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Old 23-01-08, 07:54 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 26th, '08

Since 2002


































"It’ll be hard, but I need to disconnect. I need to just pull the plug on this Internet life for a little bit and see what it’s like." – Greg Bukata


"Permitting the submission of secret argument is antithetical to our adversary system of justice." – U.S. Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV


"I owe you one. It's good to know there are some honest people left in the world." – Alan Murphy


































January 26th, 2008





MPAA Admits Mistake on Downloading Study
Justin Pope

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong.

In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.

The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so.

But now the MPAA, which represents the U.S. motion picture industry, has told education groups a "human error" in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.

The MPAA says that's still significant, and justifies a major effort by colleges and universities to crack down on illegal file-sharing. But Mark Luker, vice president of campus IT group Educause, says it doesn't account for the fact that more than 80 percent of college students live off campus and aren't necessarily using college networks. He says 3 percent is a more reasonable estimate for the percentage of revenue that might be at stake on campus networks.

"The 44 percent figure was used to show that if college campuses could somehow solve this problem on this campus, then it would make a tremendous difference in the business of the motion picture industry," Luker said. The new figures prove "any solution on campus will have only a small impact on the industry itself."

The original report, by research firm LEK, claims the U.S. motion picture industry lost $6.1 billion to piracy worldwide, with most of the losses overseas. It identified the typical movie pirate as a male aged 16-24. MPAA said in a statement that no errors had been found in the study besides the percentage of revenue losses that could be attributed to college students, but that it would hire a third party to validate the numbers.

"We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report," the group said in a statement.

Terry Hartle, vice president of the American Council on Education, which represents higher education in Washington, said the mistakes showed the entertainment industry has unfairly targeted college campuses.

"Illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing is a society-wide problem. Some of it occurs at college s and universities but it is a small portion of the total," he said, adding colleges will continue to take the problem seriously, but more regulation isn't necessary.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j...Ec2mwD8UB6S0O2





Troubling "Digital Theft Prevention" Requirements Remain in Higher Education Bill
Richard Esguerra

Last November, we reported on H.R. 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, which includes misguided anti-piracy requirements for universities. For the most part, the massive, nearly 800-page bill refreshes existing legislation about federal financial aid. But the bill also includes a section with a title that sounds as if it were dreamt up by an entertainment industry lobbyist: "Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention." Specifically, the bill says:

Quote:
Each eligible institution participating in any program under this title shall to the extent practicable—

[...]

(2) develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.
To those unfamiliar with this particular sort of DC double-speak, "alternatives to illegal downloading" means industry-sanctioned download services; and existing "technology-based deterrents" means network filters and other tools.

These congressional requirements will turn out to be expensive dead-ends -- the industry-sanctioned online music services are laden with DRM, and network detection/filtering programs present privacy risks and are inevitably rendered obsolete by technological countermeasures.

Advocates of the bill stress that the language stops short of demanding implementation -- that it only requires universities to "plan" -- but this argument misses the point entirely. The passage of this bill will unambiguously lead universities down the wrong path. For the sake of artists, administrators, students, and consumers better approaches exist.

The bill also would hang an unspoken threat over the heads of university administrators. In response to concerns that potential penalties for universities could include a loss of federal student aid funding, the MPAA's top lawyer in Washington said that federal funds should be at risk when copyright infringement happens on campus networks. Moreover, earlier versions of "Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention" proposals nakedly sought to make schools that received numerous copyright infringement notices subject to review by the US Secretary of Education.

In October 2007, the MPAA even tried to supplement its efforts in Congress by giving away custom-built network monitoring software to universities it had flagged for having the most file-sharing traffic. The software, which they called "University Toolkit," was exposed by researchers to have egregious security and privacy flaws. And, in an ironic twist, the University Toolkit was removed from the MPAA website following allegations of copyright infringement -- the MPAA had failed to comply with copyright licensing terms that required the source code for the toolkit software to be freely available.

Recent reports suggest that February may be the earliest that the House will address the bill. There is time yet to contact your representative in Congress to educate them about these out-of-place requirements, and to ask that they support any effort to remove the offending mandate from the bill. Visit our Action Center to email your representative today.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/01...education-bill





Hollywood's Congressman to Leave Internet and IP Issues Behind
Nate Anderson

"Hollywood" Howard Berman (D-CA), the California Congressman who chairs the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, could be moving on to bigger and better things—and that could mean changing priorities on the crucial subcommittee.

When Tom Lantos (D-CA) announced early in January that he would retire for health reasons after this term, Berman appeared to be next in line to chair the powerful House Committee on Foreign Affairs. A story in today's Hollywood Reporter confirms through senior Democratic aides that Berman intends to take the job, which would remove him as chair of the Internet and IP subcommittee.

While chairing that committee, Berman has consistently backed stronger IP rights for all industries that want them. He's been behind the push to make radio stations pay performers for playing their music (instead of just paying the songwriters) and has backed the MPAA's campaign against colleges and universities. Berman has also argued for "reforming" the DMCA on the grounds that it did not go far enough, and he has backed the PRO-IP Act, a bill that Google's top copyright lawyer has called the most "outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the US."

But Berman has also managed to earn praise even from his philosophical opponents for involving many different stakeholders in the creation of legislation.

One of the most likely candidates to replace Berman on the subcommittee is Rick Boucher (D-VA), who was considered to be in the running for the job the last time around. Boucher is a man we've previously referred to as "a voice of sanity in a cacophony of idiocy" when it comes to IP issues.

He was the backer of the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA), a bill designed to reform the problems of the DMCA. Sadly, when the bill was introduced in its most recent incarnation, it was far more limited in scope than we would have liked, though it did still address some real problems with secondary liability. He has also backed network neutrality laws and a plan to use the Universal Service Fund for funding rural broadband connections, and he has introduced legislation to give bloggers and journalists federal "shield" protection.

There's no guarantee yet that Boucher will get the job, and he and Berman still need to win their respective elections this fall, but even the prospect of a Boucher-controlled Internet and IP subcommittee in the House feels like an early Christmas present. As the Hollywood Reporter correctly notes, though, the full Committee is still chaired by John Conyers (D-MI), who comes from the Berman School of Thought on such issues.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...es-behind.html





Latest Test for DMCA Safe Harbors: Warner Sues SeeqPod
Fred von Lohmann

Warner Music Group has sued SeeqPod (complaint, 500k PDF), a "Web 2.0" music search engine (combined with embedable playlists, etc, etc) that has been gaining in popularity in recent months.

This is the latest in a string of lawsuits against Web 2.0 companies. Together, the suits represent an attack by the entertainment industry on the DMCA safe harbors that protect hosting services and search engines. Other similar cases have been filed against YouTube, MP3Tunes.com, Veoh, PornoTube, and Divx/Stage 6.

The SeeqPod case is different, however, because it is among the first that directly tests how copyright law applies to search engines. Despite the success of search engines like Yahoo and Google, there has been remarkably little case law developed on the copyright front. Part of the reason is because Congress stepped in with the DMCA safe harbors in 1998, creating some degree of certainty where the background legal concepts (e.g., contributory infringement) did not. In addition, by endorsing a notice-and-takedown regime, the DMCA safe harbors created a solution for many copyright owners that is cheaper than litigation.

But now, as search engines become more specialized and capable, certain copyright owners have become increasingly dissatisfied with the notice-and-takedown bargain struck in the DMCA. That's what these lawsuits are really about -- the defendants are complying with the letter of the law, but copyright owners are now trying to change the rules in court.

Of course, the SeeqPod case may settle (as a similar case brought by Warner against iMeem did). But the copyright issues will not be going away anytime soon (in particular, keep your eye on the remand in the Perfect 10 v. Google case, where the DMCA safe harbor issues may take center stage).
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/01...r-sues-seeqpod





Proposed EU ISP Filtering and Copyright Extension Shot Down
Jon Stokes

This past November, EU regulators in the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education began looking in earnest at Europe's cultural products and heritage as an engine for economic growth. The idea behind this investigation, which took its original impetus from a 2006 study on "The economy of culture in Europe" and culminated in a draft report submitted by French socialist MEP Guy Bono entitled "On cultural industries in the context of the Lisbon strategy," is to consider ways that EU regulation might give a boost to the so-called "cultural and creative sector."

The draft report contained language that the caused alarm among European music and movie business trade groups, so Europe's version of Big Content immediately set about lobbying to not only "fix" the offending point (number 9, quoted below), but to convert it into a power grab by proposing alternative language supporting ISP-level copyright filtering (c.f. similar efforts in the US) and the extension of copyright terms.

Here's point 9 from the draft report; see if you can spot the language that made Europe's content industry nervous:

Quote:
9. [The European Parliament] urges the Commission to rethink the critical issue of intellectual property from the cultural and economic point of view and to invite all those active in the sector to join forces and seek solutions equitable to all, in the interest of a balance between the opportunities for access to cultural events and content and intellectual property; draws Member States' attention on this point to the fact that criminalising consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution;
All that talk of striking a "balance" between access and intellectual property, and the negative reference to industry tactics that "criminalize" consumers spawned a flurry of lobbying activity, and by the time the dust settled lobbyists had succeeded in getting the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research, and Energy (ITRE) to submit an amendment to the draft report urging European ISPs to implement filtering mechanisms for the purpose of copyright enforcement.

