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Old 06-02-08, 08:54 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – February 9th, '08

Since 2002


































"It’s very frightening that IFPI can get through the courts with something like this. In Turkey and China its the state that decides what information the people can access and what should be censored. In Denmark its apparently the record industry." – Sebastian Gjerding


"Oink was the biggest music library in the world. People didn’t use it because they were criminals, people used it because it was literally better than any service you could pay for." – Benn Jordan


"The internet doesn't work that way." – Dane cop



































February 2nd, 2008





IFPI Forces Danish ISP to Block The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

The battle between the IFPI and the Pirate Bay continues. A Danish court ruled in favor of the IFPI, and ordered the Danish ISP “Tele2″ (DMT2-Tele2) to block all access to the popular BitTorrent tracker. The Pirate Bay, currently ranked 28th in the list of most visited sites in Denmark, is working on countermeasures.

The court case was initiated by the IFPI - the infamous anti-piracy organization that represents the recording industry - and plans to force other ISPs to do the same. However, The Pirate Bay is determined to fight back, as usual.

The Pirate Bay team has already asked other BitTorrent admins to stand up against the IFPI lobby, and arranged a meeting with Tele2 to discuss the current events. Pirate Bay co-founder Brokep told TorrentFreak in a response: “I hope the torrent community understands what this will do to Danish people. It will also act as a very bad precedent for the European Union, and I hope everybody will fight this.”

At the moment, The Pirate Bay team is registering new (Danish) domains, to make sure people can still download .torrent files from the Bay when the ban is activated later today tomorrow. In addition the Pirate Bay will launch a campaign website, together with the Danish pro-piracy lobby “Piratgruppen”.

Sebastian Gjerding, spokesperson for Piratgruppen, a pro-piracy lobby whose goals are to reform current copyright law and protect consumers’ rights, is not pleased with the news. He told TorrentFreak: “The verdict is absurd. It will block access for danish users to the worlds largest distributor of culture and knowledge - copyrighted or not. It’s true that you can access copyrighted material through The Pirate Bay, as you can with Google or Rapidshare. Should they be blocked as well?”

“It’s very frightening that IFPI can get through the courts with something like this. In Turkey and China its the state that decides what information the people can access and what should be censored. In Denmark its apparently the record industry,” Sebastian adds.

This is not the first time a Danish ISP has been ordered to censor the Internet. In December 2006 A Danish court ruled against Tele2 in a similar case, and ordered the ISP to block all access to Allofmp3.com. According to the ruling, the ISP was willingly infringing copyright if their customers use AllofMP3 to download music.

IFPI has announced it will continue it’s battle against BitTorrent sites in Europe. Last month they tried to convince European lawmakers that ISPs should block access to websites such as The Pirate Bay, and block filesharing protocols, no matter what they’re being used for. Luckily, these proposals were rejected.

We will follow this campaign, and the response from Denmark closely.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-b...by-isp-080204/





Warner, Universal Take Action Against Baidu

Three global record companies have launched legal proceedings against China's top Internet search engine Baidu.com Inc, accusing it of violating copyright by giving access to music files, an international music trade body said.

Universal Music Ltd, Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Hong Kong) Ltd and Warner Music Hong Kong Ltd have asked a court to order Baidu to remove all links on its music delivery service to copyright-infringing tracks that they own the rights to, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in a statement.

The claims have been filed with a court in Beijing, said IFPI, which is backed by global music industry heavyweights.

Separate action is also being taken by Universal Music Ltd, Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Hong Kong) Ltd, Warner Music Hong Kong Ltd as well as Gold Label Entertainment Ltd against Chinese media firm Sohu.com Inc and its search engine, Sogou, the statement added.

Yahoo China also faces proceedings after refusing to comply with a December ruling by the Beijing Higher People's Court which confirmed that the company violated Chinese law by committing mass copyright infringement, IFPI added.

Spokesmen for the three Chinese companies and court officials could not be reached for comment.

In December, IFPI said the Beijing Higher People's Court upheld a ruling that Yahoo China violates Chinese law by facilitating mass copyright infringement through music downloads.

"The music industry in China wants partnership with the technology companies -- but you cannot build partnership on the basis of systemic theft of copyrighted music and that is why we have been forced to take further actions," John Kennedy, IFPI chief executive, said in the statement.

IFPI said that more than 99 percent of all music files distributed in China are pirated, and the country's total legitimate music market, at $76 million, accounts for less than 1 percent of global recorded music sales.

(Reporting by Sophie Taylor; Editing by Jan Dahinten)
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...21536420080205





RIAA: Egg On Face Over Ray Beckerman
p2pnet news

RIAA lawyers are becoming dazed and confused as day after day, they try to con US judges into believing Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG customers, including very young children, are criminals and thieves.

Yesterday, in Arista v Does 1-21, targeting Boston University students, the Big 4’s RIAA tried to block the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) request for permission to file an amicus curiae brief, says Recording Industry vs The People.

This is the case where Big 4 unlicensed ‘investigator’ MediaSentry was told to take a hike, by order of the Massachusetts state police.

It’s now also the cause of serious RIAA embarrassment centering on Ray Beckerman, the famous New York lawyer who runs Recording Industry vs The People, the unique online repository of scores of documents relating to Big 4 sue ‘em all cases.

Beckerman was one of the first attorneys to represent RIAA victims and as such, he’s better than merely well known by the RIAA and the many and various hired legal guns which represent it.

With that in mind one has to wonder not only how, but why, the RIAA’s demand that the EFF representation be barred, offered up by Nancy M. Cremins and John R. Bauer of Boston’s Robinson & Cole, has Beckerman as an EFF attorney.

Say Crimins and Bauer in their court document:

Quote:
[The] EFF regularly takes legal positions in these cases that defy all logic. Indeed, one of EFF attorneys, Ray Beckerman, operates a blog on the Internet called “Recording Industry vs. The People” which, by way of example accuse Plaintiffs of acting as “a cartel of multinational corporations [that] collude to abuse our judicial system, distort copyright law, and frighten ordinary working people and their children.”
Yea, verily They also need to learn how to write.

This is somewhat akin to RIAA president Cary Sherman being described as someone dedicated to helping, instead of trying to destroy, American music lovers.

Never happen.

Be that as it may, today the RIAA fell flat on its lying face.

Judge Nancy Gertner (right) allowed the EFF’s motion for leave to file an amicus brief in Arista v Does, overruling the RIAA’s objections, on the ground that the cases present “questions of copyright law and computer technology” and that “amici participation” may “shed light on the issues before [the Court],” says RIvTP.

Definitely stay tuned.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14902





RIAA Wants Songwriter Royalty Lowered
NewYorkCountryLawyer

Lest there be anyone left who believes the RIAA's propaganda that its litigation campaign is intended to benefit the "creators" of the music, Hollywood Reporter reports that the RIAA is asking the Copyright Royalty Board to lower songwriter royalties on song file downloads, from the present rate of 9 cents per song — about 13% of the wholesale price — down to 8% of wholesale. Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale. So any representations by any of these companies that they are concerned for the "creators" of the music must henceforth be taken with a boxcar-load of salt.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/05/015231





Major Labels 'Face DoJ Antitrust Probe'

Unlaunched TotalMusic prompts price fixing concern
Andrew Orlowski

Two major labels have been served notice of a fresh antitrust investigation, a music business newsletter reports today. MusicAlly's daily Bulletin suggests that the as-yet-unlaunched TotalMusic service, currently backed by Universal and Somy BMG, has prompted notices from the US Department of Justice. The report suggests all four major labels have been contacted.

TotalMusic, described by Rick Rubin back here, is reported to be a low-cost, multi-platform subscription service to be offered to consumers through ISPs and device manufacturers. The plan has few of the restrictions traditionally attached to subscription services, with the service provider or hardware manufacturer subsidising some or all of the mooted $5 monthly fee.

"The subscription model is the only way to save the music business," Rubin has said. "If music is easily available at a price of five or six dollars a month, then nobody will steal it."

As an example of third-parties' willingness to subsidise music to the point of it being "free", UMG recently signed a deal with Nokia to bundle free downloads with selected handsets, which the punter can than keep.

A history of abuse

However, since the four major labels supply 80 per cent of the market with sound recordings, the issue of price-fixing has never been far from formal regulatory scrutiny. Executives are schooled in avoiding trigger words that indicate the major labels are acting in concert. In 2000, the Federal Trade Commission concluded that the labels' "Minimum Advertised Price" programs constituted wholesale price fixing, which had cost consumers $480m.

Fear of being seen to act like a cartel has paralyzed progressive licensing initiatives.

In December 2001, the majors backed two music subscription services called PressPlay and MusicNet, and came under immediate antitrust attention. PressPlay was backed by Universal and Sony, while MusicNet was backed by Warner, EMI and BMG together with Real Networks. The DoJ investigated a number of complaints, the strongest of which was that the major labels refused to license their catalogues to competing music service providers.

The investigation was overtaken by the launch of iTunes, and with it Apple's creation of a licensed market for digital music downloads. The DoJ formally concluded the probe in December 2003 with a few harsh words at the subscription offerings. While investigators couldn't find support for price fixing, the services were extremely unpopular and loaded with restrictions.

This backed the idea, the DoJ suggested, that the goal of the programs was to "impede the growth of the Internet" for music distribution, and steer users back to the "bread and butter of the music industry"; physical CD sales.

But that's a luxury the major labels don't have today. With physical sales of sound recordings showing a 25 per cent year-on-year decline, labels are prepared to lose many of their traditional paranoia and technophobia, and take the risk. They have nowhere left to go.

Today it's the harsh economic reality of doing business that most hampers the launch of licensed services that can effectively compete with free ones.

Only huge telecomms companies and large global hardware manufacturers - Apple, Nokia and Sony are all individually much larger than the entire record industry - can afford to license the music. As so often, the internet is portrayed as redistributing power from the few to the many; but with music, it may simply concentrate power with a small number of players. One or two faces may change.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02...itrust_report/





France Investigates Warner Music CEO Bronfman

Warner Music Group Corp Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. has been placed under formal investigation by French authorities as part of a probe into insider trading at Vivendi, Warner said on Thursday.

Bronfman was formerly a director of Vivendi and sold shares in the French media giant in 2002.

The probe centers on trading during the tenure of former Vivendi Chief Executive Jean-Marie Messier.

Vivendi Universal nearly collapsed in mid-2002 after a debt-fuelled acquisition spree carried out under Messier to turn the company from a simple utilities company to an international media empire.

Vivendi has since sold off a large number of assets to help pay back its debt.

Thierry Marembert, attorney for Bronfman, said in a statement on Thursday that placing someone under investigation is a preliminary stage of proceedings conducted by two French investigating magistrates and no charges have been filed.

"He will continue to cooperate with the proceedings. Mr. Bronfman's transactions have at all times been proper and at no time did he contravene any French laws or regulations," Marembert said.

Bronfman, who resigned from the Vivendi board in December 2003, provided testimony regarding the matter in June.

"The inquiry has encompassed certain trading by Mr. Bronfman in Vivendi stock. Several individuals, including Mr. Bronfman ... have been given the status of "mise en examen" in connection with the inquiry," Warner said in a Jan. 25 regulatory filing.

(Reporting by Sue Zeidler; Editing by Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...40417720080207





PRO-IP Act is Dangerous and Unnecessary, Say Industry Groups
Eric Bangeman

Last month, the Copyright Office held a closed-door session on the issue of statutory damages. A small affair, the roundtable was a response to the PRO-IP Act introduced in Congress late last year. In the wake of the meeting, eight public interest and industry groups have published a white paper (PDF) arguing against any changes to the "one work" rule and the increases in statutory damages that would result from such changes.

The PRO-IP Act would drastically alter US copyright law by increasing the amount of statutory damages that could be awarded to rightsholders. For instance, someone copying a 50 songs from a boxed set could be liable for $7.5 million in damages instead of the current $150,000. There's more: there would be a new office created within the executive branch that would be responsible for IP enforcement, while the Department of Justice would get a new IP enforcement division.

The white paper, submitted by the Consumer Electronics Association, Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Association of Public Television Stations, the Library Copyright Alliance, the Computer & Communications Industry, NetCoalition, and the Printing Industries of America, argues against the kind of changes to the copyright law envisioned in the PRO-IP Act.

Noting that the courts can currently award massive statutory damages without rightsholders having to demonstrate that they have suffered any actual harm (ask Jammie Thomas about that), the white paper calls current copyright law a "carefully designed compromise" meant to balance the interests of both parties. After all, if a rights-holder believes that it has suffered damages in excess of the statutory limits, it has the option to seek punitive damages as well.

From the standpoint of Big Content, the problem is that it can be difficult to prove actual damages; lifting the ceiling on statutory damages is much easier. During the Jammie Thomas trial, one recording industry executive testified that she had no idea what the RIAA's actual damages were. "We haven't stopped to calculate the amount of damages we've suffered due to downloading," testified Sony BMG's head of litigation Jennifer Pariser.

That's not enough, argues the white paper. Supporters of the PRO-IP Act are "not able to produce any examples where that rule has created unfair outcomes for rightsholders," according to the groups. "In fact, at the January 25 meeting Associate Register Carson asked the proponents of Section 104 if they could cite a single example where the one work rule produced an unjust result. The proponents were unable to do so."

The authors of the white paper paint a dreary future where "copyright trolls" file lawsuits in order to rake in massive amounts of statutory damages, where innovation is stifled, and where artists are afraid to "Recut, Reframe, and Recycle" because of the financial risks involved.

The PRO-IP Act would also strengthen the hand of rightsholders when it comes to secondary infringement, a development the white paper contends should be avoided at all costs. Noting that courts have seldom—if ever—ruled on the question of the applicability of statutory damages in the case of secondary infringement (a federal judge rejected the RIAA's argument that Debbie Foster was liable for secondary infringement in Capitol v. Foster), the authors argue that any changes to the Copyright Act must limit liability for secondary infringement. Otherwise, companies would be less willing to create innovative new products for fear of running afoul of this issue.

The increase in statutory damages might be justified, allow the white paper's authors, if there was evidence that it would help in the fight against piracy. They argue that such evidence is lacking. "At the January 25, 2008, meeting, supporters of the amendment provided no evidence that weakening the one work rule would deter infringement by end users or commercial 'pirates.'"

There's a lot more in the white paper, including a fascinating (well, fascinating to me, anyway) look at the history of development of the statutory damages clause in the Copyright Act. But the key takeaway is this: current law already provides for adequate damages for rightsholders, and the proposals backed by Big Content in the current legislation would have far-reaching negative consequences if the bill is passed in its current form.

