message would have to be as short as possible.

Before his typewriter experiment, Hillebrand had an argument with a friend about whether 160 characters provided enough space to communicate most thoughts. "My friend said this was impossible for the mass market," Hillebrand said. "I was more optimistic."
His optimism was clearly on the mark. Text messaging has become the prevalent form of mobile communication worldwide. Americans are sending more text messages than making calls on their cellphones, according to a Nielsen Mobile report released last year.

U.S. mobile users sent an average of 357 texts per month in the second quarter of 2008 versus an average of 204 calls, the report said.

Texting has been a boon for telecoms. Giants Verizon Wireless and AT&T each charge 20 to 25 cents a message, or $20 for unlimited texts. Verizon has 86 million subscribers, while AT&T's wireless service has 78.2 million.

And Twitter, the fastest growing online social network, which is being adopted practically en masse by politicians, celebrities ...

... and news outlets, has its very DNA in text messaging. To avoid the need for splitting cellular text messages into multiple parts, the creators of Twitter capped the length of a tweet at 140 characters, keeping the extra 20 for the user's unique address.

Back in 1985, of course, the guys who invented Twitter were probably still playing with Matchbox cars.

Hillebrand found new confidence after his rather unscientific investigations. As chairman of the nonvoice services committee within the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), a group that sets standards for the majority of the global mobile market, he pushed forward the group's plans in 1986. All cellular carriers and mobile phones, they decreed, must support the short messaging service (SMS).

Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks.

This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. Voice communication itself had taken place via a separate signal.

"We were looking to a cheap implementation," Hillebrand said on the phone from Bonn. "Most of the time, nothing happens on this control link. So, it was free capacity on the system."

Initially, Hillebrand's team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn't seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

Still, his committee wondered, would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial assumptions on two "convincing arguments," Hillebrand said.

For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters.

Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards.

Just look at your average e-mail today, he noted. Many can be summed up in the subject line, and the rest often contains just a line or two of text asking for a favor or updating about a particular project.

But length wasn't SMS's only limitation. "The input was cumbersome," Hillebrand said. With multiple letters being assigned to each number button on the keypad, finding a single correct letter could take three or four taps. Typing out a sentence or two was a painstaking task.

Later, software such as T9, which predicts words based on the first few letters typed by the user, QWERTY keyboards such as the BlackBerry's and touchscreen keyboards including the iPhone's made the process more palatable.

But even with these inconveniences, text messaging took off. Fast. Hillebrand never imagined how quickly and universally the technology would be adopted. What was originally devised as a portable paging system for craftsmen using their cars as a mobile office is now the preferred form of on-the-go communication for cellphone users of all ages.

"Nobody had foreseen how fast and quickly the young people would use this," Hillebrand said. He's still fascinated by stories of young couples breaking up via text message.

When he tells the story of his 160-character breakthrough, Hillebrand says, people assume he's rich. But he's not.

There are no text message royalties. He doesn't receive a couple of pennies each time someone sends a text, like songwriters do for radio airplay. Though "that would be nice," Hillebrand said.

Now Hillebrand lives in Bonn, managing Hillebrand & Partners, a technology patent consulting firm. He has written a book about the creation of GSM, a $255 hardcover tome.

Following an early retirement that didn't take, Hillebrand is pondering his next project. Multimedia messaging could benefit from regulation, he said. With so many different cellphones taking photos, videos and audio in a variety of formats, you can never be sure whether your friend's phone will be able to display it.

But he's hoping to make a respectable salary for the work this time.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/tech...messaging.html





Teen Claims 303,398 iPhone Texts in One Month
Chris Matyszczyk

You need a peculiar set of half-formed, skinny fingers to text on an iPhone.

And you need a peculiar set of strangely formed cranial connections to send and receive 303,398 texts on it in one month.

However, this is the claim of Crystal Wiski, a teen from Antelope in California's Sacramento County.

Her mother, Jackie, bought her the iPhone a month ago and young Crystal took to it like a duck to quacking.