The European recording industry followed up this move with another amendment, proposed last week, to extend EU copyright terms to match those of the US (the author's life plus 70 years).

The EFF's Danny O'Brien sent a heads-up to BoingBoing that, as of today, the Culture and Education Committee rejected all of the proposed filtering and copyright extension amendments. Clearly, they're not going to let the ITRE or the European recording industry push them around, which is great news for Europeans. Now if we could only get the US Congress to show as much spine as the French (ouch).
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...shot-down.html





Peer-to-Peer Network Invites Drivers to Get Connected

CarTorrent could smarten up our daily commute, reducing accidents and bringing multimedia journey data to our fingertips
Laura Parker

The name BitTorrent has become part of most people's day-to-day vernacular, synonymous with downloading every kind of content via the internet's peer-to-peer networks. But if a team of US researchers have their way, we may all be talking about CarTorrent in the not too distant future.

Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles are working on a wireless communication network that will allow cars to talk to each other, simultaneously downloading information in the shape of road safety warnings, entertainment content and navigational tools.

The UCLA Engineering's Network Research Lab team, led by Mario Gerla and Giovanni Pau, hit upon the idea in 2004, when peer-to-peer networking took off fuelled by applications such as BitTorrent. "We had the idea from BitTorrent, and decided to extend BitTorrent to cars under the name of CarTorrent. One of our dreams had always been to apply the technology to civilian applications," says Gerla. "Imagine you're driving to a beach resort and want to find out what the best beaches are. You could stop at a gas station and download several video clips from an internet access point, but that's not very convenient."

Wireless at the wheel

Gerla and his team instead propose to connect cars to one another using the wireless networking platform they're developing, which could be up and running by as early as 2012.

The wireless network would allow moving vehicles within 100 metres and 300 metres of each other to connect and create a network with a wide range. The network would then allow drivers to download information from internet access points simply by driving by, and then share that information with other cars on the road.

Gerla says the benefits of such a network are numerous: "There will be immediate benefits in driving safety as well as in content distribution. Car-to-car communications can be used to avoid accidents by alerting the drivers of imminent danger. To prevent a crash we must act in fractions of a second. We are currently collaborating with vehicle manufacturers to help reduce accidents and fatalities on the road. For this latter application, vehicles are equipped with sensing devices, such as radars and video cameras."

The network uses standard radio protocols such as Digital Short Range Communication, or DSRC, combined with wireless LAN technology at 5.9GHz (not Wi-Fi's 2.4GHz) to create networks between vehicles equipped with onboard sensing devices. These devices can gather safety-related information as well as other complex multimedia data.

By far the most essential aspect of this network, though, is that it is not subject to memory, processing, storage and energy limitations like traditional sensor networks. Instead, it relies on the resources of the vehicle itself, along with those vehicles around it.

Under the scheme, cars would be able to use their onboard radios to exchange three categories of information: safe navigation (such as reporting on icy road conditions, traffic jams and possible collisions ahead), content distribution (locally relevant information, advertisements and videos of upcoming attractions) and urban surveillance (collecting information which could be used later by police for forensic investigations).

Gerla and his team are already collaborating with car manufacturers such as Toyota and BMW on bringing the project to life. However, costs and industry standards are the more important hurdles that this network will have to jump before it can become feasible. Gerla says the network can be slowly implemented, just as GPS navigation systems and Wi-Fi-style radios have slowly started to become standard equipment.

"What will turn the tide will be the approval and widespread adoption of the emerging standards for car-to-car communications sponsored by the IEEE 802.11p Working Committee of the IEEE [the professional association for the advancement of technology]," says Gerla.

"A few years ago, leading car manufacturers decided to join forces with national government agencies in the Vehicle Information Infrastructure Consortium, which works closely with the IEEE 802.11p Committee, to develop communications architecture to help drivers anticipate hazardous events or avoid bad traffic areas."

However, Gerla says the network is not without faults: "The two most critical aspects that could go wrong if the network is implemented are location privacy, because drivers do not want others to know where they are; and attacks where a driver could maliciously inject wrong traffic congestion information to persuade other drivers to get out of its way."

Defensive drivers

With costs currently estimated at around $500 (£255) per car for the implementation of the equipment required to connect to the network, drivers probably won't be clamouring to get the kit.

"Most likely, there will be at least initially two types of drivers," Gerla says. "The drivers enamoured with high-tech features will immediately embrace this technology. But it's true that less aggressive drivers, probably a sizeable fraction of the population, will be reluctant to embrace the technology at first."

That, of course, could present a problem for the growth of CarTorrent: for as anyone who has tried using BitTorrent will know, there's no point in being the only person on a peer-to-peer network. Being the first car to use CarTorrent will be an expensive and pointless exercise. But like a telephone - and the internet - it's the sort of technology whose benefits will multiply rapidly as long as more people use it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ent.technology





Court Says You Can Copyright A Cease-And-Desist Letter

Back in October, we wrote about a law firm that was claiming a copyright on the cease-and-desist letters it sent out, and insisting that it was a violation to repost them. It's long been believed that cease-and-desist letters that have no new creative expression and are merely boilerplates are likely not covered by copyright. On top of that, preventing someone from copying a cease-and-desist letter or posting it on their own website seems like a pretty severe First Amendment violation. The group Public Citizen hit back against this law firm's claims, but surprisingly, a judge has now agreed that you can copyright cease-and-desist letters (thanks to Eric Goldman for emailing over the link). The news was announced in a press release by the lawyer in question, who claims this means he can now sue anytime someone posts one of his cease-and-desist letters. He also goes on to slam those who believe free speech means being able to talk about the fact that a company is bullying them:

Quote:
"The publication of cease and desist letters is an easy way for scofflaws to generate online 'mobosphere' support for illegal activity and, until today, many businesses have been hesitant to take action to address some of the lawlessness online because of possible retaliation and attacks."
To which I would respond: "The copyrighting of cease-and-desist letters is an easy way for law firms to bully small companies who have committed no wrong, but who have no real recourse to fight back against an attempt to shut them up via legal threat. Until today, many companies who were being unfairly attacked by companies and law firms misusing cease-and-desist letters to prevent opinions from being stated, had a reasonable recourse to such attacks, and could draw attention to law firms that used such bullying tactics to mute any criticism." This is an unfortunate ruling and can only serve to create a serious chilling effect on free speech.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080125/18070575.shtml





Virus Writers Charged with Copyright Violation
John Leyden

Japan has arrested its first suspected virus writers, but in a strange twist the three suspected creators and distributors of a strain of P2P malware have been charged with copyright violation, in an arrest that recalls Al Capone's prosecution for tax evasion.

The trio were cuffed by cops in Kyoto on suspicion of involvement in a plot to infect users of the Winny P2P file-sharing network with a Trojan horse that displayed images of popular animé characters while wiping MP3 and movie files. The malware, called Harada is Japanese reports, is reckoned to be related to the Pirlames Trojan horse (http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/ne.../pirlames.html) intercepting by net security firm Sophos in Japan last year.

According to local reports, the three men have confessed to their roles in unleashing the malware. One is said to have created the malware, while the other duo are reckoned to have offered the malware up to prospective marks on Winny. A lack of relevant computer crime law in Japan means that the group have been charged with copyright offences.

"It isn't illegal to write viruses in Japan, so the author of the Trojan horse has been arrested for breaching copyright because he used cartoon graphics without permission in his malware," explained Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "Because this is the first arrest in Japan of a virus writer, it's likely to generate a lot of attention and there may be calls for cybercrime laws to be made tighter."

Due to the lack of applicable cybercrime laws, the authors of the malware face much the same fate as the coder who developed Winny. Isamu Kaneko, Winny's author, was fined by a Japanese court in December 2006 for copyright offences.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01..._vxer_arrests/





Anti Piracy Group 'Breaks Law' to Track File Sharers

Switzerland warns leading company it is breaching telecoms law
Jeremy Kirk

The Swiss authorities have warned a company that tracks file sharers for copyright violations that its tactics violate the country's telecommunication law.

Logistep, which supplies information on suspected file sharers to law firms around the world for use in copyright violation cases, has until 9 February to respond to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), said Marc Schaefer, the agency's legal advisor.

Under Swiss law, the identity of a subscriber to an ISP (Internet service provider) can only be revealed during the course of a criminal case, not a civil one, Schaefer said. The IP (Internet Protocol) address of a computer controlled by the subscriber is considered "personal" information.

In order to try to claim damages from people suspected of trading songs or movies, Logistep has asked Swiss prosecutors to open criminal cases, Schaefer said. As the criminal cases progresses, Logistep receives information from prosecutors that identifies the file sharer.