Further reading:

The white paper (PDF) is available from Public Knowledge
The complete text (PDF) of the PRO-IP Act (HR 4279) is available from the GPO
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...dangerous.html





Federal Aid Threatened by New Bill

Bill would require Santa Clara to create alternatives for illegal file-sharing
Gina Belmonte

The entertainment industry continues to find new ways to combat copyright violations on university campuses -- this time it has turned to the federal government.

Under the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, students face the potential risk of losing their federal student aid if illegal peer-to-peer Internet file sharing continues on campus. The bill, HR 4137, has been introduced to the House of Representatives and is up for debate in the coming weeks.

While HR 4137 is a massive education bill, one provision of the bill, titled "Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention," is sparking controversy among students and university officials. Section 494 first mandates institutions to publicize policies and procedures relating to illegal downloading and sharing of copyrighted material. The second part of the section -- and the most contested -- requires institutions to plan to offer alternatives to illegal downloading as well as explore tools and software to prevent such illegal activity.

Universities that fail to comply are subject to a loss of federal student aid funding, ultimately penalizing every student who receives federal financial aid -- regardless of whether they participate in the illegal activity. Loss in such funding would affect those with Pell grants, Stafford and Perkins student loans, as well as those with work study funded by federal student aid, according to Neena Dagnino, office manager of the Financial Aid Office.

The required alternatives to illegal file sharing imposed by the bill can mean something as simple as putting up a Web site with links to places like iTunes and Rhapsody, said Ron Danielson, chief information officer.

However, other alternatives could include the university having to subscribe to download services or purchase software to control and block illegal file sharing. The extent of the threat has yet to be delineated, as the bill fails to specify exactly what is expected of the university, said Danielson.

The university seems to already be taking many illegal file-sharing precautions, said Tyler Ochoa, a Santa Clara professor of law with a specialization in copyright law.

In addition, the bill only requires the university to develop a plan that offers alternatives to illegal file sharing, not implement it, said Ochoa.

For now, the university has decided the best approach toward dealing with illegal downloading is an educational one, said Information Technology Director Carl Fussell.

Fussell cited some of the ways the university has done its best to deter illegal file sharing: Santa Clara offers an open course on illegal downloading taught by the chief information officer and copyright law professor, university representatives speak to students and parents during orientation, and a student support staff encourages other alternatives to illegal downloading.

Still, section 494's potential penalties to ensure the profit of the entertainment industry at the expense of students seem harsh, said Danielson.

"Universities should not play as tools for the tyrants," said Richard Stallman, copyrights activist and peer-to-peer sharing advocate, in a symposium speech on campus last Thursday.

Stallman argued universities should not keep records of illegal file-sharing activity that would help the corporate interests of the entertainment industry.

For liability reasons, the university releases student information upon the receipt of subpoenas, court orders that demand the identification of students, said Fussell.

Preliminary to subpoenas, Digital Millennium Copyright Act notifications are notices of alleged copyright infringement that have been traced to a computer in the network.

These notifications also request that the university retain records to identify the violators and ask them to preserve the copyright infringing materials.

The university could be called into court to testify and would not deliberately destroy information related to a potential legal action, said Danielson.

The RIAA has issued 20 DMCA notes to Santa Clara students since the beginning of the academic year, a low number for an institution of this size, said Danielson. Still, he said he believes the entertainment industry appears to be unfairly targeting higher education institutions.

Some students said they think the bill could be effective.

"If I downloaded music I'd probably stop," said freshman Jake Echeverria. "I'm just not into music that much, I think, but I'm definitely into my FAFSA."

Others feel there are probably better methods of punishment.

"I don't think it's right to punish an entire group for the actions of a few," said freshman Dan Pursley. "You can target the few that are doing it and then let the RIAA deal with it. It seems like it's their fight, not the school's."

Yet to be debated by the House during the next couple of weeks, the bill has a long road ahead before becoming a tangible threat.

First it has to pass, then an institution may have to lose its financial aid and go to court before universities can be sure what exactly this legislation means, said Danielson.

Rather than anticipate the potential consequences, Stallman said he urges people to contact their representatives and express their disfavor before the entertainment industry's grip on democracy gets too tight.
http://media.www.thesantaclara.com/m...-3194209.shtml





Microsoft Misleads on Copyright Reform
Michael Geist

The Hill Times this week includes an astonishingly misleading and factually incorrect article on Canadian copyright written by Microsoft. The most egregious error comes in the following paragraph which attempts to demonstrate why Microsoft thinks reform is needed:

Imagine you're an aspiring author who decides to self-publish on the internet in hopes of supporting yourself and catching the eye of a publishing house. Now imagine someone hacks into your website and accesses your work and begins using the ideas expressed in your work for their own commercial benefit. You should be protected, right? In Canada, you are not.

Actually, you are protected.

Copyright law would clearly protect an author whose work was used without permission for commecial benefit. In fact, the infringer would face the prospect of significant statutory damages. But don't take my word for it. One year ago (almost to the day), Microsoft issued a press release trumpeting a win at the Federal Court that led to one of the highest statutory damages awards in Canadian copyright history - $500,000 in statutory damages and an additional $200,000 in punitive damages. Funnily enough, the company didn't argue that it wasn't protected in that case (update: note that if Microsoft is claiming that there is no protection for the ideas rather than the expression of the ideas, then this is correct, though it's true for all countries since copyright protects the expression, not the ideas themselves).

The column then continues with this gem:

If we take our self-publisher as an example - that person is looking for innovative distribution channels to share their work. If digital distribution methods are not protected, what incentive is there for that person to seek other, even more innovative ways to distribute and commercialize their creations?

Actually, there are lots of incentives. In fact, Microsoft just bid $44.6 billion for a company (Yahoo) that is one of the most vocal proponents of distributing music without such protections and owns Flickr (itself formerly a Canadian company), one of the most successful online photo sites where over two billion photos have been posted without protection.

Finally, the column concludes by acknowledging that:

Critics of the proposed law often raise concerns about how to provide for fair dealing. The existing Copyright Act already provides exceptions for research, study, the disabled, and more.

Yes it does. The problem with the laws that Microsoft is seeking is that those exceptions would be trumped by the combination of content that is locked down and the Prentice Canadian DMCA. But then Microsoft ought to know that, since it is the company selling the digital locks.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2670/125/





Yahoo May Consider Google Alliance, Source Says
Eric Auchard

Yahoo Inc would consider a business alliance with Google Inc as one way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft, a source familiar with Yahoo's strategy said on Sunday.

Yahoo management is considering revisiting talks it held with Google several months ago on an alliance as an alternative to Microsoft's bid, which, at $31 a share, Yahoo management believes undervalues the company, the source said.

A second source close to Yahoo said it had received a procession of preliminary contacts by media, technology, telephone and financial companies. But the source said they were unaware whether any alternative bid was in the offing.

Few natural bidders exist beside Google that could engage in a bidding war, and Google would be unlikely to win approval from antitrust regulators, some Wall Street analysts said on Friday.

Yahoo's efforts to find an alternative bidder could simply be a measure to pressure Microsoft to boost its bid, which valued Yahoo at $44.6 billion when first announced on Friday.

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay wrote in a research note that "the Microsoft bid of $31 is very astute" because it puts pressure on Yahoo management to take actions that could unlock the underlying value of Yahoo assets, which he estimates are worth upward of $39-$45 a share.

Separately, Google Inc fired back on Sunday at Microsoft Corp's bid to acquire Yahoo Inc, accusing Microsoft of seeking to extend its computer software monopoly deeper into the Internet realm.

David Drummond, a Google senior vice president and its chief legal officer, said in a blog post that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo could undermine competition on the Web and called on policy makers to challenge the combination.

Microsoft responded to Google's arguments by saying that a merger with Yahoo would create a "compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising" to market leader Google.

"The alternative scenarios only lead to less competition on the Internet," Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in a statement.

Drummond argued that Microsoft's power stems from decades- old monopolies in Windows -- the software operating system used to control most personal computers -- and Internet Explorer, which is the dominant browser consumers used to view the Web.

Microsoft's proposed merger with Yahoo would combine the No. 1 and No. 2 suppliers of Web-based e-mail, instant messaging (IM) and portals, which act as starting points for hundreds of millions of users seeking information on the Web.

The Google executive argued in an official blog post that Microsoft could be looking to favor Microsoft and Yahoo services by pushing customers to other Web services they own instead of letting customers elect to use rival services.

"Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and Web-based services?" Drummond said in a blog at googleblog.blogspot.com/.

In making its case for the deal during a conference call on Friday, Microsoft executives said Google -- not Microsoft -- was the one company antitrust regulators were likely to bar from buying Yahoo, based on Google's dominance in Web search.

Microsoft executives cited industry data showing Google has a 75 percent share of worldwide Web search revenue. Collectively, Yahoo and Microsoft attract around 20 percent of Web searches, Internet measurement firms show.

"Today, Google is the dominant search engine and advertising company on the Web," Smith said in replying to Google on Sunday. "Google has amassed about 75 percent of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow."

A person familiar with Google's thinking said the company believes Microsoft is using the same playbook it did in the 1990s to switch Windows users away from Web browser pioneer Netscape Communications to its own Internet Explorer.

"It is the same old story," the source said. (Additional reporting by Megan Davies in New York; Daisuke Wakabayshi in Seattle and David Lawsky in San Francisco; Editing by Diane Craft)
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...51550120080203





Yahoo Board to Spurn $44B Microsoft Bid
Michael Liedtke

Yahoo Inc.'s board has concluded Microsoft Corp.'s $44.6 billion takeover bid undervalues the slumping Internet pioneer and plans to reject the unsolicited offer, a person familiar with the situation said Saturday.

The decision, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on its Web site, could trigger a showdown involving two of the world's most prominent technology companies.

If it wants Yahoo badly enough, Microsoft could try to override Yahoo's board by taking its offer — originally valued at $31 per share — directly to the shareholders. If Microsoft pursued that risky route, it will likely have to nominate its slate of directors to supplant Yahoo's current 10-member board.

Alternatively, Microsoft could sweeten its bid. Many analysts believe Microsoft is prepared to offer as much as $35 per share for Yahoo, which still boasts one of the Internet's largest audiences and most powerful advertising vehicles despite a prolonged slump that has hammered its stock.

Yahoo's board reached the decision after exploring a wide variety of alternatives during the past week, according to the person who spoke to The Associated Press. The person didn't want to be identified because the reasons for Yahoo's rebuff won't be officially spelled out until Monday morning.

Microsoft and Yahoo declined to comment Saturday.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...rsNlQD8UMVPDO2





Facing Free Software, Microsoft Looks to Yahoo
Matt Richtel

Nearly a quarter-century ago, the mantra “information wants to be free” heralded an era in which news, entertainment and personal communications would flow at no charge over the Internet.

Now comes a new rallying cry: software wants to be free. Or, as the tech insiders say, it wants to be “zero dollar.”

A growing number of consumers are paying just that — nothing. This is the Internet’s latest phase: people using freely distributed applications, from e-mail and word processing programs to spreadsheets, games and financial management tools. They run on distant, massive and shared data centers, and users of the services pay with their attention to ads, not cash.

While such services have been emerging for years, their rapid adoption has been an important but largely overlooked driver of the $44.6 billion hostile bid that Microsoft made to take over Yahoo this week.

That proposed deal would give Microsoft access to Yahoo’s vast news, information, search and advertising network — and the ability to compete more squarely with Google.

But a merger would also allow Microsoft to adapt its empire to compete in a world of low-cost Internet-centered software.

Yahoo’s huge user base could provide the audience and the infrastructure for Microsoft to change how it distributes its products and charges for them.

“Microsoft makes its money selling licenses to millions and millions of people who install it on individual hard drives,” said Nicholas Carr, a former editor at The Harvard Business Review and author of “The Big Switch,” a book about the transition to what the technology industry calls cloud computing.

“Most of what you need is on the Internet — and it’s free,” he said. “There are early warning signs that the traditional Microsoft programs are losing their grip.”

Certainly, analysts said, Microsoft’s revenue — $51 billion last year, most of it from software — is not yet suffering in any meaningful way.

The company said, to the contrary, that business is booming, and that Microsoft Office, a flagship product, is having a record-breaking year.

“Last year was our best year, and this year is better,” said Chris Capossela, a Microsoft vice president with the Office division.

At the same time, though, the company has lowered prices. Last year it began selling its $120 student-teacher edition to mainstream consumers, who had been asked to pay more than $300 for a similar product.

The bulk of the company’s profit comes from selling to corporations, which unlike consumers may be slower to adapt to a system in which proprietary data is not stored in corporate-owned data centers.

Microsoft said that corporate customers prefer using software that they are familiar with and that provides more functions and better security.

But the corporate business, too, is coming under increasing assault from lower-cost Internet competitors, including Microsoft’s archnemesis, Google.

On Thursday, Google took its attack to a new level. It released Google Apps Team Edition — a version of its productivity software that includes word processing, spreadsheet and calendar programs. In a form of guerrilla marketing, the fans of Google Docs can take it into the office, bypassing or perhaps influencing decisions made by corporate executives, who until now have overwhelmingly bought Microsoft software.

Google, while it gives such software free to consumers, charges corporations for a premium edition, though the fee is less than what Microsoft charges for productivity software, analysts said.

The change is coming not from corporations but on the computers of a growing base of individuals who increasingly expect their software to be free — and for it to be processed and managed over the Internet.

Kevin Twohy, 20, a mathematics student at U.C.L.A., uses a free service on Facebook to store and share photos, a program called Picnik to edit the images, and Gmail.

For his English class last semester, he wrote a term paper about William Blake using Google’s free word processing software, even though Microsoft Office had come loaded on his personal computer.

The advantage of the Google program, he said, was that it allowed him to keep his information on Google’s servers so that it was accessible at any computer, whether he was working at his fraternity, a coffee shop, a campus computer bank or the library. The experience, he said, has persuaded him not to pay money for software.

“I don’t ever see myself buying a copy of Office,” he said.

Those individual users may be able to do what an army of lawyers and regulators in the United States and Europe have never been able to do — rein in Microsoft’s monopoly power. There is some evidence that the erosion in its pricing power has already begun.

Last fall, Microsoft lowered prices of its most powerful productivity software for students, whom it regards as important future customers. For a limited time, it said, students could buy a $60 downloadable version of its most feature-rich version of Office, which ordinarily costs around $460.

Microsoft has also had ad-supported online competitors who have challenged other prominent brands, like the Encarta encyclopedia and Microsoft Money, personal finance management software.

“If Microsoft had to start over today, it wouldn’t even think about charging money for its software,” said Yun Kim, an industry analyst with Pacific Growth Equities. “Nobody in their right mind is developing a business in the consumer market to charge” for software.

Mr. Kim said that he expected Microsoft at some point to introduce a free ad-supported version of Office for consumers, though the company insists that it has no such intention.