Crystal told local NBC station KSBW: "I get cramps."

She then got the urge to explain the simplicity of her need to text so much: "I'm popular. I can't help it."

Well, indeed. I am sure that's how President Obama explains his attachment to his BlackBerry.

You might be saying to yourself at this point that no one can send seven texts a minute. Well, the fine folk at KSBW pointed their most excellent equipment in Crystal's direction and timed her. Those thumbs were made for talking. Rapid talking.

You might also be saying to yourself that Crystal must be a woeful student who is an awful drag on her mother's patience, time, sanity, and hairdresser.

Well, you might just need a crystal of whiskey or two when I tell you that she gets straight As, is about to graduate, and holds down a 40-hour-a-week job. (No, not at an Apple store. At McDonalds.)

What else can I tell you? Oh, yes, her mom invested in an unlimited texting plan.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10233833-71.html





Texting While Driving Kills Virtual Pedestrians
LiveScience Staff

Several studies have shown that distractions while driving, such as using cell phones or texting, can be dangerous. New research confirms these findings among teens.
The study of 21 teens in a driving simulator found that while texting or searching their MP3 music players they changed speed dramatically, wove in an out of their lanes, and, in some cases, ran over virtual pedestrians.

Similar studies have found that adults who talk on cell phones while driving in simulators perform as dismally as drunken study participants. Studies from the University of Utah show that hands-free devices do not make it safe to use cell phones while driving.

In January, the National Safety Council called on state and federal lawmakers to ban the use of cell phones and text-messaging devices while driving and also urged businesses to prohibit it.

The problem is acute among younger people.

Motor vehicle accidents are leading cause of death for people between 16 and 20, accounting for more than 5,000 deaths each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Teens are four times more likely than older drivers to be involved in a crash.

The new study included 21 subjects between 16 and 18 years of age with at least six months driving experience. Anyone diagnosed with an attention disorder or with history of unsafe driving was excluded, as were teens who reported use of alcohol or excessive amounts of caffeine. Each driver completed four separate 10-minute driving blocks: Undistracted, talking on a cell phone, text messaging and using an MP3 player. Each 10-minute block was separated into two separate driving scenarios, rural and urban.

The results for the teens sending text messages or fiddling with their MP3 players showed increased "lane position deviation" and speed changes, mostly slowing down.

"What this study demonstrates is that not only does your speed go up and down, you're swinging wide left and right," said Dr. Donald Lewis, of the Eastern Virginia Medical School and Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters in Norfolk, Va.. "You're a hazardous driver, to yourself and everybody else."

The findings were presented to the Pediatric Academic Societies May 2.
http://www.livescience.com/health/09...g-driving.html





Safe "Sexting?" No Such Thing, Teens Warned
Belinda Goldsmith

Teens sending nude or suggestive photos of themselves over their mobile phones are being warned -- "sexting" can damage your future.

Australia's state government of New South Wales launched an education campaign this week to combat the growing practice of "sexting," saying these images or sexually explicit text messages can be posted on the Internet or forwarded to others, which can end up in harassment or even sexual assault.

"Sexting," a play on the term texting, has become a concern for parents and schools internationally with the proliferation of mobile phones with cameras and social networking sites, but such images can be classified as child pornography by law.

"Young people often don't think about the consequences of their actions. What they think is an innocent joke or harmless flirting can be very damaging if it falls into the wrong hands," said NSW Community Service Minister Linda Burney in a statement.

"It is frightening to think that once these images are online or on a phone, anyone anywhere in the world can access them. It is then impossible to retrieve and delete them. They are there forever and can damage future career prospects or relationships." She said government departments had received reports of girls as young as 13 sending sexually explicit images to their boyfriends on their mobiles phones, which were then passed on to other friends and even further once the relationships ended.

In the United States, a survey last fall found one in five teenagers said they had sent or posted online nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves and 39 percent said they had sent or posted sexually suggestive messages, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Teenage actress Vanessa Hudgens, star of the successful "High School Musical" franchise, last year had to live down the scandal of her semi-nude pictures, meant for boyfriend Zac Ephron, ending up online.