Logistep then initiates a civil case against the file sharer while the criminal case is ongoing. Prosecutors usually drop the criminal case against the person, Schaefer said.

By starting a criminal case "to obtain the identity behind an IP address ... they just found a way to avoid the telecommunication law," Schaefer said. "Therefore, we told Logistep to stop their work until there is a legal basis which allows such an identification."

The FDPIC's recommended to Logistep to stop the practice, but is prepared to take the matter to court, Schaefer said. Logistep would be in the clear if they pursued a civil case after the criminal one is complete, he said.

Logistep has issued a statement contending an IP address is not personal information. Company officials could not be reached Friday.

An IP address can indicate the location of a computer but not necessarily who is using it. Several people could share the same computer, which would have one IP address.

But ISPs, as well as wireless routers used in home, can also dynamically assign IP addresses, which adds further ambiguity regarding who is using the computer and who may be responsible for illegally activity conducted on the PC.

That means the person paying the bill for the Internet service may end up as the target of the civil proceeding rather than the offender, adding another worrying factor into the lawsuits, Schaefer said.

On its Web site, Logistep said it can compile a history of illegal files shared by someone, even if encryption or proxy servers are used to mask the sharing.

The row comes amid growing concerns over how personal data is collected and retained in Europe.

On Monday, a top European data protection official, Peter Schaar, said at a European Parliament hearing that an IP address should be considered personal information since it can be used to identify people.

Schaar is chairman of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party which is looking at personal data and privacy issues, such as what kind of data search engines retain. A report is scheduled for release by April.
http://www.computerworlduk.com/manag...fm?newsid=7201





Student Behind DoS Attack that Rekindled Bad Soviet Memories
Joel Hruska

Last May, the web sites of a number of high-ranking Estonian politicians and businesses were attacked over a period of several weeks. At the time, relations between Russia and Estonia were chillier than usual, due in part to the Estonian government's plans to move a World War II-era memorial known as the Bronze Soldier (pictured below at its original location) away from the center of the city and into a cemetery. The country's plan was controversial, and led to protests that were often led by the country's ethnic Russian minority. When the cyberattacks occurred, Estonia claimed that Russia was either directly or indirectly involved—an allegation that the Russian government denied. Almost a year later, the Russian government appears to have been telling the truth about its involvement (or lack thereof) in the attacks against Estonia. As InfoWorld reports, an Estonian youth has been arrested for the attacks, and current evidence suggests he was acting independently—prosecutors in Estonia have stated they have no other suspects. Because the attacks were botnet-driven and launched from servers all over the globe, however, it's impossible to state definitively that only a single individual was involved.

Dmitri Galushkevich, a 20-year-old Estonian student, launched the DoS (denial-of-service) attacks from his own PC last year. Although he's a native Estonian, Galushkevich was angry over his government's plans to move the statue, and launched the attack as a means of protesting the decision. The fact that a single angry student was able to impact international relations between two countries is an startling development. Understanding why Estonia and Russia got into a tiff about a war memorial statue in the first place, however, requires that we take a trip down history lane.

American history tends to focus its coverage of World War II on the theaters of combat we participated in. This makes logical sense—but it leaves the story of the eastern front largely untold, and doesn't begin to explain why the Russians would be upset over Estonia's movement of a statue nearly 63 years after the war's end—or why the Estonians would want to move it in the first place.

The Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1940 as part of the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Once it held the country (Russia, to this day, insists the USSR was invited into Estonia and did not "occupy" it), extraordinary elections were held with the ballots restricted to pro-Communist choices. The country became a member of the USSR in August 1940—and was promptly invaded and occupied by the Germans in 1941 when that country opened the Eastern Front of the war.

Germany's eastern front with the USSR was both the longest and the deadliest in worldwide military history. Contemporary estimates on how many Soviet soldiers and civilians died can vary widely, but the median figures suggest that the Red Army lost approximately 10 million men, with an additional 20 million civilian casualties. Soviet casualties and losses dwarfed those of any other nation, and the conflict left an indelible imprint on Russian society.

The war memorials built in Soviet-occupied territories after the war ended weren't just monuments to the millions of soldiers and civilians killed in the conflict—they were Soviet ideological bulwarks and physical representations of what the Great Patriotic War had cost the motherland.

The majority of Estonians, however, have a different view. To them, the Bronze Soldier was a symbol of 50 years of Soviet and communist oppression—many Estonians, in fact, voluntarily enlisted and fought with the Germans in 1944 once it became apparent that the Soviets were about to reoccupy the country. Combine the two viewpoints with a significant minority of ethnic Russians who still identify with the memorial as a reminder of Soviet sacrifice, and you've got a pile of tinder just waiting for a spark.

The fact that a single student was able to trigger such events is particularly ominous when you consider just how many potential flashpoints exist between various countries all over the world. The DoS attack against Estonia is an excellent example of how a cyberattack carried out by a 20-year-old student in response to real-life events further exacerbated an existing problem between two nations.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-memories.html





Hacking the XO Laptop
Joel Evans

We recently wrote about the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative and specifically the XO laptop. Basically, the XO is a $200 laptop specially designed for use in developing nations. The laptop instantly recognizes other XO’s and connects to them, forming a mesh network, which then enables collaboration and even shared internet access in areas that traditionally can’t afford laptops and/or connectivity to the internet. They’re also specially designed for viewing in bright sunlight, and are incredibly durable. We’re already hearing about the positive impact these laptops are having on small villages, and more are being delivered daily.

The OLPC foundation previously offered a way to get your own XO laptop by taking advantage of their Give One Get One program, which allowed you to purchase two laptops, donating one to a developing nation. While that particular program is no longer available–I am hearing it will be offered again soon–you can still give one.

I took advantage of the G1G1 program and have had one for a while now and recently had a “geek” session with Brian Jepson of HackZine and O’Reilly. Brian is a seasoned geek and a quality Linux hacker, so we had a good time playing around with the XO. I should also mention that we generated some interest in our local Panera as we completely took over an area by a fireplace and had some strange gadgetry flying high.

More





RIAA Website Wiped Clean by “Hackers”
Ernesto

Apparently the RIAA is so busy suing consumers that they forgot to hire a decent programmer. With a simple SQL injection, all their propaganda has been successfully wiped from the site.

It started out on the social news website Reddit, where a link to a really slow SQL query was posted. While the Reddit users were trying to kill the RIAA server, someone allegedly decided to up the ante and wipe the site’s entire database.

The comments on Reddit are only speculation so far. Based on the username, which was apparently “webReadOnly”, it might not have been setup correctly, or someone could have found another way to delete the content form the site.

Another possibility is that the RIAA themselves removed the content temporarily. This would seem unlikely, as a better solution would be to take it entirely offline to fix the bigger problem. While they could fix a small vulnerability like this in a matter of seconds, the chances are it’s not an isolated problem.

As pointed out by Haywire, playing around with the urls a bit can return some funny results. It is pretty easy to make the RIAA link to The Pirate Bay for example.

For now it sure does look like all the content has been wiped from the RIAA homepage. Let’s hope they have backups, or not.
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-website-hacked-080120/





War Breaks Out Between Hackers and Scientology -- There Can Be Only One
Ryan Singel

A loose confederation of online troublemakers who call themselves Anonymous have declared war on the Church of Scientology by flooding its servers with fake data requests, describing the attacks as punishment for the Church's alleged abuse of copyright laws and alleged brainwashing of its members.

Anonymous congregates on the net at various hangouts such as 711chan.org (NSFW) and partyvan.info and sundry IRC channels. The group usually amuses itself by stealing passwords to downloading sites and finding ways to harass online communities that its members disdain. They were last seen on THREAT LEVEL when a Los Angeles Fox News affiliate ran a story that hilariously implied the group's arsenal included exploding vans.

The attack on Scientology, which Anonymous has dubbed Project Chanology, started in recent days, set off by the Church's most recent attempt to censor the internet by forcing sites to remove a creepy Tom Cruise Scientology video. A wiki set up for the project directs Anonymous members to download and use denial of service software, make prank calls, host Scientology documents the Church considers proprietary, and fax endless loops of black pages to the Church's fax machines to waste ink.

From the Wiki page for Project Chanology:

Quote:
Let our message ring out from the highest e-mountain.

So you want to join Project Chanology eh? Fight the good fight for the Internet? Or perhaps you are a skeptic, doubtful we can do anything? I won't lie to you. I am an /i/nsurgent first, a /b/tard second, and an all around Anonymous, but I know that for a fight against the Beast it will take more then possible even every chan combined could muster. We might be rivals; hell, we might hate each other's guts, but this goes beyond just us. The people of the Internet, Anonymous, the Goons of SA, the YTMNDers, various hacker groups, trolls of the world, the GameFAQs members, the Gaians, the eBaumers; us old time Internet users, and the newest of noobs, the YouTubers and MySpacers, must band together for a fight that transcends our differences and takes us to a level beyond our individual selves. When things happen to Scientology, like that South Park episode or Tom Cruise going insane on Oprah's show, Scientology loses lots of credential. We need to finish that off, or leave it open for the major media to deliver the coup-de-grace.
Anonymous has also sent out a press release.