Mr. Kim, however, expects that Microsoft’s corporate business is more entrenched and resilient, and less susceptible to the influences of free or ad-supported cloud computing.

Microsoft’s online competitors disagree. Among them is Zimbra, a division of Yahoo that offers Internet-centered productivity software for e-mail, word processing and spreadsheets.

Consumers pay nothing for the product, but corporations pay as much as $50 a year per license. About 20,000 companies, most of them small, are paying customers.

For Office software, Microsoft charges $75 a year per license to large companies, and up to $300 for small companies, according to Forrester Research.

Satish Dharmaraj, general manager of Zimbra, said the company could undercut Microsoft because it costs far less to create, maintain, fix and upgrade software that runs in a central data center instead of on thousands of individual computers.

But the relative quality of Microsoft’s software continues to attract customers, argued J. P. Gownder, an industry analyst with Forrester Research.

He said that Microsoft has an opportunity to develop a hybrid version of its software that combines the convenience of cloud computing with the security of processing on the desktop, thus helping it maintain and further its empire.

“This is the predominant reason why Microsoft has gone after Yahoo,” Mr. Gownder said. “The ad revenue is a nice short-term achievement, but in the long run it is much more about delivering apps over the Web.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/09/te...hp&oref=slogin





Firefox Vulnerable By Default
Don't blame the extension developers this time

You probably thought otherwise after they just released version 2.0.0.12. a couple of hours ago, that had a fix for numerous other vulnerabilities. But guess what? we are going to see 2.0.0.13 pretty soon I guess. I snared at Mozilla before: don't patch vulnerabilities for fifty percent, take the time and fix the cause. Because directory traversal through plugins is all nice and such, we don't need it. We can trick Firefox itself in traversing directories back. I found another information leak that is very serious because we are able to read out all preferences set in Firefox, or just open or include about every file stored in the Mozilla program files directory, and this without any mandatory settings or plugins.

In the vulnerability we make use of the 'view-source:' scheme that allows us to source out the 'resource:' scheme. With it, we can view the source of any file located in the 'resource:///' directory, which translates back to: file:///C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/. Then we only include the file inside it and it becomes available to a new page's DOM, and so we are able to read all settings.

Other issues can emerge also, this is only a short-hand proof of concept. Like always, more is possible. While chatting with Gareth Heyes, I came up with the vector in a couple of minutes. We talked about more issues which we probably are going to discuss very soon. That's right, back to the drawing board with this one. In the mean time you can either use another browser, or install the NoScript plugin to mitigate these issues. The NoScript plugin can be found here.

Code:
<script>



/*

 @name: Firefox <= 2.0.0.12 information leak pOc

 @date: Feb. 07 2008

 @author: Ronald van den Heetkamp

 @url: http://www.0x000000.com

*/



pref = function(a,b) {



   document.write( a + ' -> ' + b + '<br />');



};



</script>



<script src="view-source:resource:///greprefs/all.js"></script>
http://www.0x000000.com/index.php?i=515





U.S. Agents Seize Travelers' Devices

Clarity sought on electronics searches
Ellen Nakashima

Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter's calls had been erased.

A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. "This laptop doesn't belong to me," he remembers protesting. "It belongs to my company." Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself.

Maria Udy, a marketing executive with a global travel management firm in Bethesda, said her company laptop was seized by a federal agent as she was flying from Dulles International Airport to London in December 2006. Udy, a British citizen, said the agent told her he had "a security concern" with her. "I was basically given the option of handing over my laptop or not getting on that flight," she said.

The seizure of electronics at U.S. borders has prompted protests from travelers who say they now weigh the risk of traveling with sensitive or personal information on their laptops, cameras or cellphones. In some cases, companies have altered their policies to require employees to safeguard corporate secrets by clearing laptop hard drives before international travel.

Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Asian Law Caucus, two civil liberties groups in San Francisco, plan to file a lawsuit to force the government to disclose its policies on border searches, including which rules govern the seizing and copying of the contents of electronic devices. They also want to know the boundaries for asking travelers about their political views, religious practices and other activities potentially protected by the First Amendment. The question of whether border agents have a right to search electronic devices at all without suspicion of a crime is already under review in the federal courts.

The lawsuit was inspired by two dozen cases, 15 of which involved searches of cellphones, laptops, MP3 players and other electronics. Almost all involved travelers of Muslim, Middle Eastern or South Asian background, many of whom, including Mango and the tech engineer, said they are concerned they were singled out because of racial or religious profiling.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman, Lynn Hollinger, said officers do not engage in racial profiling "in any way, shape or form." She said that "it is not CBP's intent to subject travelers to unwarranted scrutiny" and that a laptop may be seized if it contains information possibly tied to terrorism, narcotics smuggling, child pornography or other criminal activity.

The reason for a search is not always made clear. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives, which represents 2,500 business executives in the United States and abroad, said it has tracked complaints from several members, including Udy, whose laptops have been seized and their contents copied before usually being returned days later, said Susan Gurley, executive director of ACTE. Gurley said none of the travelers who have complained to the ACTE raised concerns about racial or ethnic profiling. Gurley said none of the travelers were charged with a crime.

"I was assured that my laptop would be given back to me in 10 or 15 days," said Udy, who continues to fly into and out of the United States. She said the federal agent copied her log-on and password, and asked her to show him a recent document and how she gains access to Microsoft Word. She was asked to pull up her e-mail but could not because of lack of Internet access. With ACTE's help, she pressed for relief. More than a year later, Udy has received neither her laptop nor an explanation.

ACTE last year filed a Freedom of Information Act request to press the government for information on what happens to data seized from laptops and other electronic devices. "Is it destroyed right then and there if the person is in fact just a regular business traveler?" Gurley asked. "People are quite concerned. They don't want proprietary business information floating, not knowing where it has landed or where it is going. It increases the anxiety level."

Udy has changed all her work passwords and no longer banks online. Her company, Radius, has tightened its data policies so that traveling employees must access company information remotely via an encrypted channel, and their laptops must contain no company information.

At least two major global corporations, one American and one Dutch, have told their executives not to carry confidential business material on laptops on overseas trips, Gurley said. In Canada, one law firm has instructed its lawyers to travel to the United States with "blank laptops" whose hard drives contain no data. "We just access our information through the Internet," said Lou Brzezinski, a partner at Blaney McMurtry, a major Toronto law firm. That approach also holds risks, but "those are hacking risks as opposed to search risks," he said.

The U.S. government has argued in a pending court case that its authority to protect the country's border extends to looking at information stored in electronic devices such as laptops without any suspicion of a crime. In border searches, it regards a laptop the same as a suitcase.

"It should not matter . . . whether documents and pictures are kept in 'hard copy' form in an executive's briefcase or stored digitally in a computer. The authority of customs officials to search the former should extend equally to searches of the latter," the government argued in the child pornography case being heard by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.

As more and more people travel with laptops, BlackBerrys and cellphones, the government's laptop-equals-suitcase position is raising red flags.

"It's one thing to say it's reasonable for government agents to open your luggage," said David D. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University. "It's another thing to say it's reasonable for them to read your mind and everything you have thought over the last year. What a laptop records is as personal as a diary but much more extensive. It records every Web site you have searched. Every e-mail you have sent. It's as if you're crossing the border with your home in your suitcase."

If the government's position on searches of electronic files is upheld, new risks will confront anyone who crosses the border with a laptop or other device, said Mark Rasch, a technology security expert with FTI Consulting and a former federal prosecutor. "Your kid can be arrested because they can't prove the songs they downloaded to their iPod were legally downloaded," he said. "Lawyers run the risk of exposing sensitive information about their client. Trade secrets can be exposed to customs agents with no limit on what they can do with it. Journalists can expose sources, all because they have the audacity to cross an invisible line."

Hollinger said customs officers "are trained to protect confidential information."

Shirin Sinnar, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, said that by scrutinizing the Web sites people search and the phone numbers they've stored on their cellphones, "the government is going well beyond its traditional role of looking for contraband and really is looking into the content of people's thoughts and ideas and their lawful political activities."

If conducted inside the country, such searches would require a warrant and probable cause, legal experts said.

Customs sometimes singles out passengers for extensive questioning and searches based on "information from various systems and specific techniques for selecting passengers," including the Interagency Border Inspection System, according to a statement on the CBP Web site. "CBP officers may, unfortunately, inconvenience law-abiding citizens in order to detect those involved in illicit activities," the statement said. But the factors agents use to single out passengers are not transparent, and travelers generally have little access to the data to see whether there are errors.

Although Customs said it does not profile by race or ethnicity, an officers' training guide states that "it is permissible and indeed advisable to consider an individual's connections to countries that are associated with significant terrorist activity."

"What's the difference between that and targeting people because they are Arab or Muslim?" Cole said, noting that the countries the government focuses on are generally predominantly Arab or Muslim.

It is the lack of clarity about the rules that has confounded travelers and raised concerns from groups such as the Asian Law Caucus, which said that as a result, their lawyers cannot fully advise people how they may exercise their rights during a border search. The lawsuit says a Freedom of Information Act request was filed with Customs last fall but that no information has been received.

Kamran Habib, a software engineer with Cisco Systems, has had his laptop and cellphone searched three times in the past year. Once, in San Francisco, an officer "went through every number and text message on my cellphone and took out my SIM card in the back," said Habib, a permanent U.S. resident. "So now, every time I travel, I basically clean out my phone. It's better for me to keep my colleagues and friends safe than to get them on the list as well."

Udy's company, Radius, organizes business trips for 100,000 travelers a day, from companies around the world. She says her firm supports strong security measures. "Where we get angry is when we don't know what they're for."

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020604763.html





Danish Police Befuddled by 1G iMac
John Martellaro

An open wireless network led to a Danish police investigation of a stolen credit card. The police wanted to confiscate the author's computer. When the author's roommate agreed to also let the police look at her first generation iMac, they were frustrated because they thought the iMac was just the screen. They wanted to know where the actual computer was and got rather heated about finding it, according to the author of Rottin' in Denmark.

The police were equally confused when the poor fellow tried to explain that even though his personal computer was only two weeks old, he was reading his Web e-mail from November, trying to figure out where he was on the dreaded "night of the 15th."

Even worse, however, was this tragic dialog with the police.

• 'We have your roommate's permission to confiscate her computer,' the Ichabod Crane one said.
• 'Whatever,' I said. They had already assured me that we would get our laptops back that afternoon, so I figured the damage had already been done. Ichabod started rooting around under her desk.
• 'Where's the computer?' he said.
• 'On the desk. That's the computer,' I said.
• 'No, the computer.'
• 'That's the computer, dude.'
• 'That's the screen.' He had lapsed into the voice you use when you explain to your 6-year-old cousin how the toaster works. 'I mean the compuuuuuter. Understand?'
• 'Dude. That's the whole computer. Right there. The blue object the size of an armadillo.'
• 'No. Where the daaaaata goes. The computer part.'
• 'That is the computer. For Hell!' Danish swear words aren't as satisfying.
• 'So that's the entire computer, right there?'
• II was standing there with a look on my face like I was watching a dog walk on its hind legs.
• 'New technology, huh?' he said.
• I blew the dust off the keyboard and handed it to him. 'Do you mind if I check your badge again?'

The police were also very confused about how a neighbor could log onto their open, wireless network. "The internet doesn't work that way," was the officer's response.
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2008/02/06.8.shtml





Watchdogs are Wary of New Licences

Could they be mere step away from ID cards?
Lindsay Kines

"Enhanced" driver's licences such as those to be issued in B.C. will lay the groundwork for a national identity card, federal privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said yesterday.

Stoddart said the licences, touted as an alternative to a passport for the purpose of crossing the U.S. border, closely resemble the Read ID program in the United States. She characterized that program as a way of introducing a "type of national identity card" for Americans.

"This may be an attempt to encourage us to harmonize with them," she said.

Privacy commissioners across the country oppose a national identity card.

"We think it's unnecessary," she said. "We think it's intrusive, and we think it's a route that Canadians don't need to follow.

"So this is very worrisome to us as a possible model."

Stoddart made the comments as B.C. privacy commissioner David Loukidelis welcomed fellow commissioners from across the country to Victoria to raise concerns about the privacy and security of enhanced drivers' licences.

B.C. began offering the licences to a select group of 500 residents last month to ease border crossings into the U.S. by land or sea. A passport is required for air travel.

The enhanced licences contain a radio frequency identification chip with a "unique identifier" that can be read from 10 metres away. It's that identifier that worries commissioners, since it could form the basis for a national identity card and allow governments to track people's movements.

B.C. Minister of State for Intergovernmental Relations John van Dongen rejected that concern, saying the drivers' licences are being issued for the sole purpose of speeding border crossings.

The information on the licence will be much the same as on a regular licence, and will not include a person's driving or criminal record.

More worrisome for the watchdogs is that the database, at least initially, will likely be in U.S. hands where it could be lost, subject to "inappropriate browsing" or used for unintended purposes.

The commissioners said that no program should proceed on a permanent basis unless the database remains in Canada.

Loukidelis noted that Canada doesn't let its passport database be seen by foreigners.

"And we don't see why there would be any need to do anything differently when it comes to enhanced drivers' licences," he said.

"I think that we have to think long and hard before we get into that kind of approach. Generally speaking, if data leaves the country then privacy rules don't follow."
http://www.canada.com/theprovince/ne...adfd14&k=77025





Great Firewall of China Faces Online Rebels
Howard W. French

As an 18-year-old student with an interest in the Internet, Zhu Nan had been itching to say something about the country’s pervasive online censorship system, widely known here as the Great Firewall.

When China’s censors began blocking access to the popular photo-sharing site Flickr, Mr. Zhu felt the moment had come. Writing on his blog last year, the student, who is now a freshman at a university in this city, questioned the rationale for Internet restrictions, and in subsequent posts, began passing along tips on how to evade them.

“Officials in our country claimed that Internet censorship is done according to the law,” Mr. Zhu wrote. “If so, why not let people know about this legal project, and why, instead, ban the Web sites that publicize and examine those legal policies? If you’re determined to do this, you shouldn’t be afraid of criticism.”

Mr. Zhu’s obscure blog post and his subsequent activism is a small part of what many here regard as a watershed moment. In recent months, China’s censors have tightened controls over the Internet, often blacking out sites that had no discernible political content. In the process, they have fostered a backlash, as many people who previously had little interest in politics have become active in resisting the controls.

And all of it comes at a time of increasing risk for those who choose to protest. Human rights advocates say the government has been broadening its crackdown on any signs of dissent as the Olympic Games in Beijing draw near.

For a vast majority of Internet users, censorship still does not appear to be much of a factor. The most popular Web applications here are games and messaging services, and the most visited Internet sites focus on everyday subjects like entertainment news and sports. Many, in fact, seem only vaguely aware that China’s Internet universe is carefully pruned, and even among those who know, a majority hardly seems to care.