Several prosecutions have been undertaken or threatened in the United States and one girl, Jessica Logan, 18, from Cincinnati, committed suicide after being taunted when a nude photo of herself sent via text was circulated at her school.

The NSW government has produced a fact sheet for schools, parents and youngsters to warn about the possible lifetime consequences of sexting while Burney was hitting the airwaves to publicize the campaign: "Safe Sexting, No Such Thing."

Burney is also urging parents to talk to children about the issue and to check their social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook for any inappropriate images.

"More and more parents are telling me how worried they are about their children making a silly mistake that can affect them for the rest of their lives," said Burney.

"Reports from concerned adults are becoming more frequent... a dangerous consequence is the risk of public humiliation, harassment or even sexual assault."

(Editing by Miral Fahmy)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...5430UO20090504





Tuned-In Kids Get Turned on Earlier
James Hibberd

Watching adult-oriented TV shows and movies might prompt kids to start having sex at an earlier age, according to a new study released by Children's Hospital Boston.

The research suggests that early onset of sexual activity among teens might relate to the amount of adult content they watched as children.

"Television and movies are among the leading sources of information about sex and relationships for adolescents," said Hernan Delgado, a pediatrician at the hospital who is lead author of the study. "Our research shows that their sexual attitudes and expectations are influenced much earlier in life."

The study consisted of 754 subjects who were tracked during childhood and again five years later, when their ages ranged from 12 to 18. The study recorded the amount of TV programing and movies viewed over sample days, noting the amount of content geared toward adults. The participants' onset of sexual activity was tracked during the second stage of the study.

When the youngest children in the sample were exposed to adult-targeted entertainment, they were more likely to have sex earlier. In fact, the study found that for every hour the youngest group of kids watched adult-targeted content over two sample days, their chances of having sex during early adolescence increased by 33 percent. But the reverse wasn't true: Becoming sexually active early did not increase their viewing of grown-up shows.

"Adult entertainment often deals with issues and challenges that adults face, including the complexities of sexual relationships," said David Bickham, co-author of the study. "Children have neither the life experience nor the brain development to fully differentiate between a reality they are moving toward and a fiction meant solely to entertain. Children learn from media, and when they watch media with sexual references and innuendoes, our research suggests, they are more likely to engage in sexual activity earlier in life."

The findings were presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in Baltimore.

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...54613Z20090507





Woody Allen Objects to Farrow, Soon-Yi as Witnesses

Lawyers for film director Woody Allen asked a court on Monday to prevent American Apparel from calling his wife Soon-Yi Previn and his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow as witnesses in an upcoming trial.

Allen sued the U.S. clothing company for trademark infringement more than a year ago seeking more than $10 million after his image was used on billboards in New York and Los Angeles without his consent.

In court papers filed Monday, Allen's lawyers said a possible witness list provided by American Apparel Inc. included Allen, Farrow, Previn, his sister Letty Aronson and Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt.

The motion filed in Manhattan federal court asks for a court order preventing American Apparel from calling witnesses and introducing evidence "concerning Mr. Allen's personal and family life."

The lawyers said any plan to put Farrow on the stand was "part of a brutish attempt to smear and intimidate Mr. Allen."

The possibility of calling such witnesses to the stand "all demonstrate the unmistakable intent to transform this trial into a spectacle," the court papers said. The trial is set to begin May 18.

American Apparel has argued that Allen overestimates the value of his image after various sex scandals. In 1992, Allen's then-girlfriend Farrow discovered he was having an affair with their 22-year-old eldest adopted daughter, Soon-Yi. Allen married Soon-Yi Previn in 1997.

A lawyer for the clothing company did not immediately return calls for comment.

In the advertisements, which also appeared on Web sites, Allen is dressed as a Hasidic Jew with a beard and black hat.