The Church of Scientology was founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1952, and has a large presence in Los Angeles. Scientology's core beliefs center on overcoming traumas from earlier lives, something overcome through sessions with a Scientologist "auditor" who uses an "e-meter" to measure electrical changes in the petitioner's body.

The highly secretive Church of Scientology is liberal in its use of lawsuits to attack its critics and to have Church documents removed from the internet.

The Church of Scientology did not immediately respond to a call for comment.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ous-attac.html





Qualcomm’s Guards
Patrick McGeehan

Qualcomm spent about $265,000 last year to post guards at the homes of the company’s billionaire chairman, Irwin M. Jacobs, and its chief executive, Paul E. Jacobs. But the shareholders who were billed for the unusual protection may never know why.

Qualcomm, which makes chip sets for cellphones, temporarily provided the guards to “address a potential threat” to the two men, according to the company’s latest proxy statement. The proxy provides no detail on the threat or whether the Jacobses, who are father and son, were even targets. It simply states that the protective action was taken after “an incident with another high-profile business executive in the same residential area.”

Irwin Jacobs, who founded the company, is one of the most prominent residents of La Jolla, Calif., the affluent community where he has lived for decades in an oceanfront estate. A Qualcomm spokeswoman declined to answer questions about the matter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/business/27suits.html





Boning up on Locust Valley lockjaw

Criminals Beware: Computerized Lip Reading
Sarah Gingichashvili

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK are developing a computerized lip-reading system, which they say may be used to fight crime. The scientists recently received a grant of over half a million dollars by England’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and expect to complete developing the prototype within the next two years.

Lip-reading is a very difficult skill to master - human lip reading is often unreliable, even when it’s performed by trained lip readers. “We all lip read, for example in noisy situations like a bar or party, but even the performance of expert lip readers can be very poor. It appears that the best lip-readers are the ones who learned to speak a language before they lost their hearing and who have been taught lip-reading intensively. It is a very desirable skill” – said Dr. Richard Harvey, a Professor at UEA’s School of Computing Sciences and a leading researcher on the project.

UEA researchers are working in collaboration with experts at the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing at Surrey University, who have already developed advanced face and lip motion tracking systems. Both teams are currently collecting data, such as videos, which will be used in an analysis designed to determine the exact lip movements and facial expressions associated with specific letter combinations in the most accurate way. The scientists say that since very little is known about exactly what kind of visual information is required for effective lip-reading, one of their main challenges is the task of building a precise and sufficient database of photographs and videos to form a reliable basis for the lip-reading software. Their ultimate goal is to build machines that will be able to automatically convert lip-motion videos into text. According to the researchers, they also plan to extend the silent speech-recognition system to additional languages.

“To be effective the systems must accurately track the head over a variety of poses, extract numbers or features that describe the lips, and then learn what features correspond to what text.” – said Dr. Harvey. “To tackle the problem we will need to use information collected from audio speech, so this project will also investigate how to use the extensive information known about audio speech to recognise visual speech. The work will be highly experimental. We hope to produce a system that will demonstrate the ability to lip-read in more general situations than we have done so far.”

Apart from being extremely helpful to hearing-disabled individuals, researchers say that such a system could be used to noiselessly dictate commands to electronic devices equipped with a simple camera - like mobile phones, microwaves or even a car’s dashboard. England’s Home Office Scientific Development Branch, an institution dedicated to exploring technologies with potential applications in the fight against crime, is currently investigating the feasibility of using lip-reading software as an additional tool for gathering information about criminals or for collecting evidence.

TFOT previously covered MIT’s Lecture Browser software, which allows users to search video content using keywords. You can also read about NASA’s sub-vocal speech-recognition research, aimed to enable silent communication and speech augmentation in extremely noisy environments.

More information can be found on the UEA website (PDF).
http://www.tfot.info/news/1089/crimi...p-reading.html





Unisys Awarded CBP $62 Million RFID Reader Contract

This year, various forms of U.S. IDs will be equipped with vicinity RFID technology; DHS selects Unisys to install RFID readers at the 39 busiest U.S. land border ports of entry

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) awarded Blue Bell, Pennsylvania-based Unisys a task order worth as much as $62.2 million over five years to deploy readers and other technologies to support the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on new identification cards at the U.S. borders. Unisys of will install technology upgrades to enable border patrol agents at the thirty-nine largest land border ports of entry to read new RFID cards as well as to read license plates, the agency said in a news release. The new identification cards include the State Department’s upcoming passport card under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), the production of which -- a $100 million contract -- was awarded to General Dynamics earlier this week, as well as for a hybrid driver’s license and border card to be produced by Washington State and possibly other states and Canadian provinces. CBP awarded the task order under the Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for the Leading Edge Solutions contract program. It was competed among sixteen vendors in a category covering infrastructure engineering design, development, implementation and integration services.

Unisys will support the use of vicinity RFID technology, which makes RFID-equipped ID cards readable at distances of twenty feet. The RFID tags, embedded in the passport cards and enhanced driver’s license, will be scanned automatically by readers at the border. DHS officials have said they selected the long-range RFID technology over the shorter-range proximity RFID because it enables speedier processing of traffic at the borders. To protect privacy, the RFID tags on the passport card and enhanced driver’s licenses will transmit a reference number that must be matched to a CBP database to obtain personal information on the holder of the card or license.
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5375





Bush Order Expands Network Monitoring

Intelligence agencies to track intrusions
Ellen Nakashima

President Bush signed a directive this month that expands the intelligence community's role in monitoring Internet traffic to protect against a rising number of attacks on federal agencies' computer systems.

The directive, whose content is classified, authorizes the intelligence agencies, in particular the National Security Agency, to monitor the computer networks of all federal agencies -- including ones they have not previously monitored.

Until now, the government's efforts to protect itself from cyber-attacks -- which run the gamut from hackers to organized crime to foreign governments trying to steal sensitive data -- have been piecemeal. Under the new initiative, a task force headed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will coordinate efforts to identify the source of cyber-attacks against government computer systems. As part of that effort, the Department of Homeland Security will work to protect the systems and the Pentagon will devise strategies for counterattacks against the intruders.

There has been a string of attacks on networks at the State, Commerce, Defense and Homeland Security departments in the past year and a half. U.S. officials and cyber-security experts have said Chinese Web sites were involved in several of the biggest attacks back to 2005, including some at the country's nuclear-energy labs and large defense contractors.

The NSA has particular expertise in monitoring a vast, complex array of communications systems -- traditionally overseas. The prospect of aiming that power at domestic networks is raising concerns, just as the NSA's role in the government's warrantless domestic-surveillance program has been controversial.

"Agencies designed to gather intelligence on foreign entities should not be in charge of monitoring our computer systems here at home," said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. Lawmakers with oversight of homeland security and intelligence matters say they have pressed the administration for months for details.

The classified joint directive, signed Jan. 8 and called the National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23, has not been previously disclosed. Plans to expand the NSA's role in cyber-security were reported in the Baltimore Sun in September.

According to congressional aides and former White House officials with knowledge of the program, the directive outlines measures collectively referred to as the "cyber initiative," aimed at securing the government's computer systems against attacks by foreign adversaries and other intruders. It will cost billions of dollars, which the White House is expected to request in its fiscal 2009 budget.

"The president's directive represents a continuation of our efforts to secure government networks, protect against constant intrusion attempts, address vulnerabilities and anticipate future threats," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. He would not discuss the initiative's details.

The initiative foreshadows a policy debate over the proper role for government as the Internet becomes more dangerous.

Supporters of cyber-security measures say the initiative falls short because it doesn't include the private sector -- power plants, refineries, banks -- where analysts say 90 percent of the threat exists.

"If you don't include industry in the mix, you're keeping one of your eyes closed because the hacking techniques are likely the same across government and commercial organizations," said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute, a Bethesda-based cyber-security group that assists companies that face attacks. "If you're looking for needles in the haystack, you need as much data as you can get because these are really tiny needles, and bad guys are trying to hide the needles."

Under the initiative, the NSA, CIA and the FBI's Cyber Division will investigate intrusions by monitoring Internet activity and, in some cases, capturing data for analysis, sources said.

The Pentagon can plan attacks on adversaries' networks if, for example, the NSA determines that a particular server in a foreign country needs to be taken down to disrupt an attack on an information system critical to the U.S. government. That could include responding to an attack against a private-sector network, such as the telecom industry's, sources said.

Also, as part of its attempt to defend government computer systems, the Department of Homeland Security will collect and monitor data on intrusions, deploy technologies for preventing attacks and encrypt data. It will also oversee the effort to reduce Internet portals across government to 50 from 2,000, to make it easier to detect attacks.