But growing numbers of others are becoming increasingly resentful of restrictions on a wide range of Web sites, including Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace (sometimes), Blogspot and many other sites that the public sees as sources of harmless diversion or information. The mounting resentment has inspired a wave of increasingly determined social resistance of a kind that is uncommon in China.

This resistance is taking many forms, from lawsuits by Internet users against government-owned service providers, claiming that the blocking of sites is illegal, to a growing network of software writers who develop code aimed at overcoming the restrictions. An Internet-based word-of-mouth campaign has taken shape, in which bloggers and Web page owners post articles to spread awareness of the Great Firewall, or share links to programs that will help evade it.

In almost every instance, the resistance has been fired by the surprise and indignation when people bumped up against a system that they had only vaguely suspected existed. “I had had an impression that some kind of mechanism controls the Internet in China, but I had no idea about the Great Firewall,” said Pan Liang, a writer of children’s literature and a Web site operator who first learned the extent of the controls after a friend’s blog was blocked. “I was really annoyed at first,” Mr. Pan said. “Then the 17th Party Congress came, and I received an order that my Web site, which is about children’s literature, had to close its message board. It made me even angrier.”

Like others, Mr. Pan used his Web page to post solutions for overcoming the restrictions to some banned sites, and then he used a historical allusion to mock his country’s censorship system.

“Many people don’t know that 300 years after Emperor Kangxi ordered an end to construction of the Great Wall, our great republic has built an invisible great wall,” he wrote. “Can blocking really work? Kangxi knew the Great Wall was a huge lie: just think how many soldiers are needed to guard those thousands of miles.”

A 17-year-old blogger from Guangdong Province who posted instructions on how to get to YouTube, overcoming the firewall’s restrictions, was no less philosophical. “I don’t know if it’s better to speak out or keep silent, but if everyone keeps silent, the truth will be buried,” wrote the girl, who uses the online name Ruyue. “I don’t want to be silent, even if everyone else shuts up.”

The Chinese government seems particularly wary of video-sharing sites like YouTube, and has recently tightened regulations on domestic Internet providers in ways that are aimed at controlling such services.

Others, meanwhile, have gone beyond launching Internet-based responses like these and taken more direct action. One such person is Du Dongjing, 38, an information technology engineer in Shanghai who sued a branch of China Telecom for contract violation because of the service provider’s unacknowledged restrictions on Web content.

In this case what initially angered Mr. Du was the surprise blocking of his own business Web site last February. The site markets personal finance software, and had no editorial content of any kind. When the service provider failed to explain why the link went dead, Mr. Du took the phone company to court.

His lawsuit was rejected by a Shanghai court in October, but the case has been heard in appeal. “The Americans have an expression, ‘You can’t fight City Hall,’ ” Mr. Du said. “However, I believe that with the help of today’s Internet, the mood of the public, I can win this case. I can even make a contribution to improving Chinese democracy.”

Even as anticensorship activism spreads, views are divided about whether a grass-roots campaign can prevail. Some see strong continued popular resistance to the limits imposed by tens of thousands of well-financed government technicians operating powerful computers and predict a breakthrough.

Yuan Mingli, who created an anti-Great Firewall evasion group because of his love for Wikipedia, said the government was already at work on new generations of Internet technology aimed at insulating Chinese users even more from the rest of world. But he predicted its failure. “That’s impossible, fundamentally, because people’s hearts have changed,” he said, adding that the system would “eventually break down precisely because China cannot be completely disconnected to the outside world anymore.”

For some of the anticensorship activists, creating a broader awareness of censorship is itself a victory. “If you don’t know what’s on top of you, than you won’t fight back against it,” said Li Xieheng, a blogger who wrote a program he named Gladder, meaning Great Ladder, to help users of the Firefox browser overcome Great Firewall restrictions. “It’s just like many people not feeling that China isn’t free. They’re not aware of it and feel things are natural here, but that’s just the power of media control.”

Mr. Li said he expected the Great Firewall to continue adapting to the tactics of its opponents. The movement, though, has proved the power of public opinion as an important limitation of the censor’s power, he said. “Why don’t they just take Google down?” he asked. “It’s because they don’t want to have a scene and have everybody know. A lot of people came to know about the system because of Flickr, and that is something the system needs to weigh.”

Fan Wenxin contributed reporting from Shanghai.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/wo...4china.html?hp





Iran is Not Disconnected!

We have gotten a few queries about why we did not highlight Iran in our review of the network outages that resulted from the cable breaks. Like most countries in the region, the outages in Iran were very significant, but for the most part they did not exceed 20% of their total number of networks. Now 20% is a significant loss, but in the context of an event where countries lost almost all of their connectivity, such a loss did not place Iran into the top 10 of impacted countries. So we focused most of our attention where the losses where the highest.

But then there was this Slashdot posting, claiming Iran had zero connectivity. This was news to us. It's said that "the first casualty of war is truth." Something similar can probably be said with regard to catastrophic failures. Truth might not be first, but it is a very close second. Journalists are pushed to meet deadlines for stories about topics for which they have little familiarity, and technical experts sometimes jump to conclusions on the basis of little evidence. It's not hard to see why the truth gets distorted; it's hard to think clearly when you believe the sky is falling.

The Slashdot claim was made since a web page at the Internet Traffic Report was reporting that the country was down. This report seems to be based on pings to a single router in Iran from multiple places around the world, which at best only indicates that one router in Iran is unavailable, not that the entire Internet has ceased to function there. Of course, once something ends up "in print", it tends to gain credibility and then be referenced by others. And before long, large numbers of people think it is actually true. (For a detailed ping analysis to the region during the outage, see this article.)

To understand what happened in Iran after the fiber cuts, we looked at actual routing data for the country, collected from around the globe. You can say with absolute certainty that if a provider does not have a route to any network in Iran, then no traffic will flow from that provider or its customers to Iran. But that is all you can say. The problem could be with the provider. That is why Renesys collects routes from a carefully selected set of peers around the world. If none of them know how to get to Iran, then you can be assured that Iran is truly off the air. Note that you have to be careful here with your selection of peers. If all of them end up traversing the same cable to get to Iran, even when other options exist, then the problem could be only with that cable and nothing more. To make a definitive statement about the worldwide reachability of any geography, you need to collect data from a diverse and at least somewhat independent set of peers so that you'll see all paths into the area. When the overwhelming majority of them have the same view of a situation, then you can conclude that the view is almost certainly correct for the entire world.

So back to Iran. In the following graph, we plotted the availability of Iranian networks for four entire days, 30 January 00:00 UTC until 3 February 00:00 UTC. The first day is the day of the cable cuts. Of the 695 networks that geo-locate to Iran, at no time were more than 199 unavailable, as observed by large number of Renesys peers. A few peers here and there might not have been able to reach Iran for local reasons, but the vast majority of the world could get to most of the networks in Iran for this entire time period. Note also that around 64 networks were unavailable before the event even started. These networks could be simply unused at this time. In other words, at most 135 networks that were active before the cable cuts disappeared for at least a short while during the outages.

So much for Iran being off the Internet. Again, this is not to imply that Iran was not impacted by this event. A lot of networks were unavailable and some of them continue to be so. The end users of those networks are certainly noticing the problem and everyone in the country might be experiencing a slowdown due to the decrease in bandwidth to the region. Still, Iran fared much better than most.
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/...sconne_1.shtml





Online Petition Asks Wikipedia to Remove Pictures of Muhammad
Noam Cohen

An article about the Prophet Muhammad in the English-language Wikipedia has become the subject of an online protest in the last few weeks because of its representations of Muhammad, taken from medieval manuscripts.

In addition to numerous e-mail messages sent to Wikipedia.org, an online petition cites a prohibition in Islam on images of people. The petition has more than 80,000 "signatures," though many who submitted them to ThePetitionSite.com remained anonymous.

"We have been noticing a lot more similar sounding, similar looking e-mails beginning mid-January," said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.

A Frequently Asked Questions page explains the site's polite but firm refusal to remove the images: "Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group."

The notes left on the petition site come from all over the world.

"It's totally unacceptable to print the prophet's picture," Saadia Bukhari from Pakistan wrote in a message. "It shows insensitivity towards Muslim feelings and should be removed immediately."

Paul Cobb, who teaches Islamic history at the University of Notre Dame in Indian, said, "Islamic teaching has traditionally discouraged representation of humans, particularly Muhammad, but that doesn't mean it's nonexistent." He added, "Some of the most beautiful images in Islamic art are manuscript images of Muhammad."

The idea of imposing a ban on all depictions of people, particularly Muhammad, dates to the 20th century, he said. With the Wikipedia entry, he added, "what you are dealing with is not medieval illustrations, you are dealing with modern media and getting a modern response."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/...ology/wiki.php





All Forgiven, WIMUS-AM Is on a Roll
Jacques Steinberg

IN the two months since his microphone was turned back on, Don Imus has hardly suffered for company.

Politicians like John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman and Bill Richardson have called him on the air to welcome him back and take his questions, as have Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and John McCain, who happily accepted Mr. Imus’s presidential endorsement.

Newsmen like Tim Russert, Bob Schieffer and George Stephanopoulos have submitted to interviews, too, along with the authors Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the columnists Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman and Frank Rich of The New York Times.

Each appeared with some regularity before Mr. Imus was fired in April over the racially and sexually disparaging remarks that he and a producer made about the Rutgers women’s college basketball team. And each has followed him to his new radio flagship (WABC-AM in New York) and to RFD-TV, the up-and-coming, rural-oriented television channel now simulcasting his program in place of MSNBC.

The immediate imprimatur of such A-list guests is but one indication that Mr. Imus has emerged, seemingly clean and in many ways whole, from a wash cycle administered with breathtaking velocity both inside the Beltway and out. (One notable exception: he has yet to find a radio affiliate in Washington, D.C., where his show was once regarded as a virtual salon.) While it will be some time before Arbitron has calibrated how many listeners he has on the nearly 50 stations that do carry his show, many advertisers have seen little reason to wait. Bigelow Teas, Accountemps, NetJets, the Mohegan Sun casino, various car makers and a big New Jersey hospital are peddling their wares during his commercial breaks, at least in New York, just as they did before.

Last week, the nation’s largest cable system, Comcast, reached a deal with RFD, which is mostly seen outside big cities, that could result in the channel’s addition to systems in Washington, Boston, Philadelphia and Nashville, among others. Time Warner is discussing a similar deal that could return Mr. Imus to its cable systems in New York and Los Angeles.

That Mr. Imus has moved with relative ease from transgression to redemption is — to some — a reflection of the country’s collective attention span, which these days can be measured by the time it takes to watch a video on YouTube (where tens of thousands heard his ill-fated remarks last spring) or to scan a blog item on the gossip site Defamer.com.

“Yesterday it was Heath Ledger,” Martin Kaplan, a media professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, said last week. “Today it’s Britney Spears and Natalee Holloway again. There’s a lot of competition for the shelf space of national outrage.”

To Mr. Schieffer, who has chronicled scandal in Washington for 40 years, “it seems like in this age of instant communication, they fall faster and they rise faster.”

“IT used to be, before the Internet, it took a while for this stuff to get around,” Mr. Schieffer added. “Now it goes around in a nanosecond. Maybe what we’re seeing is that it’s possible to come back just as quickly.”

Perhaps. But in his return, Mr. Imus has also benefited from the extraordinary goodwill he has banked over the years by helping countless politicians to scrounge for votes, journalists (including Mr. Schieffer) to attract viewers or readers, and authors to sell books.

“His voice reaches all the right people, be they politicians or business associates,” said Jerry Della Femina, the legendary ad man, who arranged for one client, the Hackensack University Medical Center, to have the first commercial on Mr. Imus’s comeback show, followed shortly thereafter, by another client, the New York-Long Island Honda dealers. “He’s got a great audience, a very wealthy audience.”

Mr. Beschloss, who has had four books showcased on the Imus program over the last 10 years, was asked if, in deciding to go back on the show, he had felt any sense of indebtedness. “That’s just human nature,” he said. “Of course I do.”

But he also said he had been moved by Mr. Imus’s apologies in the days before his firing and his meeting with (and subsequent forgiveness by) the Rutgers team.

“The speed of this,” he said, “is really a response to the magnitude of the apology and the magnitude of the acceptance by the people who were offended.”

Which is not to say that everyone has been so quick to absolve Mr. Imus.

Five journalists from Newsweek who were once among Mr. Imus’s most frequent guests — including Jon Meacham, the editor — are continuing, for now, to abide by a policy the magazine adopted following his comments last spring: they are not appearing on the show. (For his part, Mr. Imus has not asked.) Also yet to return is former Representative Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee, who is black and who Mr. Imus had supported in his unsuccessful bid for the United States Senate in 2006. Mr. Ford did not return several messages left for him last week.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, said he viewed the fast track of Mr. Imus’s return as a sign of how “cash and marketplace trump race.”

“I’m troubled by the cynicism,” said Mr. Gates, who has never been an Imus guest. “Basically Imus has had a sabbatical. His remarks were the racist remarks of the month. Now it’s as if everyone has forgotten. Perhaps he has learned from his mistake.”

But Mr. Gates said that the responsibility for Mr. Imus’s rebound lay not just with the elites of white America, but with those in the black community who led the charge for his firing.

“People like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were so vocal, and so triumphant in their moral victory,” he said. “Where are they now?”

Mr. Jackson did not immediately return a message left at his press office Friday. But Mr. Sharpton, who had pledged to monitor Mr. Imus’s broadcasts, said that the host “has not been offensive” in his latest incarnation.

“He came out on his first day back and said he should have been fired, which clearly validated everything we’d been saying,” Mr. Sharpton said. “We were affirming the girls and black women. We were not trying to destroy Imus. I hope he does well.”

Still, Michael Eric Dyson, a university professor in the sociology department at Georgetown University who has never been an Imus guest, lamented that the sting of the words uttered that day by Mr. Imus and his producer, Bernard McGuirk, had already begun to fade. After Mr. Imus referred to the Rutgers team as “nappy-headed hos,” Mr. McGuirk used another racial slur (and a reference from the Spike Lee movie “School Daze”) to contrast the skin tone of many of the Rutgers players to that of their opponents from the University of Tennessee.

“And nappy was a stand-in for black female ugliness,” said Mr. Dyson, who is black and the author of “Know What I Mean?” a meditation on hip-hop. “That’s what Imus was getting at.”

In light of the offensiveness of those remarks, Mr. Dyson said he wished Mr. Imus’s guests had waited a bit longer before traipsing back.

“You mess up in a marriage and you step out on your spouse, you can’t just pretend in the first month or two that it’s all good,” he said. “You need a year. The rush to redemption has been a bit speedy, and therefore a bit cheap.”