Allen's lawyers compared his case to that of Cary Grant suing Esquire magazine for publishing a photo in which Grant's head was superimposed on a child's torso.

"Like Mr. Allen, Grant was publicly known to be opposed to reaping commercial profits from the publicity sale of his identity," the court papers said.

Allen has directed more than 40 films and won numerous awards, including an Oscar for best director for 1977's "Annie Hall."

(Reporting by Christine Kearney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...54406L20090505





European Parliament Smacks Down France on Three Strikes Law

The European Parliament today sent a message to countries like France, as 88 percent of MEPs voted to require that judges be involved in any attempt to disconnect people's Internet connections. The issue threatens to hold up telecoms reform in the EU.
Nate Anderson

How many times does the European Parliament have to make clear that judges must be involved in ordering Internet disconnections of repeat online copyright infringers? Eighty-eight percent of MEPs today rejected an attempt to water down the provision and instead restored the original toughly worded amendment to Europe's Telecoms Package. The massive bill now appears to hinge on just this one issue.

The Telecoms Package covers everything from national regulators to mobile phones to network management to "graduated response" schemes; it's a huge hodgepodge of a bill, but all the main issues appear to be settled. When it comes to network neutrality and graduated response laws, however, the European Council (which needs to sign off on legislation from Parliament and is made up of the various EU national governments) objected. France, in particular, vigorously opposed the provisions.

France, of course, is attempting to implement the Création et Internet law, one of the toughest of its kind, which would create a new administrative agency called HADOPI to oversee and order 'Net disconnections. The country refused to pass the Telecoms Package unless changes were made, and just last week, the Council and the MEPs overseeing the bill announced that a compromise had been reached. Graduated response and network neutrality provisions in the bill would be weakened but not stripped away entirely, and life was beautiful.

But when it came time for Parliament to vote on the compromise, lawmakers sent a message: 407 voted to restore the original graduated response amendment, which made it illegal to disconnect Internet users without direct judicial oversight of the process. Only 57 MEPs voted against.

This upsets the delicate compromise agreed to by the Council, of course, so the whole package will enter a negotiation phase once more. That's fine with consumer groups, which were ecstatic about the clear message sent (again) by Parliament.

"The massive re-adoption of amendment 138/46 [on graduated response] rather than the softer compromise negotiated by rapporteur Trautmann with the Council is an even stronger statement. These two elements alone confirm that the French 'three strikes' scheme, HADOPI, is dead already," said Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net.

Every time this issue comes up, Parliament has voted overwhelmingly in favor of judicial involvement in the graduated response process. France doesn't want to hear that, of course—judicial involvement can be slow and expensive—but it may need to compromise further unless it's willing to sink a major piece of legislation over this one issue.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...trikes-law.ars





India Ahead of US, UK in IP Laws, Enforcement Practices

India has been ranked as the country with the world's most consumer friendly intellectual property (IP) laws since its copyright regulations allow citizens great freedom to access and utilise information for educational and development purposes.

This emerged in a study of 16 countries, including economically advanced ones, undertaken by the Malaysia-based Consumers International, which calls itself the "world's only global consumer advocacy body".

Consumers International said its first IP Watch List focused on copyright - which has "the most immediate impact on consumers' access to knowledge and thereby on their educational, cultural and developmental opportunities".

In the listing which saw India come out on top, the other countries with good ratings were South Korea, China, the US and Indonesia.

At the bottom of the list were Britain, Thailand, Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

India was rated high (with a B average on a scale of A to F) in terms of its scope and duration of copyright as well as the freedom of access and use it gave to home users, content creators, the press and those in public affairs.

However, despite topping the list, India didn't do so well and got a C scale in terms of the leeway it allows for disabled users to access copyrighted work. Likewise, it got only a D when it came to freedom to access and use copyrighted work by libraries.

Consumers International called for a "balanced copyright regime in which the importance of copyright flexibilities and of the maintenance of a vibrant public domain are upheld".

India's strengths and weaknesses of its copyright laws - from a consumer's perspective -were closely studied.