"The government has taken a solid step forward in trying to develop cyber-defenses," said Paul B. Kurtz, a security consultant and former special adviser to the president on critical infrastructure protection. Kurtz said the initiative's purpose is not to spy on Americans. "The thrust here is to protect networks."

One of the key questions is whether it is necessary to read communications to investigate an intrusion.

Ed Giorgio, a former NSA analyst who is now a security consultant for ODNI, said, "If you're looking inside a DoD system and you see data flows going to China, that ought to set off a red flag. You don't need to scan the content to determine that."

But often, traffic analysis is not enough, some experts said. "Knowing the content -- that a communication is sensitive -- allows proof positive that something bad is going out of that computer," said one cyber-security expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the initiative's sensitivity.

Allowing a spy agency to monitor domestic networks is worrisome, said James X. Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "We're concerned that the NSA is claiming such a large role over the security of unclassified systems," he said. "They are a spy agency as well as a communications security agency. They operate in total secrecy. That's not necessary and not the most effective way to protect unclassified systems."

A proposal last year by the White House Homeland Security Council to put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of the initiative was resisted by national security agencies on the grounds that the department, established in 2003, lacked the necessary expertise and authority. The tug-of-war lasted weeks and was resolved only recently, several sources said.

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012503261.html





Swiss Move on Quantum Cryptography

Ensuring effective data security is the next challenge for global data networks; quantum cryptography offers such effective security; the Swiss national election in October 2007 provided first real-life test of the technology, and Swiss now move to implement it in security-sensitive sectors of the economy

We wrote last fall about how the October 2007 wiss national elections would offer the first real-world opportunity to examine quantum cryptography in action. In last fall's elections, Geneva was first in line to test the unbreakable data code developed by Swiss start-up company id Quantique, paving the way for a new era in data security. The canton of Geneva became a world pioneer when it decided to use quantum cryptography to protect the dedicated line used for counting votes in the October national elections.

The world’s first commercial quantum random number generator and quantum cryptography system was developed by the Swiss company id Quantique -- a spin-off company of the University of Geneva -- so the choice of Geneva to test the system in action was only appropriate. The firm was founded in 2001 by four researchers from the University of Geneva: Nicolas Gisin, Grégoire Ribordy, Olivier Guinnard, and Hugo Zbinden. According to Gisin: “Protection of the federal elections is of historical importance in the sense that, after several years of development and experimentation, this will be the first use of a 1 GHz quantum encrypter, which is transparent for the user, and an ordinary fibre-optic line to send data endowed with relevance and purpose. So this occasion marks quantum technology’s real-world début.”

Quantum cryptography, or quantum key distribution (QKD), allows two communicating parties to produce a shared random bit string know only to them, which can be used as a key to crypt and decrypt messages. An important and unique feature of quantum cryptography is the ability of the two communicating parties quickly to detect the presence of any third party trying to gain access to the key. This third party, the eavesdropper, is commonly known as Eve among cryptographers -- and quantum cryptography is essentially all about cutting Eve out of the equation. The use of the system developed by id Quantique makes it possible to detect Eve’s presence almost immediately and to take counter measures. The system works, however, not only when there is an eavesdropper on the line but also when data become corrupted accidentally, which, in the case of the Swiss elections(and, come to think of it, also Florida), is an equally important feature.

For Robert Hensler, the Geneva State Chancellor, the application of quantum cryptography will thus go a long way toward alleviating concerns over eVoting. “In this context, the value added by quantum cryptography concerns not so much protection from outside attempts to interfere as the ability to verify that the data have not been corrupted in transit between entry and storage,” he says. The Swiss elections provided an important milestone for id Quantique, but they are just the initial phase of a broader plan which is expected to lead to the creation of a pilot quantum communications network in Geneva similar to the nascent internet network in the United States back in the 1970s.

Known as SwissQuantum, this next stage in the project aims to provide a platform for testing and validating the quantum technologies which will help to protect the communications networks of the future. The project’s plans, however, extend beyond the Geneva region with a long term view of expanding the network throughout the country and beyond. This technology will appeal in particular to certain core industries of the Swiss economy which depend particularly on data security -- banks, insurance companies, and high-tech businesses. The Swiss authorities hope that the SwissQuantum name will come to be seen as the best guarantee for reassuring potential clients of the soundness of this scientific innovation.

id Quantique is a partner in the European project SECOQC which began in April 2004. “The SECOQC project makes it possible for id Quantique’s engineers to interact with some of the best groups worldwide in the field of quantum cryptography,” observes id Quantique's cofounder Ribordy. Together, the project partners intend to lay the foundations for a long-range, high-security communication network which combines the technology of quantum key distribution with components of classical computer science and cryptography.
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5365





Skype and the Bavarian Trojan in the Middle

You can lead a trojan horse to a Bierzelt, but can you make it Skype?
Daniel Schmitt

The pdf file obtained by Wikileaks and also released by the political party Piraten, contains two scanned documents relating to activities of the Bavarian police, Ministry of Justice and the Prosecution office in intercepting encrypted data submitted via SSL or Skype via the internet. The first one, presenting a communication on splitting cost between Bavarian police and the prosecutors offices, the second one presenting the related offer for the software by a German company called Digitask.

The technology, in high-level explained in the offer of Digitask, works via a local installation of a malware on the clients computer.

1 An offer on interception technology
2 The eventuality of delivery
3 The high cost of governmental eavesdropping
4 Software versus bulletproof vests?

An offer on interception technology

The offer dating September 4th 2007, replies an inquiry by Bavarian officials on the possibility of Skype interception, introduces a basic description of the cryptographic workings of Skype, and concludes that new systems are needed to spy on Skype calls.

It continues to introduce the so-called Skype Capture Unit. In a nutshell: a malware installed on purpose on a target machine, intercepting Skype Voice and Chat. Another feature introduced is a recording proxy, that is not part of the offer, yet would allow for anonymous proxying of recorded information to a target recording station. Access to the recording station is possible via a multimedia streaming client, supposedly offering real-time interception.

Another part of the offer is an interception method for SSL based communication, working on the same principle of establishing a man-in-the-middle attack on the key material on the client machine. According to the offer this method is working for Internet Explorer and Firefox webbrowsers. Digitask also recommends using over-seas proxy servers to cover the tracks of all activities going on.

The eventuality of delivery

The document interestingly holds some information on future dependencies, time schedules and similar things, and it quickly becomes clear, the solution presented here eventually delivers something. While it might be admittable that the recording server offered now might only be able to handle a lower amount of clients of Skype introduces new features like Video Chat, the first striking factor is a delivery time of 4-6 weeks for a single installation. Maybe by then or at some other time the software will also be Windows Vista compatible. Interestingly in 2008 software for Windows 2000 and Windows XP only is offered.

The delivery time also does not include installation on the target machine, but only provisioning of the software. Methods of delivery, which would be one of the more interesting features of such a software, include personal delivery to the target machine, and sending it as an e-mail attachment. While other methods, not being further specified, can always be integrated, this will only happen at full development cost and the delivery is still fully up to the purchaser of the software.

Digitask will also not take on any responsibility for use of the software or damage caused by it.

The high cost of governmental eavesdropping

The licensing model presented here relates to instances of installations per month for a minimum of three months. Each installation of the Skype Capture Unit will cost EUR 3500, SSL interception is priced at EUR 2500. A one-time installation fee of EUR 2500 is not further explained. The minimum cost for any installation on a suspect computer for a comprehensive interception of both SSL and Skype will be EUR 20500, if no more than one one-time installation fee are required.

Software versus bulletproof vests?

The letter gives a tabular overview of the cost, interestingly including the proxy server to disguise police officers identity. After stating that no law currently clearly regulates these costs, and concentrating on various legal aspects of this statement, it is declared that all cost for hardware and software obtained needs to be covered by the well-known tight German local police budgets. Based on a decision taken by the State Ministry of the Inner and the State Ministry of Justice, this includes all costs for acquisition and further maintenance of any technical equipment.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Skype_and_..._in_the_middle





Sharper Aerial Pictures Spark Privacy Fears

Plans to add high-res images and data including ages to a commerical online database are causing concern
Michael Cross

If you were up to no good in the London open air last winter, start working up excuses: you might be on the web. This week, a company launches an online map of central London which includes aerial photography at four times the resolution of existing online maps: the equivalent of looking down from the 10th floor.

The map, from 192.com, publishes aerial photography at a resolution of 4cm for London and 12.5cm for the rest of the UK. In the right conditions, images at this resolution are enough to identify individuals - a step that existing online mapping ventures such as Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth have so far been careful to avoid.

Alastair Crawford, 192's chief executive, makes no apologies for the possibilities: "We're considering holding a competition. We want to challenge people to find out how much naughty stuff is happening. If you're having an affair in London, you'd better be careful!"

The mapping venture is likely to heat up the debate about the extent to which information about individuals is available on the web - especially as 192.com, which specialises in providing data about individuals gleaned from official sources has announced plans to attach estimated ages to every person in its database of 27 million Britons.