That said, Mr. Dyson said that he did not oppose the host’s return. “I’m for second chances,” he said. “I’d much rather see a guy like Imus remain on the air” to “try to make amends and change the tenor of the discourse.”

In many ways, the show Mr. Imus is now putting on is not all that different than the one before. He continues to disparage Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as “Satan” “the Devil” and “evil” (including last week in an interview with Senator Kerry, who endorsed her rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Barack Obama). Also back is Rob Bartlett, an impressionist who variously appears as a randy Bill Clinton, or as Don Corleone bemoaning Florida’s rejection of Mr. Giuliani. (Mr. Bartlett’s godfather immediately called for a summit with the heads of several Florida “families,” including those led by “Don” Shula and “Don” Duck.)

But to regular listeners, it is clear that Mr. Imus and Mr. McGuirk, who is still heard often, are holding their tongues. Gone are Mr. McGuirk’s most offensive characters, including a homophobic “Cardinal Egan,” and a caricature of C. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, seemingly reimagined as Stepin Fetchit.

Mr. Imus has also been true to his pledge to engage two new black cast members on matters of race. He did so on Mr. Obama’s being asked, at a CNN debate in South Carolina, if he considered Mr. Clinton “the first black president,” as Toni Morrison has suggested. Mr. Imus said he felt the question was condescending and patronizing to Mr. Obama.

Last week, Mr. Imus welcomed one of his favorite gospel groups, the Blind Boys of Alabama, who’d been on the old show several times. This time, though, one of the songs they performed took on new meaning in light of his experience the last nine months.

It was a Negro spiritual, “Free at Last.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/we...steinberg.html





California Court Bars Unmasking of Web Critic

A California appeals court on Wednesday said an anonymous Internet poster does not have to reveal his identity after being sued for making "scathing verbal attacks" against executives at a Florida company on a Yahoo! Inc message board.

The Sixth Appellate District in Santa Clara County reversed a trial court ruling that would have allowed a former executive at SFBC International Inc to subpoena Yahoo! for the names of her critics.

The appeal was filed by a poster whose screen name includes a Spanish expletive but who is known as "Doe 6" in the lawsuit filed by former SFBC Chairman and COO Lisa Krinsky in 2006.

Krinsky accuses Doe 6 and nine other Yahoo! Finance posters of libel, fraud and other claims arising from posts they made about her while she was a company officer.

The appellate court concluded that while Doe 6's messages were "unquestionably offensive and demeaning," they could not be counted as defamation since they could not be considered assertions of fact.

Without a cause of action, Krinsky could not overcome Doe 6's First Amendment right to speak anonymously on the Internet, the court said.

The decade-old controversy over pseudonymous posting in invest or chat rooms took a major twist last July when the U.S. regulators revealed that Whole Foods Market Inc CEO John Mackey had been posting in Yahoo! Finance under a fake name for several years.
His messages boosted his own company's strategy and denigrated those of rival supermarket chain Wild Oats, which Whole Foods later sought to acquire.

(Reporting by Gina Keating; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...61392320080206





MediaSentry Role in RIAA Lawsuit Comes Under Scrutiny
Eric Bangeman

A key component of all of the RIAA's lawsuits against suspected file-sharers is supplied by MediaSentry, the company that goes hunting for targets on KaZaA and other P2P networks. MediaSentry's role in the RIAA's cases is coming under new scrutiny in Lava v. Amurao, with the defendant's attorney arguing that the testimony from the company be excluded on the grounds that Media Sentry is operating as a private investigator without the license that is required by New York state law.

MediaSentry has acted as the RIAA's investigative arm throughout the music industry's legal campaign against file-sharers. The exhibits attached to the RIAA's complaints invariably contain screenshots of KaZaA users' share folders as well as a list of the 20 to 30 songs downloaded by MediaSentry in their entirety.

In Lava v. Amurao, defendant's attorney Richard A. Altman is arguing that MediaSentry's testimony should be barred. Calling the firm "plaintiffs' private investigator," Altman argues that the company's activities violate New York State law. As a result, "no testimony or evidence gathered in the course of their investigation should be admissible."

Under section 70 of the New York General Business Law, all private investigators need to first be licensed by the state before conducting business. Altman uses section 71 of the same law to argue that MediaSentry is indeed a private investigator under the laws of New York. "The company clearly falls within the definition, in that its primary function is "the securing of evidence to be used in the trial of a civil... case," argues Altman.

MediaSentry's findings are key to all of the RIAA's cases, and the company's director of enforcement, Mark Weaver, testified during the Jammie Thomas trial last fall. Weaver explained to the jury how KaZaA works, how MediaSentry obtains its evidence, and how some of the music in tereastarr@KaZaA's shared folder was itself likely downloaded over P2P networks.

Without MediaSentry's testimony and exhibits, the RIAA would have very little left to build a case on, a fact that Altman is banking on in his filing. It appears, however, that the judge may not ever rule on the motion, as the RIAA has filed a motion to dismiss the case with prejudice. Rolando Amurao, the defendant and person responsible for the ISP account in question, apparently has no idea how to use a P2P program, and the RIAA accuses his adult daughter, Audrey Amurao, of copyright infringement in the motion for dismissal.

Should the Audrey be sued by the RIAA and decide not to settle, the question of whether MediaSentry needs a PI license (the company says that it does not) is certain to arise once again. It's a question that has been raised by a handful of other file-sharing defendants that we're aware of, including Tanya Andersen, who had the case against her voluntarily dismissed by the RIAA and currently has a malicious prosecution lawsuit against the record labels pending. If a judge were to rule that MediaSentry is indeed a private investigator operating without a license, it would be a major blow to the RIAA.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-scrutiny.html





Pirate Bay Says It Can't Be Sunk, Servers Scattered Worldwide
David Kravets

The world's most notorious BitTorrent tracking site, The Pirate Bay, won't be going to Davy Jones' Locker, even if its four operators are convicted of facilitating copyright infringement, one of the defendants said in an interview Friday with THREAT LEVEL.

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of the four Swedes charged in Sweden on Thursday, said in a telephone interview that the site has set up a clandestine, double-blind operation with its servers spread throughout the world -- and out of reach of the Swedish authorities.

"The Pirate Bay is not in Sweden," the 29-year-old Kolmisoppi said.

Where are the servers?

"It's a distributed system. We don't know where the servers are. We gave them to people we trust and they don't know it's The Pirate Bay," Kolmisoppi said. "They then rent locations and space for them somewhere else. It could be three countries. It could be six countries. We don't want to know because then you'll have a problem shutting them down."

The Pirate Bay allows users to search for and access indexed torrents, which contain the information needed to download data containing copyright-infringing content like movies, music, software and other material from users of the service. The Bay, he said, operates like the search engine Google, which also points the way to copyrighted works on the internet.

"We're just a general-purpose search engine and torrent-tracking system. You can put whatever you want on the Pirate Bay," Kolmisoppi said. "We don't participate in how the people communicate with each other. We only participate in bringing the possibility to communicate and share files."

The Bay has been on the entertainment industry's and police authorities' watchlists for years.

In June, 2006, a police raid shuttered it for three days after the authorities confiscated its servers, which were later moved. The raid sparked street protests in Sweden, and garnered the site an international presence after the mainstream media began reporting on it.

The four charged in Stockholm are Hans Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstroem and Kolmisoppi. According to charges lodged in Stockholm, the four are accused of "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws."

"I think they're lame," he said of the charges.

Prosecutor Hakan Roswall was not immediately available for comment.

None of the defendants, Kolmisoppi said, have prior convictions, meaning even if they are convicted, they won't likely be jailed for the two years the charges potentially carry.

"As a worse-case scenario for us, we get a fine," Kolmisoppi said. "They can say we have to shut down the site, don't host it in Sweden. But they can't say it won't be accessible in Sweden or anywhere. They can't do anything about it, no matter what happens."

He also disputes that the company is generating millions in profit, as the authorities allege.

"It's so stupid to say we're making a profit," he said "We're spending hours and hours of our own time to do this. If we were making millions, we wouldn't have day jobs. And even if we did make millions, it would not change the fact that this is not illegal."

Kolmissoppi said his day job is "developing a micro payment system."

No court date has been set.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-bay.html#more





Milestones

Polaroid Abandons Instant Photography
Patrick J. Lyons

In happier times: Polaroid’s 1970s-80s television ads featuring James Garner and Mariette Hartley wisecracking and needling one another were widely admired and imitated.

It was a wonder in its time: A camera that spat out photos that developed themselves in a few minutes as you watched. You got to see them where and when you took them, not a week later when the prints came back from the drugstore.

But in a day when nearly every cellphone has a digital camera in it, “instant” photography long ago stopped being instant enough for most people. So today, the inevitable end of an era came: Polaroid is getting out of the Polaroid business.

The company, which stopped making instant cameras for consumers a year ago and for commercial use a year before that, said today that as soon as it had enough instant film manufactured to last it through 2009, it would stop making that, too. Three plants that make large-format instant film will close by the end of the quarter, and two that make consumer film packets will be shut by the end of the year, Bloomberg News reports.

The company, which will concentrate on digital cameras and printers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2001 and was acquired by a private investment company in 2005. It started in 1937 making polarized lenses for scientific and military applications, and introduced its first instant camera in 1948.

The Lede remembers fondly how magical it was to watch the image gradually manifest itself from the chemical murk right there in your hand. But truth be told, the Lede’s own scuffed Polaroid SX-70 camera, which used to get regular use in all manner of situations, from producing a quick step-by-step primer on how to do the Ickey Shuffle to documenting a problem with a house he was buying that cropped up the day before the closing, hasn’t come out of its cabinet drawer in years.

Loyal users take heart, though — Polaroid said it would happily license the technology to other manufacturers should they want to go on supplying the niche market with film after 2009.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200.../index.html?hp





Our Media Have Become Mass Producers of Distortion

An industry whose task should be to filter out falsehood has become a conduit for propaganda and second hand news
Nick Davies

Here's a little example of what I call Flat Earth News. In June 2005, Fleet Street told its readers about a gang of feral child bullies who had attempted to murder a five-year-old boy by hanging him from a tree; the boy had managed to free himself. This story was not true. Indeed, it was obviously not true from the moment it started running. There was the commonsense problem that even a fully grown man with 10 years of SAS training who found himself hanging by the neck would have the greatest difficulty in reaching up and lifting his entire body weight with one hand while using the other to remove the noose. How would a five-year-old boy do it?

More than that, there was the evidence in the story itself. From the first day, the police refused to say the boy had been hanged. The parents and neighbours, who told the press how shocked they were, never claimed to know what had happened. The one and only line on which the whole story was built was a quote from the boy's adult cousin, who said he had told her: "Some boys and girls have tied a rope around my neck and tried to tie me to a tree." That's "tie me to a tree", not "hang me from a tree".

It was a nasty case of bullying but not an attempted murder. A 12-year-old girl had put a rope around the boy's neck and led him round like a dog, pulling on it hard enough to leave marks on his neck. That was clearly dangerous. But the boy never claimed she had hanged him from a tree. Indeed, he never even claimed that she had tied him to a tree, only that she had tried to. To double check, we spoke to Professor Christopher Milroy, the Home Office pathologist who handled the case. He said: "He had not been hanged. That was not correct and I couldn't understand why the press were insisting that he was."

Nevertheless, the tabloids ran all over it; and TV and the rest of Fleet Street joined in. The London Evening Standard called it a lynching; the Mail, Guardian and Times ran headlines which stated boldly that the boy had been hanged; the Independent ran a moody feature about fear descending on the boy's estate. Sundry columnists joined in with solemn comment about the youth of today and the impact of violence on television.

The ingredients in this little story run routinely through a stream of other small stories, through stories as big as those about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and then into a flood of media commentary that feeds into government policy and popular understanding - falsehood as profound as the idea that the Earth is flat, widely accepted as true to the point where it can feel like heresy to challenge it.

There never was a time when news media were perfect. Journalists have always worked with too little time and too little certainty; with interference from owners and governments; with laws that intimidate and inhibit the search for truth. But the evidence I found in researching my new book, Flat Earth News, suggests our tendency to recycle ignorance is far worse than it was.

I commissioned research from specialists at Cardiff University, who surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their "facts", they discovered that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn't be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these "facts" had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12% of the stories.

The implication of those two findings is truly alarming. Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda.

And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling. They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985. In other words, as a crude average, they have only one-third of the time that they used to have to do their jobs. Generally, they don't find their owns stories, or check their content, because they simply don't have the time.

Add that to all of the traditional limits on journalists' trying to find the truth, and you can see why the mass media generally are no longer a reliable source of information.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...251982,00.html





A Tiny Staff, Tracking People Across the Globe
Jason DeParle

It has an editorial staff of one and annual advertising revenues of less than $2,000. It charges its subscribers nothing and pays most contributors the same. Mapping the settlement of Latino poultry workers is its idea of a sexy piece.

But for a growing number of followers, it has become an important read.

Every moment has its magazine, and for the age of migration it is the Migration Information Source, a weekly (more or less) online journal followed worldwide by scholars, policy makers and the occasional migrant in distress. “My soul’s dying every moment,” an Iranian asylum seeker wrote last year in an e-mail message from Greece. “Give me an answer.”

Many readers discover the Source simply by googling the word “immigrant” and finding a link to migrationinformation.org among the millions of citations.

At the site’s helm is an American-born editor, Kirin Kalia, 32, who describes herself as “half Dutch, half Indian, 100 percent American and total migration geek.” Ms. Kalia thrives on hybridity — devouring Indian-American novels and Dutch-Moroccan films — and finds no migration topic too obscure. To know the fate of Latvian mushroom pickers in Ireland is, for her, to glimpse the world in a grain of sand.

“To move to a different country for whatever reason takes so much courage,” she said, interrupting an interview to play a song by a British-Indian rapper, Panjabi MC, stored on her hard drive. “The fact that so many people do it is just endlessly fascinating to me.”

With conflicts rising over immigration to the United States, interest in the Source has surged. Readership has doubled in the past three years, Ms. Kalia said, to about 140,000 unique visits each month. To stroll through the archives is to see the American debate freshly, as part of a global phenomenon.

If the Source has a unifying theme, it is that migration is a defining force nearly everywhere. There are about 200 million migrants in the world — probably a record, demographers say, in both relative and absolute terms — and more than 80 percent live outside the United States.

The Source has focused on Tajik construction workers in Russia, farmhands from Burkina Faso who pick Ghanaian crops and the Peruvians who take jobs left behind by Ecuadorean workers who have migrated to Spain.

Other themes of the coverage include the speed with which migration has grown (Spain’s immigrant population has risen nearly sixfold in 10 years) and the conflict it brings, within both nations and living rooms. Political parties rise and fall. Economic interests win and lose. Family relations change.