The study praises India's Copyright Act as being "a relatively balanced instrument that recognises the interests of consumers through its broad private use exception, and by facilitating the compulsory licensing of works that would otherwise be unavailable".

It points out that "neither has India rushed to accede to the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) Copyright Treaty, which would expose India's consumers to the same problems experienced in other jurisdictions that have prohibited the use of circumvention devices to gain access to legally acquired copyright material".

The study acknowledges that copyright infringement, particularly in the form of physical media, is widespread in India. It adds though that this must be taken in the context that India, although fast-growing, remains one of the poorest countries in the world.

"Although India's cultural productivity over the centuries and to the present day has been rich and prodigious, its citizens are economically disadvantaged as consumers of the culture to which they have contributed," says the study, which goes counter to the dominant trend of pushing for tighter copyright rules and enforcement.

It points to certain limitations - not all libraries can copy works that cannot reasonably be obtained commercially. Only public libraries can do so and they can make only three copies of such works.

No explicit rule exists to allow libraries to copy works for users for the purpose of research or study. Only limited permission is given for the reproduction of unpublished works by libraries. No provisions allow for libraries to make preservation or archive copies of material in their collection.

Of the significant findings, Consumers International said: "The list of countries that best support the interests of consumers is dominated by large Asian economies but they are in odd company with the US, which has regularly criticised those same countries for failing to adequately protect and enforce intellectual property rights."

It suggested that this "reflects the fact" that US policy makers "apply double standards when comparing their own copyright system to systems from abroad".

It said countries with copyright regimes that "most disregard the interests of consumers" was also an "odd grouping".

This included the country in which the copyright law was first developed in the 16th century - Britain.

Together with it were "developing and transitional economies, whose outdated copyright laws fail to take advantage of all the flexibilities that international law allows them to benefit local consumers".
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...ow/4492767.cms





'File Sharing Law Goes Too Far': Swedish EU Election Candidates

A clear majority of the Swedish candidates seeking election to the EU parliament are against the IPRED copyright law, arguing that EU countries have gone too far in the hunt for file-sharers.

Only 11 of the 39 candidates expressed support for the controversial copyright law in a major new survey conducted by newspaper Sydsvenskan.

The law is based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) and was passed by a large majority in the Swedish parliament on February 25th, courting criticism from opponents who argue that it constitutes a threat to democracy and personal integrity.

Opposition to the Swedish government bill came primarily from members of parliament for the Centre and Green parties. The new survey indicates that opposition to the IPRED law exists among EU parliamentary candidates representing all parties.

25 candidates answered in the affirmative to the statement: With the IPRED law the EU has gone too far in its hunt for file sharers.

Among the 25 were the Pirate Party's Christian Engström as well as representatives from eight other political parties, including two members of the Moderate party.

"There is a need for more younger politicians in the European parliament who understand modern technology. Today the average age is 55, which I think affects a large number of decisions by which politicians try to regulate the internet," said Christoffer Järkeborn of the Moderate party to Sydsvenskan.

The Green party's leading candidate Carl Schlyter argued that European politicians have been far too inclined to allow themselves to be pressured by the USA.

"The EU laws are founded on a lobbying campaign from Hollywood with blind faith in the total surveillance of the internet - which is neither possible nor desirable."

Many of the IPRED law's critics argue that it is old-fashioned and call for file sharing technology to be allowed to develop in tandem with copyright protection.

The IPRED law gained the support of 11 of the 39 candidates. Among whom were Liberal party veteran Marit Paulsen, party colleague Cecilia Wikström, Göran Färm and Carina Olsson of the Social Democrats, Christian Democrats Ella Bohlin and Sofia Modigh, and five Moderate candidates including Gunnar Hökmark and Christofer Fjellner.

Those defending the law argue that it is necessary to protect the rights of filmmakers, authors, and artists by allowing them to earn a living from their creations.
http://www.thelocal.se/19226/20090504/

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

May 2nd, April 25th, April 18th, April 11th

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


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