Getting on the map

The prospect is likely to alarm privacy campaigners. Dr David Wood, of the Surveillance Studies Network at Newcastle University, says he is worried by the power of such systems. "When you combine detailed mapping with demographic data, consumer data and particularly things like credit ratings, you end up with very powerful tools."

Crawford says he is simply presenting data that is already available, often in a less secure setting than through his website.

The London map images, which combine aerial photographs shot over 20 hours last year with data licensed from Ordnance Survey's digital map of Great Britain, are strikingly more detailed than existing services, especially when individuals appear in oblique views. At present, coverage extends from Hyde Park in the centre of London to Dartford Bridge in the east, and Finsbury Park in the north of the capital to Tooting Broadway in the south. The west of London is unavailable because of flight restrictions around Heathrow.

The plan to add estimated ages to its listings will help people look up old friends, says Crawford, especially when they have a common name. "Most people seeking an individual have a rough idea how old the person is. Addresses are very variable, but age stays with you for your whole life."

The estimated age bands are modelled on data gleaned from a sample of the population using what the company calls "complex mathematical algorithms".

Several clues are already in the public domain, Crawford says. One starting point is the database of 4 million directors held at Companies House. This is a public record listing dates of birth as well as addresses. From national demographic statistics of age differences between married couples, it is then possible to estimate the likely age of the director's spouse.

Another source is the electoral roll, which has an annually updated list of 17-year-olds. If a 17-year-old lives with two people of the same surname already listed in the register, they are probably aged between 40 and 60.

Another clue is forename: all other factors being equal, Elsie Jones is probably from a different generation than Kylie Jones. Even house prices, again on public record, can provide a clue: two people of the same name living in a £2m property are probably older than two living in a £200,000 one. All these can be cross-checked with the average age for the postcode area, which is contained in census data.

Crawford says there is nothing new about using information in this way; all the software does is open it up to the non-expert. "It gives that knowledge without having to be clever," he says. "Our anticipation is it will help people get connected."

Crawford says he has taken advice from the information commissioner's office. "We're producing a product as responsible as it can be. 192 provides transparency. It's a safer place for data than the local library. We require users to register with their credit card details and put them through a vigorous verification. We log all IP [internet] addresses, we know what you looked at and we keep a log. If someone is going to abuse personal data, the last place you would get it from is 192.com." But, he admits, "where I think there will be more fuss is when women have been hiding for many years how old they are. But we've always allowed people to have control of data: if anyone wants to correct it, we'll do it free of charge." The data is also not provided for mass unsolicited marketing, he adds.

Who's watching you?

What about stalkers, or worse? "It's not like the movies where killers pick a victim from the phone book. In the real world, the stalker is almost always somebody who already knows where you are."

But with public concern about the safety of personal data rising, the directory is likely to come under fire. Crawford says anyone worried about personal data abuse should start with sites such as Facebook: "It's grossly irresponsible for social networking sites to canvass dates of birth, and publish them."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ivacy.internet





China Subway Apologizes Over Leaked Kiss Video

Shanghai subway authorities apologized to a Chinese couple videotaped hugging and kissing on a subway platform and dismissed an employee involved in uploading the video which drew thousands of hits, state media said on Friday.

The company found three staff were responsible for taking and uploading the video. Two had already left the company and the other was dismissed after the incident caused "public uproar", Xinhua news agency quoted authorities with Shanghai Metro Operation Co Ltd. as saying.

"We have wrapped up an internal investigation and found the videotape was uploaded by people who had worked for Shanghai metro," they said.

"We made formal apologies and are negotiating with the couple over compensation."

The three-minute footage was uploaded online earlier this week, attracting thousands of hits on sites such as YouTube and sina.com.

Authorities have credited the installation of hundreds of thousands of closed-circuit security cameras in large Chinese cities for helping to reduce crime in recent years.

But Chinese legal experts and scholars have called for more robust privacy legislation to regulate the use of video footage and impose penalties on its abuse.
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...55638420080125





Odyssey of State Capitols and State Suspicion
Kathryn Shattuck

IN a recent morning interview in a Midtown Manhattan office Ramak Fazel came across as the quintessential world citizen: tall, slim and elegant, his English tinged with an untraceable accent and peppered here and there with an Italian phrase.

He also exuded the weariness of a frequent flier, having arrived the afternoon before at Newark Liberty Airport, where he was delayed for nearly three hours while United States Customs and Border Protection agents questioned him about the purpose of his trip, searched his baggage and photocopied the pages of his personal agenda.

That routine is something that Mr. Fazel, a 42-year-old freelance photographer who lives in Milan, Italy, has come to know well, and he takes pains to come across as favorably as possible. For starters, he makes sure his face is always immaculately cleanshaven.

“I have become the poster boy for Gillette,” he said, somewhat ruefully.

Shaving was one of the last things on Mr. Fazel’s mind when, on Aug. 7, 2006, he set out on a photographic and philatelic odyssey from his mother’s home in Fort Wayne, Ind. His mission was to photograph each of the nation’s 50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard from each city, using postage stamps from a childhood collection. Each postcard would be mailed to the next state on his journey, where he would pick it up, continuing until he had gone full circle back to Indiana.

But there was a problem. On a flight from Sacramento, Calif., to Honolulu, Mr. Fazel described his project to a fellow passenger. He later discovered that she had reported him as suspicious — perhaps to the pilot or the Transportation Security Administration — and taken a picture of him as he slept.

Maybe it was because he was vaguely foreign looking, he reasoned, and his photographic endeavor seemed menacing in a post-9/11 landscape. He also had a three-day growth of beard, he recalled. And, although Mr. Fazel grew up mostly in the United States and is an American citizen, there was his Iranian name.

In his view that woman’s report began a chain reaction, turning him into a person of interest for officials from local law enforcement agencies on up to the F.B.I. On a stop in Annapolis, Md., for example, he was interrogated about his activities and read his Miranda rights. Today, he said, his name lingers on what he thinks of simply as the “the list.” (He doesn’t know where it originated or who controls it.) He believes it has prevented him from receiving a visa to India and caused him be questioned at the border of Poland, both of which he had visited in the past. He said he has been interrogated the last four times he has entered the United States.

That sense of stigmatization — and the pursuit of life, liberty and art — is a steady undercurrent in “49 State Capitols,” an exhibition of postcards, photographs and ephemera from Mr. Fazel’s 2006 trip that is to open on Wednesday at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo. (He ran out of money before he made it to Alaska.)

“I wanted to learn about America,” Mr. Fazel said. “Visiting the capitols — I don’t want to say it’s a dream, but we’re led as children to believe that it’s kind of an obligation, that you need to see up close the country you call home.

“I may live abroad, but my sense of being an American, of loving my country, has never changed.”

Mr. Fazel, who moved to Italy in 1994, conceived of the trip in 2006 while visiting his mother in Fort Wayne, where she called his attention to his stamp collection in the attic. “Do something with these,’ ” he remembered her saying.

He went to a collector who offered him less than he believed his stamps were worth. “I thought, what a shame to just sell these for $1,000,” Mr. Fazel said. “I felt they needed to be released from that static state, needed to be released for their original purpose to be postage.”

What specifically inspired his trip was a page of stamps of the flags of the 50 states, in the order of their admission to the union, issued for the nation’s bicentennial in 1976. That was the year he began collecting, shortly after moving to Fort Wayne, where the Fazels were the only Iranian family.

Mr. Fazel was born in Iran but moved to the United States when he was 2 months old. His father, who was then working on his doctorate in psychology, and his mother, who eventually became a potter, settled in Logan, Utah, and then in Fort Wayne. In 1970 the family briefly moved back to Iran, where his father taught in a satellite campus of Harvard Business School in Tehran; in 1976 they returned to Fort Wayne.

Mr. Fazel, feeling something of an outsider in a community divided into white and black, athletically gifted and not, turned to stamp collecting at his father’s urging. “Through stamps I had the chance to learn about America and American culture,” he said. He collected enthusiastically, using money he earned from mowing lawns and shoveling snow.

But with a driver’s license came adult freedom, and Mr. Fazel tucked his collection away. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering at Purdue University, then went to New York to study graphic design and photography. In 1994 he moved to Milan — “to enrich myself, invest in myself,” he said — and to overcome a sense of his cultural limitations. He feels that he succeeded, he said, yet he never stopped pondering what it meant for him to be American.

So in the spring of 2006, stamps in hand, he began to plot his road trip, researching the shortest distances from state capital to state capital and the locations of post offices and Y.M.C.A.’s (where he could shower and swim). He spent $1,500 on a used Chevy van in which he would live and another $2,000 to refurbish it. At night he would often seek out Wal-Mart parking lots, where security was tight, to park his van and sleep.

In each capital Mr. Fazel would research the state’s history in a library and then design a 10-by-14-inch postcard on white stock, adorned with mosaics he concocted from stamps related to the state.