“None of this is easy,” Ms. Kalia said.

Nor is the process of tracking it, with migration studies a nascent field and data on many countries scarce. But the magazine has won praise from a roster of A-list scholars who read it, write for it and assign it to their students.

“It’s the best online source of information on migration that I have seen worldwide,” said Rubén G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine and a leading authority on the children of immigrants to the United States.

The magazine is published by a Washington research group, the Migration Policy Institute, that was started six years ago (with assistance from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation and the J. M. Kaplan Fund) to help fill the knowledge gap.

Does migration drive down domestic wages? Do guest worker programs always bring permanent settlement? Does “brain drain” hurt developing countries, or have critics overlooked indirect benefits, like the money the migrants send home?

“Heck! I don’t believe we have a consensus on a single thing in migration,” said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, the Migration Policy Institute’s president. “You have to build a knowledge base if you’re going to make progress.”

With a staff of 20, the institute reflects the mobility it studies. In addition to Mr. Papademetriou, a Greek immigrant, it includes a Moldovan demographer (Jeanne Batalova), a British analyst (Will Somerville), a Filipino-American with dual citizenship in Iceland (Dovelyn R. Agunias), and a refugee expert (Kathleen Newland, a co-director) who is American-born and married to a British journalist.

Some critics see a loose-borders tilt to the work. “They do some useful research,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that seeks lower immigration to the United States. “But their orientation is towards higher immigration and looser borders worldwide.”

But admirers said the work merely reflected the reality that migration is ubiquitous. “This is not something just going on inside the United States,” Mr. Rumbaut said.

One recent article charts the emergence of Tajikistan as a leading exporter of labor, with one in five Tajik adults leaving to work abroad each year. Another shows that at least 60 million migrants have left one poor country to live in another.

Yet another compares the incentives that draw Mexicans to the United States with those that lure Africans onto rickety boats bounds for Spain. American wages are about four times those in Mexico, a Norwegian scholar, Jorgen Carling, noted, while the wage differential between Spain and Senegal is “a staggering 15 to one.”

Even nonmigrants can be deeply affected by migration, at both ends of the stream. Studying a village in the Dominican Republic, Peggy Levitt of Wellesley College found that women prefer to marry men who have worked abroad “because they want husbands who will share in the housework and take care of the children the way men who have been to the United States do.”

Conflict is also a running theme, across cultures and time. The Dutch are so worried about assimilation they require migrants to pass a language test before they come. Aristede R. Zolberg of the New School, notes that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin “considered the German language to be the bearer of a culture incompatible with republican democracy.”

Professor Zolberg resists the term “age of migration” (coined by the scholars Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller) because people have been migrating since the beginning of time. Still, he sees migration growth as likely to continue, in an era of cheap travel and easy communication via cellphones and Web cams. And as incomes rise in the developing world, more people have the means to move.

“What’s new is it’s much easier now,” he said.

Financially, the Source may be a victim of its own success. Its initial supporters largely consider the site a core mission of the institute, to be financed from the broader institute’s $3.5 million budget. That leaves Ms. Kalia rattling the online cup for reader donations.

As for the difficulties that migration can bring, Ms. Kalia encountered them early when her uncle, who is Dutch and a Catholic priest, flew to California to baptize her baby brother. Her Hindu grandmother lived with the family, and locked herself in her bedroom, beside a Lord Krishna poster, until the uncle promised to desist.

Ms. Kalia has yet to write about the episode, but she does see a lesson. “It shows you just how difficult negotiating cultural differences can be,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/wa...ration.html?hp





Yahoo to Offer RealNetworks’ Music Service on Its Site
Alex Veiga

Yahoo Inc. will cease operating its online music subscription service and switch its customers to RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody music service as part of a new deal between the companies that calls for Yahoo to promote Rhapsody on its site.

Terms of the deal, to be formally announced Monday, were not disclosed. The move is part of Yahoo's overhaul of its online music offerings.

''People want to have music and consume it in lots of different forms and across different devices and platforms and we want to have a play in as many of those as we can,'' said Scott Moore, Yahoo's head of media.

Moore said the partnership would allow Yahoo to focus its energies more on free, ad-supported music and other media offerings.

Yahoo Music Unlimited lets users download an unlimited number of tracks that are playable as long as their plan is active.

Under the Yahoo-RealNetworks partnership, subscribers to Yahoo Music Unlimited will be shifted to the Rhapsody service sometime in the first half of this year. Yahoo subscribers' music library and payment plans will remain the same for a limited time after the switch, but those wishing to remain on Rhapsody eventually will be required to sign up at Rhapsody's rates.

Yahoo's subscription rates range from $5.99 a month, if users pay for a full year in advance, or $8.99 a month. Rhapsody memberships start at $12.99 a month.

Yahoo executives declined to say how many subscribers their music service has. Rhapsody has 2.75 million subscribers worldwide, including customers signed up for its premium radio and mobile music services.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo has been hurt by sliding profits and a new management team is trying to turn the company around. Last week, it received an unsolicited $44.6 billion offer from Microsoft Corp.

As part of its deal with RealNetworks, Yahoo will integrate Rhapsody into its online music portal, something both companies hope will translate into new Rhapsody subscribers.

''They are our subscription partner going forward and there's money to be made for both of us in that,'' Moore said.

The two companies also intend to collaborate on other digital music services, including offering music downloads, the companies said.

In addition to its music subscription service, Yahoo offers free streaming audio, music videos, Web radio. It also operates a premium Internet radio service.

The company's management said last fall it had begun to de-emphasize its subscription model in favor of an advertising-supported music service.

The Internet pioneer also planned to announce Monday that it had acquired FoxyTunes, a browser plug-in that offers -- among other features -- online searches for music, lyrics and other content tied to media playing on a computer. It also recently launched a Web-based media player.

Moore said the company is still working out the details of upcoming changes to its music offerings, but noted music downloads and ad-supported music would play a role.

''We already have a very significant streaming ad-supported business and that's something that I'm particularly interested in continuing to expand,'' Moore said. ''In terms of downloads, that's another area where I'm not quite ready to talk about yet, but we're very interested and we're exploring our opportunities.''

Both Yahoo and Rhapsody have previously offered a limited number of tracks in the MP3 format.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h...CgHuwD8UJA3D80





Yahoo Wipes Out Small Business Hosted Storage Limits

Monthly service offers unlimited disk space, bandwidth to business customers
Brian Fonseca

Yahoo Inc. this week introduced a new monthly Web Hosting service for small and medium sized businesses, which provides unlimited hosted storage capacity and bandwidth.

Subscribers to the new service, priced at $11.95 a month, are free to take up as much disk space on Yahoo's servers as they need to transfer data, store information or secure e-mail without fear of shrinking capacity restrictions, the company said. The service is only available in the U.S. from Yahoo's Small Business division and costs $11.95 per month.

Previously. Yahoo had charged companies $12 a month for 5GB of disk space and 200GB of bandwidth per month; $20 a month for 10GB disk space and 400GB of bandwidth; and $40 for 20GB disk space and 500GB bandwidth, said Guy Yalif, director of web hosting products for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo.

The company's 1.5 million small business customers will soon receive instructions on how to migrate to the new model, Yalif said.

Yalif said the company has enough capacity to handle the increasing requirements, though he declined to provide details. Yalif said the service is not designed to be a "hard drive" in the sky but rather a mechanism to help the small business users quickly get in line with growing online demands. He said Yahoo will monitor the service to prevent any illegal activities.

Kaitlyn Sharp, CEO of Houston, Tex.-based Custom Plumbing & Hardware has used Yahoo Web Hosting for a year to support her decorative hardware and plumbing showroom business. The new service eliminates any need to postpone new efforts due to limited storage capacity.

"I'm thinking about doing maybe some online sales and putting a lot more detail in the system. But people were saying 'you have to have a lot of storage [for that], you sure you can keep this on Yahoo?' At least I don't' have to worry about that anymore," said Sharp.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...&intsrc=kc_top





MySpace Wins Domain Name Fight
Mark Sweney

MySpace has won the right to have the MySpace.co.uk domain name despite another firm having registered it six years before the social networking website launched.

The ruling, by domain registry Nominet's dispute resolution service, has caused controversy in the industry because Total Web Solutions of Stockport registered the myspace.co.uk name in 1997, long before the US social networking website launched.

"This dispute resolution service decision is counter-intuitive at first sight and serves as a warning that domain registrations are not guaranteed and need to be secured by pro-active management as well as a clear understanding of the dynamic nature of the industry," said Jonathan Robinson, the chief operating officer at web services company NetNames.

However, the ruling, made by independent expert Antony Gold, found that while myspace.co.uk had initially been used to offer email services and mini-websites to subscribers it had changed its model to exploit MySpace's popularity.

TWS started to use the myspace.co.uk address to lead to a "parked" web page with advertisements for social networking websites including MySpace.

The arbitrator decided that this was evidence of abusive registration, that TWS was profiting unfairly from the association with MySpace.

MySpace.co.uk was awarded to News Corporation-owned MySpace as a result.

The two sides disagreed about whether the use of the myspace.co.uk domain name was abusive.

Out-Law.com, the website owned by lawyers Pinsent Masons, said that the TWS defence was based on the fact that mysapce.co.uk had been used for running advertisements before the founding of the social networking website and that it should not be punished for its recent popularity.

TWS said that the choice of ads that run on the myspace.co.uk website are determined by algorithms linked to search terms by internet users, which in recent years have been dominated by people looking for MySpace.

Gold, the arbitrator, said that it was not relevant that TWS did not select the specific ads. Because it owned the website it was responsible for those ads and income made off the back of MySpace.

"It is amazing how, after so many years, domain disputes still cause such unpredictable outcomes and associated controversy," said Robinson. "It also highlights how automated web content of any sort can get people into real difficulties."

Since its launch, MySpace has used myspace.com as its global home page.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008...e.digitalmedia





Giants - Patriots Most - Watched Super Bowl
David Bauder

The 97.5 million viewers who saw the New York Giants' last-minute win over the New England Patriots made it the most-watched Super Bowl ever and second biggest event in American television history.

Only the ''MASH'' series finale in 1983, with 106 million viewers, was seen by more people, Nielsen Media Research said Monday. Sunday's game eclipsed the previous Super Bowl record of 94.08 million, set when Dallas defeated Pittsburgh in 1996.

This year's game had almost all the ingredients Fox could have hoped for: a tight contest with a thrilling finish involving a team that was attempting to make history as the NFL's first unbeaten team since 1972.

But the Giants ended New England's bid for perfection, 17-14. Throughout the game, the teams were never separated by more than a touchdown.

''You might like your equation going in, but you still need some breaks going your way,'' said Ed Goren, Fox sports president. The closeness of the game probably added a couple million viewers to the telecast's average; the audience peaked at 105.7 million viewers between 9:30 and 10 p.m. EST -- during the fourth quarter.

Giants quarterback Eli Manning won bragging rights over his brother: Last year's win by Peyton Manning's Indianapolis Colts was seen by 93.2 million people, now the third most popular Super Bowl. Manning was set to appear on David Letterman's ''Late Show'' on Monday, but travel delays in Arizona pushed his appearance back to Wednesday.

An eye-popping 81 percent of all TV sets on in the Boston area Sunday were tuned in to the game. In New York, the audience share was 67 percent.

There were signs even before game time that Fox could be headed for a record. The opportunity for a team to make history with football's first 19-0 record was a powerful draw. The Giants and Patriots also had a tight contest in late December that drew strong ratings.

The Giants' underdog run had also captivated the nation's largest media market, making up for the only potential weakness in the event as a drawing card: the lack of geographical diversity in the competing teams.

There were past Super Bowls with higher ratings, topped by the 1982 game between San Francisco and Cincinnati (49.1 rating, 73 share). That indicates a larger percentage of homes with televisions were watching the game. But since the American population has increased, along with the number of people with TVs, the actual number of people watching this year was higher.

The Giants-Patriots game's actual rating (43.2 rating, 65 share) was the highest for any Super Bowl since 2000. That means 43 percent of the nation's TV sets were tuned in to the game, and 65 percent of the TV sets that were turned on were watching football.

The 97.5 million figure represents the game's average viewership during any given minute. Nielsen said that a total of 148.3 million watched at least some part of the game.

Goren said ratings were stronger than usual for Fox's pregame show, crediting the decision to add a show biz element with Ryan Seacrest to a program often usually only hardcore football fans could love.

Fox, a division of News Corp., charged $2.7 million for 30 seconds of advertising time on the game, and that may have been a bargain.

This year's Super Bowl was one of the few -- if only -- television events where more people watched the commercials than the program itself, according to digital video recorder makers TiVo Inc.

By measuring live viewership, and the number of people who rewound their DVRs, the most-seen Super Bowl commercial was E-Trade's stock-talking baby, who ended a financial discussion by spitting up, TiVo said.

''I didn't see that punch line coming at all,'' said Todd Juenger, Tivo's research chief.

Pepsi's Justin Timberlake commercial was second, proving fans either like watching Timberlake, or like watching him sail into a mailbox post crotch-first. The Doritos ''Mouse Trap'' commercial, from an idea submitted by a viewer, was third.

In what may be a sign of the times, TiVo's top 10 commercials featured only one beer ad and four for either soft drinks or flavored water.
http://www.mercurynews.com/tv/ci_8163625?nclick_check=1





For Marketing, the Most Valuable Player Might Be YouTube
Stuart Elliott

SOME religions believe in an afterlife. Others do not. On Madison Avenue after the Super Bowl, most everyone is a believer.

An agency of the Publicis Groupe created a spot for Tide to Go, and another division created a Web site to dovetail with it.

That is because the Internet, digital video recorders, mobile devices and other technologies are giving a strong postgame presence to the commercials that appear each year during the Super Bowl. The spots can be watched later on Web sites, forwarded to friends through e-mail, discussed on message boards and assessed on blogs.

It is a far cry from just a few years ago, when the Super Bowl commercials disappeared after the game, along with the losing team. Now the strategy among sponsors is to maximize postgame exposure to help amortize the eye-popping cost of a Super Sunday spot — this time, an estimated $2.7 million for each 30 seconds of national air time.

For instance, the commercials “got a higher audience than the game” in homes with the TiVo video recorder service, said Todd Juenger, vice president and general manager for audience research and measurement at the New York office of TiVo.

“There is rewinding and multiple viewing of the ads” on Super Bowl Sunday, he added. “It’s one of the few times it happens.”

Super Bowl XLII, broadcast by Fox on Sunday, was no exception, Mr. Juenger said. TiVo’s list of most-watched spots was topped by one of two for E*Trade featuring a “talking” baby; in this spot, the infant spits up at the end of his spiel.