The postcard he sent from Florida to Georgia honors space flight; the one from Hawaii to Arizona pays tribute to Pearl Harbor. The postcard sent from New York to Pennsylvania bears 11-cent stamps from 1965 that Mr. Fazel arranged in the shape of the twin towers — one toppling over, the other being pierced by a commercial aviation stamp — and with fire truck and ambulance stamps and a commemorative stamp of St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan.

Mr. Fazel drove 17,345 miles in 78 days, mailing a postcard from each city and picking it up in the next one, with the speed of the mail dictating the pace of his trip. “It was such a nice surprise to discover how reliable the postal system was,” he said, adding that some of the cards arrived within 12 hours.

But in Jackson, Miss., his journey took its bizarre twist. One night, as he sat in his van, a beam of light pierced his reverie. He heard his name over a loudspeaker and a command to step out of the vehicle with his hands held high.

Suddenly, Mr. Fazel said, he was forced to the ground, face to the concrete, and handcuffed by a city police officer. His vehicle was searched, and when the officers determined that nothing was amiss, Mr. Fazel was ordered to leave the parking lot and continue down the road.

He said the officers told him that they had received a report that he was aiming an automatic weapon at passing traffic.

Lee D. Vance, assistant chief of the Jackson city police, said he could not confirm the incident because it had not resulted in an arrest and because Mr. Fazel has not filed a complaint.

As Mr. Fazel continued his travels, he slowly began to perceive that he was on some kind of watch list. In Atlanta he was prohibited from entering the Capitol, he said, even as others did. In Columbia, S.C., he was questioned on the grounds of the Capitol by a police officer who mentioned that he knew Mr. Fazel lived in Italy.

On the morning of Oct. 3, he entered the Maryland Capitol in Annapolis, where he presented identification and signed his name on a visitors’ sheet. A guard asked him to wait.

Suddenly, Mr. Fazel said, he was handcuffed and rushed through corridors into a police station, where a man he later learned was a member of the Maryland Joint Terrorism Task Force with the F.B.I. started speaking to him in Farsi.

As Mr. Fazel related it, the experience went as follows:

“I’m American,” Mr. Fazel said. “I speak English.”

Another officer asked, “Where are you really from?” Mr. Fazel produced his Indiana driver’s license.

“I can tell by looking at you that you’re not from Fort Wayne,” the officer replied.

After a four-hour encounter in which he was asked about a recent trip to Iran for an Italian design magazine and about who was financing his trip to state capitols, he was released without being charged. But he was also warned by an F.B.I. official that he was now in the system and would have troubles if he continued his trip.

Richard Wolf, a media coordinator with the F.B.I. in Baltimore, said he had no knowledge of the incident. He added, “We don’t normally respond or comment on any sort of leads we’ve conducted with the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

Asked whether Mr. Fazel was on the government’s terrorist watch list, Bill Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman in Washington, said that as a matter of policy, “we can’t verify whether an individual is on a watch list or not.”

After the incident in Maryland Mr. Fazel called Brett R. Fleitz, a lawyer in Indianapolis and a childhood friend. Mr. Fleitz said he immediately sought to reassure him. “I implored him to continue because he was very, very doubtful about the prospects for going on and the dangers that might lie ahead,” Mr. Fleitz said. “I said, ‘Dude, you’re an American.’ And Ramak said, ‘No, I’m a naturalized American.’ And I said: ‘It doesn’t matter. There aren’t two tiers of citizenship here. You have nothing to hide.’ ”

He advised Mr. Fazel to greet law enforcement officers cheerfully and “lay it all out,” as well as to ask for and photocopy the business cards of the authorities he encountered.

Mr. Fazel forged toward the last half of his destinations with his camera, a 1964 Rolleiflex. Despite being questioned at or denied entrance to the remaining capitols, he got every one of his pictures: sometimes an image of gilded rotundas or historic murals, other times pictures of the everyday, the mundane. He photographed visitors in House chambers; a funeral procession for Ann Richards, a onetime Texas governor; a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, in the waiting room of the California governor’s office.

And as the mood of his trip changed from joy to disquiet, he photographed police officers at one capitol, and, at another, a “caution” tape blocking an entrance.

In Albany, Mr. Fazel was asked to wait at the entrance of the Capitol until investigators talked with him. One gave him a big slap on the back, Mr. Fazel recalled, and said, “I know everything about you, and I know you’ve been getting a lot of attention.”

Thomas M. Peters, a senior investigator with the New York State Police, confirmed that Mr. Fazel’s journey from capitol to capitol had raised suspicion.

“We were notified in advance that he was making his way up the East Coast from his stops at other capitols, where he was challenged by law enforcement agents,” he said. “They indicated that at some times he seemed agitated and seemed to be giving evasive answers to their questions, but we don’t know for sure because we were basically getting this information thirdhand.”

Mr. Peters added: “He was fine with us. And if he was agitated, it was probably because he got tired of being questioned.”

Looking back on his travels, Mr. Fazel said: “Notwithstanding the intense scrutiny, the trip was a positive experience. I’m neither rancorous, nor do I feel offended.”

Still, he said, he would like to see his name removed from “the list,” or whatever it is that caused him to be repeatedly stopped and questioned.

The journey ultimately left him wondering what it means to be American — and, more fundamentally, who he really was.

“What I thought would be an exercise in self-betterment turned out to be something a little bigger,” he said dryly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/ar...gn/20shat.html





Teen Arrested After Flight to Nashville
AP

A teenage passenger was detained after a Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles landed in Nashville, an airline spokeswoman said Thursday.

Nashville television stations, citing unnamed sources, said the teen unsuccessfully tried to hijack the plane to Lafayette, La., and crash it into a building where a ''Hannah Montana'' concert was to be performed.

Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Brandy King said the passenger was removed from Flight 284 Tuesday night by authorities at Nashville International Airport. She declined to provide additional details.

Airport spokeswoman Emily Richard confirmed there was an incident, but could not provide more information because the passenger was a minor. The teen was not identified.

WSMV and WTVF in Nashville reported the teenager boarded the plane in possession of handcuffs, rope and duct tape with intentions to hijack the plane.

Messages left by The Associated Press with the FBI, TSA, Department of Homeland Security and Nashville police were not immediately returned.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&type=politics





Social Networks, from the 80s to the 00s
Brian McConnell

As Facebook enjoys its moment in the sun, we should take a moment to step back and look at the history of computers and social communication. Some historical perspective is in order, both to assess the real value of social networks as businesses, and to anticipate how they are likely to evolve in the future.

I’ve been using the Internet since 1988, and have been using various commercial online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy and GEnie since I had my first computer. A lot of things that could be described as social networks have come and gone in that time.

Bulletin Boards

People have been using computers for social communication since the very beginning of the personal computer industry. Long before the Internet became accessible to the general public, people were hosting BBS systems, many of them focused on an interest group or local community. One particularly prescient invention was FidoNet, a network for BBSes that allowed systems to transfer data (messages, files, etc.) in bucket-brigade fashion to sites around the world. It grew to, at one point, cover much of the world, and was an entirely community-based effort.

Since not everyone had a computer , the communities that emerged in the BBS world largely revolved around computers in some way. Some BBSes focused on DIY computer projects, others on games, and more than a few were devoted to pirating commercial software.

Online Services

Commercial online services reached their peak in the 1990s, first as destinations in of themselves, and later as a way to access the Internet. These services provided access to a broad range of services that are now mirrored on the web. News, travel reservations, shopping and social hubs were all part of the package; much of what we see today on the web existed in some form on these sites. Social communication was one of the big draws for online services, as a major source of their revenue was derived from billing for usage on a per-minute basis. AOL in particular recognized this and allowed users to create communities about just about any topic.

Just as online services were reaching their peak, the web became accessible to ordinary users, turning the Internet into a mainstream phenomenon. Online services, in turn, gradually morphed from destinations to a means of accessing the Internet.

Throughout this period, the population of computer users expanded rapidly. AOL, for all of its faults, deserves a lot of credit for introducing millions of people to the Internet. As the user community grew, online services began to build communities around more diverse interest groups, most having nothing to do with computers. The community focus shifted from computers to people who happened to use computers to do something.

Web 1.0

From the mid-90s to 2000, there was an explosion of activity as companies rushed to reproduce existing online services on the web. There were many social services created during this period, notably GeoCities and theGlobe.com. One thing the web did was to eliminate the walled garden problem that plagued AOL and their brethren. This promoted the development of niche communities, such as PlanetOut/Gay.com, that may have otherwise been stifled by corporate censorship in controlled environments. While none of these services advertised themselves as a social network per se, they had many of the same characteristics.

Friendster

Friendster deserves special mention because it was the first popular web site that contained all of the features we expect from social networks today — especially the notion of using a social graph to track relationships. But was an unfortunate example of being too early in a developing market. Everything I have seen since Friendster is highly influenced by it, and generally offers the same basic features, just in a different package.

The Future

While I think commercial social networks will continue to be popular, it is dangerous to project future growth from past trends. There are several important trends already underway that, while they are good for social networking as a whole, will undermine proprietary commercial services.