The E*Trade commercial, created by the Grey Global division of the WPP Group, was followed on the TiVo list by one featuring Justin Timberlake, for a music promotion co-sponsored by Pepsi-Cola and Amazon; a spot for Doritos created by a consumer for a contest last year; one for Coca-Cola Classic that spoofed the red-blue political divide; and a spot with Carmen Electra for Ice Breakers Ice Cubes gum.

The results “say something about the TiVo audience in terms of what works to get something rewound,” Mr. Juenger said, listing tactics like humor, celebrities and surprise punch lines.

The Timberlake spot came from BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group. Pepsi-Cola and Doritos are both owned by PepsiCo. The spot for Coca-Cola was created by Wieden & Kennedy. The ad for Ice Breakers, a Hershey brand, was from TracyLocke, also part of Omnicom.



Scores of Web sites are offering computer users a chance to watch video clips of the Super Bowl commercials, among them AOL, MSNBC, MySpace, Spike and YouTube.

During the Fox broadcast of the game — watched by 97.5 million viewers, a record for a Super Bowl, data from Nielsen estimated — the announcers twice reminded the audience to “log on to myspace.com” if “you’ve missed any of the Super Bowl commercials.” (MySpace and Fox are owned by the News Corporation.)

Even specialty Web sites are getting into the act. The Huffington Post, at huffingtonpost.com, known for politics, is wooing visitors to a section that offers a look at the “best 2008 Super Bowl ads.”

And three Web sites operated by the automotive expert Edmunds Inc. (edmunds.com, carspace.com and AutoObserver.com) are carrying video clips of and discussions about car commercials from companies like the Audi division of Volkswagen, General Motors, Hyundai Motor America and Toyota Motor.

On some Web sites, visitors could vote for their favorite spots. In the sixth annual AOL Super Sunday Ad Poll, conducted by the AOL division of Time Warner, a Budweiser commercial that spoofed “Rocky,” starring a Clydesdale and a Dalmatian, was the leading vote-getter as of Monday afternoon.

The Bud spot was followed by a commercial for Bridgestone Firestone with a screaming squirrel and a commercial for Coca-Cola Classic that brought to life balloons from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

The spot for Budweiser beer, an Anheuser-Busch product, was created by DDB Worldwide, part of Omnicom. The Bridgestone Firestone commercial, one of two sponsored by Bridgestone during the game, was created by the Richards Group. The Coke Classic spot was from Wieden & Kennedy.

Visitors to YouTube, owned by Google, are even being offered an incentive to vote for their favorite spot at a special section of the site (youtube.com/adblitz): The commercial attracting the most votes will be featured on the YouTube home page next Tuesday.

The spot that had been watched most often on YouTube as of Monday afternoon was for SoBe Life Water, sold by PepsiCo, featuring animated lizards dancing to “Thriller.” Not far behind was a spot for GoDaddy, a Web services company, which directed viewers to godaddy.com to watch a risqué commercial that the company said Fox had refused to run.

The SoBe spot was created by the Arnell Group, another Omnicom agency, and the GoDaddy.com spot was created internally.

Bob Parsons, the chief executive of GoDaddy, wrote Monday on his blog (bobparsons.com) that the “banned” spot had been watched online Sunday more than two million times. And traffic on Monday was “up over four times normal levels,” he added.

“Our Web site has never been busier,” Mr. Parsons said.

The cross-promotion between the GoDaddy commercial and Web site was indicative of the increasing efforts by Super Bowl sponsors to integrate their TV and online presences.

“The ‘torture test’ for brands beyond their Super Bowl ads is how to make it easy for consumers to find the ads and engage with them, whether you put them on Web sites, on YouTube or make them easy to search for on Google,” said Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president at the Nielsen Online Strategic Services division of the Nielsen Company.

“I think a lot advertisers are still struggling to organize around this,” Mr. Blackshaw said, as they try to coordinate the work of various agencies that specialize in different tasks like traditional ads, digital ads or media placement.

“The conflict comes to a head in the Super Bowl,” he added, “when there’s a lot of money riding on the campaign.”

Mr. Blackshaw praised sponsors that created special Web sites, known as microsites, to promote their campaigns. He singled out as notable the one for the Tide to Go stain remover sold by Procter & Gamble (mytalkingstain.com). The site was created by the Digitas division of the Publicis Groupe, whose Saatchi & Saatchi division created the Tide to Go commercial for the game.



Steven Siegel, vice president for brand solutions at HipCricket, a mobile-marketing agency, said he was disappointed there were “not as many examples of mobile programs as I would have liked to see” in spots and promotions during the game. One he recalled, sponsored by the Cadillac division of General Motors, asked viewers to vote by text message for the most valuable player.

“A lot of Super Bowl viewership takes place outside the home, away from your computer,” Mr. Siegel said. “With mobile, you can immediately engage with consumers at a bar, at a friend’s house.”

Some sponsors used old-school media for postgame outreach. Several, including Bridgestone Firestone, Doritos, E*Trade, Under Armour and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, ran ads in newspapers Monday to encourage conversation about their spots.

At least one advertiser missing from the Super Bowl sought to ride the coattails of a competitor that had been there. The Miller Brewing division of SABMiller ran an ad in USA Today that offered mock congratulations to Anheuser-Busch for the success of its spots for Bud Light.

“This certainly calls for beer,” the ad teased. “A nice cold Miller Lite.”

Dave Peacock, vice president for marketing at Anheuser-Busch, dismissed the ad as “one of those things we almost don’t dignify with a response.”

“We learned in research in the last few months that people prefer to hear a positive story,” Mr. Peacock said, which is why he believes the heart-warming “Rocky” parody for Budweiser did so well.

Anheuser-Busch, usually the biggest Super Bowl ad spender each year, is known for how intensely — and how far ahead — it works on its commercials.

Asked what the company intends for Super Bowl XLIII, scheduled for Feb. 1, 2009, Mr. Peacock replied, laughing, “We have a meeting this afternoon.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/bu...ia/05adco.html





The Beta Male’s Charms
Stephanie Rosenbloom

“EVERYWHERE there’s someone better than you,” said Steven Tsapelas, 26, over a cheeseburger deluxe at Mike’s Diner in Astoria. “Everywhere you go, if you’re talking to a girl there’s five other guys right in their immediate vicinity blowing you away.”

So goes the refrain of the New York City beta male — that gentle, endearingly awkward, self-conscious soul for whom love is a battlefield. For the last year or so the bungled seductions and everyday fears of such men have been laid bare in “We Need Girlfriends,” a no-budget Web series based on the ups and downs of Mr. Tsapelas and his former college roommates, Brian Amyot, 26, and Angel Acevedo, 25.

A cult hit among the under-30 set, the series chronicles the lives of three postcollegiate guys (Henry, Tom and Rod) who live on the cheap in Queens and routinely demonstrate that while they are suitors with hearts of gold, the only game they have is Taboo.

In one episode Tom is crushed to learn that his former college girlfriend has created a blog called “I Probably Never Loved Tom” and changed her MySpace status to “in a relationship” (her new beau’s MySpace moniker is Looze It 2 Me). In another episode, Henry receives a letter in the mail from his eighth-grade self and realizes that though he has lost his virginity and no longer wears sweat pants in public, he is still a Mr. T fan likely to die alone, like his former classmate, Morbidly Obese Carl.

The 11 brief episodes (the shortest is under six minutes; the longest is more than 14) have been viewed millions of times on YouTube, MySpace and WeNeedGirlfriends.tv, where they were posted monthly at midnight. As one fan wrote on the show’s MySpace page: “I watched it religiously waiting for every new episode coming out like a fat guy waiting for his MoonPie to cook in the microwave.”

Like other buzz-generating Web content, the series has attracted mainstream media movers and shakers: Greg Daniels, the executive producer of the American version of “The Office,” and Dennis Erdman, a director and producer who worked on television shows the three grew up with like “Saved by the Bell”, both sent e-mail messages to say they were fans. A pilot for CBS, with Darren Star of “Sex and the City” fame as executive producer and Mr. Erdman and Clark Peterson of “Monster” as co-executive producers, is in the works.

Until now, “We Need Girlfriends” — which underscores that women are not the only ones to cultivate meaningful friendships with each other or to be emotionally pulverized by the opposite sex — has been filmed on the streets of Astoria and in Mr. Amyot and Mr. Acevedo’s humble apartment, with its mismatched furniture and walls of unframed movie posters. The three were the creative team, the body doubles and the extras. They created the series at night and on weekends when they weren’t at their day jobs. The actors worked for free.

“We were sort of casting fictional versions of ourselves but, you know, we cast better looking guys than ourselves,” said Mr. Amyot, who was also having lunch at Mike’s Diner, where the three regularly convene to brainstorm and to decompress.

Promoting “We Need Girlfriends” cost nothing: Mr. Tsapelas, Mr. Amyot and Mr. Acevedo made MySpace pages for Henry, Tom and Rod two months before the show went online, duping MySpace users into thinking the characters were real people and delighting them with posts about a rivalry between the abrasive, porn-watching Rod and the bespectacled, “X-Files”-revering Henry. Fans (who “skew a little bit female, but not by much,” according to Mr. Acevedo) made art collages of Rod and Henry and bought “Team Rod” and “Team Henry” T-shirts. Each character had more than 2,000 MySpace friends before the first “We Need Girlfriends” episode was uploaded.

“I saw this little kid with geeky glasses on, and I thought he was really cute,” said Jessica Babyok, 20, of Beaver Falls, Pa., who presumed Henry was real.

Though he turned out to be as real as Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, Ms. Babyok ended up liking “We Need Girlfriends” so much that she stayed up until midnight waiting for each episode to go online. “It shows you a different side of the male psyche, and they’re all really geeky and that’s awesome,” she said.

Awesome?

“I just feel that the geeky guys have more to offer than the hotshots.”

Before Mr. Tsapelas, Mr. Amyot and Mr. Acevedo were spending their days teasing out the virtues of fictional beta guys who subsist on Bagel Bites and ice pops, they were attending Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., where they met in 2000 and worked together as film majors. In general, Mr. Tsapelas (the inspiration for Henry) does the writing, Mr. Amyot (a k a Tom) directs and Mr. Acevedo (Rod) shoots and edits. After graduation they reconvened in Astoria, entered short film contests and attended small film festivals. Yet it all cost time and money, and few people ever showed up for screenings. Inspired by Comedy Central and Spike TV’s online contests, they decided that showcasing their work on the Internet would get it seen by more people and also enable them to tell a longer story. But what?

“At the time we were watching ‘Entourage’ a lot,” Mr. Tsapelas said. “And ‘Entourage,’ you know, these guys go through their daily situations in life and just pick up women constantly. And for us it was like the complete opposite. Everything was a struggle.”

For the first time since college, all three were single. “We broke up and I was just clueless,” said Mr. Amyot, whose three-year relationship had been the longest of the bunch. “I would have these discussions with Steve about it, about what I was feeling, how I was trying to figure it out and, like, how are we going to meet girls and all this stuff. We were just sort of living the lives that these characters are living in the show while trying to come up with an idea for a Web series.”

Their college relationships had been the most momentous of their relatively young lives. “That was like the last hope, I guess,” Mr. Tsapelas said. “And then it ended, and then we were all on a life raft.” He suggested to Mr. Amyot and Mr. Acevedo the notion of creating an anti-“Entourage,” a show, essentially, “about us.”

The first episode, in which Rod accuses Tom of “scamming” his “squirrel” (translation: stealing the woman he’s got his eye on), went online on Nov. 1, 2006. Eventually a few of the episodes ended up on the home page of MySpace. Last April, Episode 4, “Rod vs. Henry” (in which Rod uses Photoshop to create a picture of himself having sex with Henry’s ex), appeared on the home page of YouTube. In the episode, Rod invites every girl Henry has ever made out with (all three) to their apartment to see Henry’s collection of wrestling dolls and DVDs. Henry appropriates tricks from the movie “Home Alone” to booby-trap the apartment, in an attempt to maim Rod.

“It kind of exploded after that,” Mr. Tsapelas said. Last May the three went to Los Angeles to meet industry executives who had contacted them, including Barry Blumberg (now their manager), talent agents (they signed with United Talent) and Mr. Daniels, who gave them a tour of the set of “The Office.”

Two months later, the three received an e-mail message from Mr. Erdman, saying Mr. Star had expressed interest. In August they were back in Los Angeles meeting with Mr. Star and Sony Pictures TV. Two months later, they ended up pitching “We Need Girlfriends” to several networks.

On a visit to Mr. Erdman’s house in Bel Air, they asked him if it was O.K. if they photographed themselves with his Emmy and Golden Globe awards. (It was.) They were about 500 feet outside of Mr. Erdman’s gate when he called Mr. Amyot’s cellphone and told them to return. The three thought they had forgotten something, but when they pulled their rental hybrid up to the gate, Mr. Erdman leaned into the car window and told them that CBS wanted “We Need Girlfriends.”

Mr. Tsapelas’s first instinct was to call his mother.

Now all three are supervising producers and writers on the “We Need Girlfriends” pilot, which they were working on until the night before the writers’ strike began. “It would have been probably done by Christmas,” said Mr. Tsapelas.

While they don’t know when the script will be completed, they can answer another question: Do they still need girlfriends?

Mr. Tsapelas has been dating a graphic designer for about a year and a half (she created the “Team Rod” and “Team Henry” shirts). Mr. Acevedo, who was trolling Facebook a few months ago, came across the profile of the first girl he ever kissed (at 14). He is now her boyfriend.

As for Mr. Amyot: “I’m dating a girl,” he said sheepishly. “The girl that broke up with me that inspired ‘We Need Girlfriends.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/fa...rlfriends.html





Net Neutrality's Not Anti-Property, it's About Our Property
Ken Fisher

It took 17 rounds, but when the FCC's $4.638 billion reserve was met late last week, it meant that the FCC's mandated open access rules would necessarily come into play. Under the proposed rules, 22MHz of the spectrum to be auctioned would be subject to open-access regulations, meaning that the company winning the auction would not be able to control what kind of devices are attached to the network or how the bandwidth is used.

While there were plenty of high-fives around here, not everyone is pleased. Scott Cleland, founder of telecom analyst firm The Precursor Group, is out blasting the developments, saying that open access and "net neutrality" advocates are "antiproperty" according to the IDG News Service. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"Everybody throws the word 'open' around and says open is wonderful," Cleland said. "But 'open' means communal. It means not owned."

Mr. Cleland is of course wrong on the most fundamental of levels. Open means open, not communal. Check a dictionary. When Verizon "opens" its network this year, it's certainly not giving up complete and utter ownership of its network.

Second, Net Neutrality advocates are not ipso facto "antiproperty," because if they were, they wouldn't care whether or not their own devices (aka, property) were locked into proprietary networks and/or designed to only work with specific technologies. Net neutrality proponents simply want their property to work like it should.

What has brought this situation to light is nothing short than the collective abuses of the American wireless user, who is frankly sick of having choice determined by carrier lock-in and having "features" determined by committee. The rhetoric of property is apropos here, in the way that carriers can sometimes treat their subscribers like they own them. Compare your cell phone service to your cable TV service. Both are, ultimately, powering expensive pieces of technology you own, but taking your television to another cable company is magnitudes easier than taking your cell phone to another carrier.

To be sure, "open" access won't mean free access or that whoever owns a chunk of open spectrum can't make money. It simply means that making such services worth paying for will require a lot more than traditional carrier lock-in. At the very least, it marks the beginning of an age when our mobile telecommunications property has value and functionality less constrained by arbitrary sets of rules from on high. And to hear Verizon tell the tale, their dramatic swing from opposing the notion of "open access" networks to wanting to build one themselves was partially the result of coming to grips with market forces in a competitive environment. It certainly had nothing to do with "not owning" a network. It was quite the opposite: Verizon realized that the best kind of network to own is the open kind.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-property.html





RIAA Boss: Move Copyright Filtering from ISPs to Users’ PCs
Nate Anderson

Filtering sounds so wholesome. As with filtered water, Internet filtering backers suggest that their products simply keep the sludge from passing through, and who wants to drink unfiltered sludge? The big difference between the two kinds of filtering is that sludge can't use 128-bit keys and AES encryption to hide its sludgy nature; Internet traffic can. It's a key problem for any Internet filtering regime, including the one being studied right now by AT&T. Once strong encryption is slapped on Internet traffic, the effectiveness of filters drops off dramatically.

At a Washington, DC, tech conference last week, RIAA boss Cary Sherman suggested that Internet filtering was a super idea but that he saw no reason to mandate it. Turns out that was only part of the story, though; Sherman's a sharp guy, and he's fully aware that filtering will prompt an encryption arms race that is going to be impossible to win... unless users somehow install the filtering software on their home PCs or equipment.

Last night, Public Knowledge posted a video clip from the conference that drew attention to Sherman's other remarks on the topic of filtering, and what he has to say is downright amazing: due to the encryption problem, filters may need to be put on end users' PCs.

The issue of encryption "would have to be faced," Sherman admitted after talking about the wonders of filtering. "One could have a filter on the end user's computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from encryption because if you want to hear [the music], you would need to decrypt it, and at that point the filter would work."

This means moving the filter out of the network and onto the edges (local machines), since it's at the edges that decryption and playback occurs. But who would voluntarily install software that would continually scan incoming P2P streams for copyrighted material after that material has been decrypted? Or software that would watch every song you played and tried to figure out if it was legit?

Sherman knows it's a tough sell. "Why would somebody put that on their machine?" he asked rhetorically. "They wouldn't likely want to do that."

No... they wouldn't. But Sherman's idea is that customers install filtering software such as virus scanners all the time because they see a tangible benefit to it. Apparently, they are supposed to realize the same benefit from installing a filter that flags as illegal the very music that they are trying to download.

This is clearly not going to happen, so Sherman has another idea. He appears to suggest installing the filter in a customer's cable or DSL modem, which wouldn't act as anything more than a network filter (the encryption and decryption happens on the PC). There's also some talk of putting the filtering tech into "applications" such as P2P apps, but again, this seems unlikely, especially for the open-source ones. Maybe he hopes to get OS vendors on board?

The entire scheme has about as much chance of success as my 2008 bid for the White House (write-in Anderson for President in November!). The only way to make it work is to mandate the filters or have ISPs mandate that users install them to get on the Internet. The consumer backlash from such a plan would be like the force of a thousand supernovas, and it's hard to visualize this happening.

What's most incredible about all of this is that the RIAA and some ISPs (namely AT&T) are seriously moving ahead with a filtering regime despite their own admissions that it won't work. Filters might work, they might allow for fair use, and they could conceivably be built in such a way as to maintain privacy, but it just wouldn't matter. Filtering as a concept is ultimately doomed by encryption unless the "filters" simply block entire protocols altogether, and talking about the consumer benefits of installing RIAA-approved filtering software is just another sign of how ludicrous the entire debate has become.

It's time to find a better solution with more than a short-term chance of success.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...n-problem.html





“The Federation” Targets BitTorrent Pirates at the Workplace
enigmax

The UK’s Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) has launched the third phase of ‘Operation Tracker’, an initiative to monitor people using BitTorrent to share computer software from their homes and also from their workplaces.

FAST - The Federation Against Software Theft is a UK organization setup in 1984 with the stated aim of ‘promoting the legal use of software by enforcement, lobbying and education’

‘The Federation’, as they like to be called, are currently entering Phase 3 of ‘Operation Tracker’ which aims to trace a “large number of computer users who are breaking copyright law by sharing software on the internet.” They do this using what they call ‘undercover investigators’ - people monitoring P2P networks and gathering data. FAST targets residential addresses but much prefers to catch business connections engaged in file-sharing activities as these are easiest to get a big settlement from. Very often, FAST tries to shift the blame for the file-sharing directly to the company directors, an effective way of increasing the pressure.

Now, FAST says it is monitoring certain sites for the purposes of tracking ‘illegal software downloads’, particularly those that employ ’swarming technology’ (BitTorrent) in the 3rd phase of Operation Tracker. FAST is using a tracking tool it calls ‘The CCTV of the Internet’ but which is likely just an open source BitTorrent client, with some more advanced logging features tagged on.

Chief Executive of The Federation John Lovelock, said of the system: “The march of technology assists both the law breaker and the investigator.” Indicating a longer-term initiative rather than a blitz he continued: “Operation Tracker Three is not designed to achieve overnight results. Rather it is a long-term surveillance operation aimed at successfully tracing and bringing to book anyone found to be blatantly flouting the law.”

According to FAST, it recently carried out some research with YouGov and was very disappointed to learn that just 2% of the workforce in the UK thought that they could get caught ’stealing software’. With that in mind, this ‘new phase’ is probably more of a publicity drive for instilling fear into UK businesses who allow their staff to share files than anything else.

As mentioned before, FAST likes to concentrate its efforts on targeting businesses, and those directors that run them, very often claiming that management allow their employees to break the law and therefore must be held ultimately responsible.

“Corporate liability is something that management cannot afford to gloss over - misuse of software is something Directors cannot plead ignorance to” said Lovelock. “If employees are using the corporate network for illegal activity those in charge may be liable. Theft is theft and will be treated accordingly.”

As is customary, Lovelock goes on to confuse physical theft, with copyright infringement: “Our message hasn’t changed,” he said. “Installing software unlawfully is wrong. After all you would not let your employees steal a company car so why are corporates allowing this to continue?”

‘The Federation’ is interesting in that it has mixed non-profit and for-profit operations under the same banner, leaving some people wondering about the direction of the organization. The Federation was a share holder in the for-profit business ‘FAST Limited’ with both sharing offices, staff and a common logo, creating a huge amount of confusion, as indicated by this post, and others like them:

“We had a visit from an officer of Fast who, in a 10-minute Q&A, identified ‘16 areas of concern’ with our IT practices. Nearly all were bullshit, with some very minor exceptions. She then suggested that we should join FAST as a corporate member to complete the training, just in case (hint, hint) Trading Standards ever came around to do an audit. What this tells me is that she is obviously a salesperson, working on commission, signing up as many members as possible. This strikes me as a highly unethical way of doing business for what is essentially a regulatory body.”

Unethical? Surely not…..
http://torrentfreak.com/the-federati...kplace-080203/





Television

Famous Black Lives Through DNA’s Prism
Felicia R. Lee

“African-American Lives 2,” a four-part series on PBS that begins on Wednesday night, belies its sleepy name with the poetry of history, the magic of science and the allure of the family trees of Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Tina Turner, Don Cheadle, Tom Joyner and Maya Angelou.

It is the latest incarnation of the highly rated, critically successful star genealogy program that its host, the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., presented in 2006. Then Oprah Winfrey, Chris Tucker, Quincy Jones and Whoopi Goldberg were among Professor Gates’s eight guests for “African-American Lives.” That was followed in 2007 by “Oprah’s Roots.”

This time scientists use DNA samples, and scholars peruse slave ship records, wills and other documents to recreate the histories of 12 people, including Professor Gates and one Everywoman guest.

“I conceived of these series as roots in a test tube,” Professor Gates says early in “Lives,” which will be broadcast on most PBS stations in two hourlong episodes on Wednesday and two on Feb. 13. Through the prism of the individual stories of rapes of black women, the failed promise of Reconstruction, the great migration of black Southerners to the North, the struggle for education, land, and freedom, Professor Gates lays bare the basic contradiction of the American dream.

Mr. Rock can be seen wiping away a tear after learning that his great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, served in the South Carolina Legislature, and died owning dozens of acres of land. He never knew any of that history, Mr. Rock says in the program. He recounts growing up in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood and being bused to a white school where he was bullied.

“Until I lucked into a comedy club at, you know, age 20, just on a whim, I assumed I would pick up things for white people for the rest of my life,” Mr. Rock says. “If I’d known this, it would have taken away the inevitability that I was going to be nothing.”

Along with the triumphs are the inevitable tragedies. Tom Joyner, the celebrity radio personality, is shaken to learn that in 1915 an all-white jury in South Carolina convicted his two great-uncles of killing a white man. They were prosperous landowners, but were sent to the electric chair, even though evidence uncovered by the “Lives” researchers suggests their innocence. Mr. Joyner and Professor Gates said they planned to petition the South Carolina government to exonerate them posthumously.

Mr. Joyner is seen in “Lives” gathered with his extended family, reading old newspaper articles and learning a story that had been lost.

“I have had mixed emotions — grief, anger, pride,” Mr. Joyner said in an interview about the program’s revelations, adding, “If you feel — and all of us have these feelings — that you can’t go any further, think about the people in your past and what they survived.”

In addition to the celebrities, the “Lives” interview subjects include Bliss Broyard, a writer whose father, Anatole Broyard, a New York Times book critic and editor, was black and passed for white; the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, a Harvard theologian; Linda Johnson Rice, president and chief executive of the company that publishes Ebony and Jet magazines; Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Olympic gold-medal athlete; and Kathleen Henderson, a University of Dayton administrator who competed with more than 2,000 entrants to be on the program.

Professor Gates, a co-founder of the genealogy Web site AfricanDNA.com and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, keeps things going at a rapid pace for his guests. He whips out photographs of former slave masters (who were sometimes relatives), pinpoints the African countries of ancestors and travels to Ireland himself to track down his Irish roots. In the last episode everyone learns his or her percentage of European, Native American and African blood.

“These stories are much more in-depth than those in ‘African-American Lives,’ ” Mr. Gates said in a recent telephone interview. “Then, a lot of documents had not been digitized, and we’ve learned to interpret the DNA testing better, with more subtlety and sophistication.”

In one of the stories Morgan Freeman puzzles over the nature of the relationship between his white great-great-grandfather and African-American great-great-grandmother, who had eight children together. His great-great grandfather’s employer owned her.

“I don’t know, really,” Mr. Freeman replies when Professor Gates asks him how that information makes him feel.

But, in a twist, the “Lives” researchers discovered that Mr. Morgan’s white great-great grandfather sold land to his biracial sons. And they found the great-great-grandparents’ headstones on that land in Mississippi, side by side, bearing the same last name and surrounded by the graves of their children.

None of the guests are 100 percent anything. Maya Angelou shakes her head in sorrow as Mr. Gates tells her that her black great-grandmother, 17-year-old Mary Lee, was impregnated by her 50-year-old white former master (who forced her to name another man as the father) and ended up in the poor house along with her child. That child was Ms. Angelou’s grandmother, Marguerite.

“That poor little black girl, physically and psychologically bruised,” Ms. Angelou murmurs.

“You never know how you’re going to come here,” Ms. Angelou said in an interview about her participation in “Lives” and her ancestor Mary Lee. “People have great weddings, and they’re lucky to have it last five years.”

Ms. Angelou said she initially disliked the idea of using celebrities to reclaim history but realized that they would attract viewers to examine the complexity of this country’s roots. “Nothing human can be alien to me,” Ms. Angelou said. “If we could internalize just a portion of that, it could get us away from the blithering idiocy of racism.”

And what is race? Professor Gates asks. Ms. Broyard, who grew up thinking she was white, says in “Lives” that she believes that her father, who died in 1990, “passed” to protect his children from racism. She does not feel she has the right to call herself “black” now because it designates not just physicality but lived experience, she tells Professor Gates.

“It’s a complicated message to get across,” Ms. Broyard said in an interview. “We can find the geographic origins of our ancestors, but it doesn’t mean that race is a biological destiny.”

Still, Professor Gates sees the evolving use of DNA and records searches as ways to revolutionize how science is taught in schools. PBS is using the Web site pbs.org/aalives2 and other resources to help educators and others interesting in pursuing the information in the series.

“Forget going into a classroom and saying, ‘I am going to teach you about Watson and Crick and the double helix,’ ” Professor Gates said. “Imagine if I could say, ‘With this cotton swab, we can tell you where your ancestors come from in Africa.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/ar...root.html?8dpc





Mininova Launches Music Torrent Streaming
Ernesto

The popular BitTorrent site Mininova just released a set of new features, including music torrent streaming. The new music streaming feature uses a Java applet developed by BitLet, which is easy to use and compatible with all Java-enabled browsers.

With the new music streaming feature users can listen to individual music tracks, streamed from .torrent files. It is integrated in the featured torrents section, which lists all the distributors that take part in Mininova’s content distribution platform. An example of a streamable torrent is this track.

If you want to stream music torrents that are not listed in the featured section, you’ll need to use the Bitlet website. The service currently supports mp3 and ogg/vorbis files.

BitTorrent streaming is not restricted to music files, and indeed, Erik, one of the founders of Mininova told TorrentFreak that they are currently looking into the possibility of video streaming via BitTorrent as well. He said that Mininova will start a private BETA test of the BitTorrent video streaming integration in a few weeks.

Together with the music streaming capability, Mininova published some other new features including comment tracking, which gives users an overview of all the comments they recently made. Another new feature that might come in handy is the manual refresh of the seeder and leecher statistics that logged in users now have.

Finally, every self respecting BitTorrent sites now has its own toolbar. Isohunt and The Pirate Bay launched one a few weeks ago, so Mininova couldn’t stay behind. Personally I’m not a huge fan of these toobars, but some people seem to like it. The good news is, the toolbars are malware free, and generate some extra revenue via the integrated search box.

It’s good to see that Mininova and other BitTorrent sites continue to add new features, and improve the service to their users.
http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-lau...eaming-080209/
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