Commercial social networks today are a lot like online services in the mid-90s — they’re popular because they make something easier to do (maintain a social graph, keep track of friends, search for new people). It was not that long ago when getting online was difficult for novice users. Large businesses (EarthLink, Netcom, AOL) were built around making the Internet easy to use. They became superfluous as broadband became standard and devices with built-in Net access were shipped.

I think the same thing is likely to happen to social networks, so let’s look at what a social network really does, and think about how that can be implemented on the open web.

Profiles

Social networks make it easy for people to create profiles using standard templates. This makes sense, but this is really no different than a web page. I like what Chris Messina and co. are doing with their distributed social networking project, which uses blogs as a basic building block, and microformats to embed metadata in pages. Separating profiles from other functions, like search and discovery, makes a lot of sense because then you can have one page or site that is visible via many different search tools.

Search (and the Social Graph)

The social graph is a function that can easily be added to search engines. Once web sites, blogs, etc. are tagged to indicate that they are profiles, search engines can crawl them to pick up metadata, links to friends, etc. Search engines are already good at indexing the web, so adding a vertical search for people and social information is not a daunting task. Expect the search engines to add social/people search features. While the conventional wisdom holds that this task will naturally fall to Google, I think this is an area where AOL or Yahoo could score an unexpected win, as both companies are much more people- and community-focused.

Updates

One of the reasons Facebook is so addictive is because it is a convenient way to track the status of friends. This, too, is something that can be moved onto the open web. Anyone who wants to can publish updates, events, etc. via standard formats like RSS and iCal. Anyone who wants to monitor their friend’s updates can do so, via a feed reader, or via custom applications that have yet to be built. If this becomes standard practice, there will be many opportunities for software developers to create new and better ways to track and display this information.

Follow The Money

To many, social networking is a winner-takes-all market. But I don’t think that’s the case. With the three pieces above, you can recreate what any social network does using open standards and the web. At the moment, this requires more effort, so people use commercial services, but in the long run, open standards usually win.

I would bet on a company like WordPress or perhaps Tumblr to come out with a simple tool that makes publishing profiles and updates easy, and that is designed with social search in mind. Maybe this will be an open-source tool, maybe it will be a commercial service supported by monthly fees or advertising. My guess is that many companies will get into this category, and that — just as there is diversity among blogging and personal publishing tools — there will not be one clear winner. Blog authoring and hosting companies are logical entrants, as they already do the majority of what’s needed for an open social network.

Search will be an important component of this, and I would expect that Google and other search vendors will play a dominant role here. There should also be opportunities for companies that specialize in people and social search. They’ll make money, as they already do, by mixing targeted ads with their social search tools.

The good news for users is that this will be an open market, an ecosystem, with no lock in. Users will be able to choose among many profile and update publishing tools. They’ll also be able to use whatever search tool they prefer. Most importantly, users (a.k.a. publishers) will own their data, and will be able to control how it is presented to the outside world.

The bad news for social networking companies is that this is not a winner-takes-all market, with winner-takes-all valuations. Blog authoring tools are a good comparison. This is certainly not a bad business to be in, but it is not a get-rich-quick business, either. The barriers to entry will also disappear as the network effect of having a large user community becomes irrelevant when every participant is equally searchable via multiple services. I also think that the general paranoia about big companies using personal data inappropriately will be an incentive for people to switch to other tools that provide more control over the use and presentation of their data.

If I had to pick a category to start a company in, I’d pick authoring tools. There’s real long-term value there, as people tend to pick a publishing tool and stick with it — and they’ll more for higher-end tools. If I were Facebook, I’d be thinking about how to participate in this trend — in other words, deal with change before it deals with you.
http://gigaom.com/2008/01/20/social-...0s-to-the-00s/





From MySpace to YourSpace
Brian Stelter

Two years ago, Chris DeWolfe, the co-founder and chief executive of MySpace, was talking about international expansion with Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation bought the social networking site in 2005. According to Mr. DeWolfe, an entrepreneur used to moving at Internet velocity, he suggested that MySpace could expand to “four or five” countries in the next year.

“What about 13?” Mr. Murdoch said.

That was one of Mr. DeWolfe’s first lessons in just how fast business is done inside the News Corporation. MySpace ended up adding 15 local versions in the year. It is now up to 24 — “we just launched in Brazil,” Mr. DeWolfe said in one of his first interviews since signing a new two-year contract with the News Corporation in October.

In addition to expanding, MySpace is evolving. While it is introducing new musicians and playing host to amateur filmmakers, it is also signing artists to its own record label and developing online video series. It introduced a content guide, MySpace Celebrity, last week.

The world’s largest social networking site, MySpace has grown far past being merely “a place for friends,” as its slogan states. With an estimated 110 million monthly active users, MySpace is undeniably a powerful tool for advertisers who seek reach and efficiency.

Richard Greenfield, a media analyst for Pali Research, called MySpace a fantastic acquisition from a return-on-investment standpoint. The site was sold for $580 million; Mr. Greenfield said it was expected to have around $800 million in revenue in fiscal 2008, mostly through advertising.

“Rupert made an important bet,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, which signed a $900 million advertising deal with MySpace’s parent, Fox Interactive Media, in August 2006. “He may find that this is the single best investment he has ever made.”

But MySpace has challenges, especially from Facebook, which has leapt ahead of MySpace in technology and has been accumulating users at a faster rate. Facebook, with its cleaner interface and higher demographic profile, is also seen by some advertisers as a better bet. By comparison, the reputation of MySpace — with its cluttered and often sexually tinged personal pages and lingering privacy concerns — has suffered.

“It’s definitely not the sexy pick anymore,” said Adam Kasper, a senior vice president at Media Contacts, the interactive division of Havas.

So MySpace has changed tack. What was seen as a competitor to traditional media platforms is starting to resemble one.

“Some people still perceive MySpace like it was in early 2004, as a niche place for scenesters in New York and Los Angeles. That’s how it started, but it’s become very mainstream,” Mr. DeWolfe, 41, said. “It’s about consuming content and discovering pop culture.”

As a result, the MySpace site resembles a portal like Yahoo or AOL as much as a social networking site. Peter F. Chernin, the president and chief operating officer of the News Corporation, called MySpace a “contemporary media platform” and said the site existed to “create content and connect people to one another.”

Fox Interactive “clearly envisioned them as a portal,” said Alan Rambam, a senior vice president at the ad agency Fleishman Hillard. “I thought they would be much further along with that today.”

The original content may draw advertisers who are wary of placing a marketing message next to a messy profile page, but it is unclear whether the users who make MySpace the most-viewed Web site in America will want to watch TV episodes and chat with friends on the same site.

Making this transformation work falls to Mr. DeWolfe, the business face of the company, and co-founder Tom Anderson, 37, the product specialist. Both recently signed new contracts at salaries reported to be $7.5 million a year, which would make them two of the highest-paid employees at the News Corporation.

Mr. DeWolfe did not enter MySpace with a media background. He led two companies, now defunct, specializing in data storage and Internet marketing, but he had long envisioned a community-based Web site. In 1997, while in graduate school at the University of Southern California, he developed a business plan for the idea, which he called SiteGeist (he received an A-).

Surprising some observers, the News Corporation — one of the largest media conglomerations — has remained relatively hands-off. Mr. DeWolfe said Mr. Murdoch visited MySpace’s headquarters in Los Angeles about once a month — “He’s definitely in tune with the different features on the site, and he’s very aware of the product road map” — but the two founders are still in control of the site.

“Some of the first words out of Rupert’s mouth were about how important he felt it was to protect what Tom and I had built and to preserve the user experience at all costs,” Mr. DeWolfe said. “He said the single most important thing the company could do is to empower MySpace with the autonomy and resources it needed to continue giving the users what they want.” He added, “It was incredibly reassuring.”

But as MySpace expands beyond its origins, its executives struggle as they try to give users and advertisers what they both want. There is a big contrast between the chaos that is comfortable to many MySpace residents and the neatness that appeals to consumer product companies.

“The challenge for MySpace in the future is making it more of a well-lighted environment for the big brand advertisers — the Procter & Gambles and Unilevers,” said David Cohen, the United States director for digital communication for the media buying agency Universal McCann.

Sitting in his Boston office, Mr. Kasper of Havas counted 10 advertising units on the main page of MySpace Music. He said that some appeared to have been placed by third-party networks, creating a cluttered environment.

“I think it’s too much,” Mr. Kasper said. “It’s just not as valuable to the advertiser, and it’s certainly not as good from a consumer experience standpoint.”

The site suffers, at least in some circles, from an image problem. The prevalence of unwanted friend requests, spam and sexually suggestive material has driven some users away, even giving rise to the term “MySpace refugee.” It still has more page views than any other Web site in the world — more than 1.3 billion a day — although that figure dipped for the first time in December 2007, according to comScore. (MySpace executives said improvements to the site’s structure were at fault.)

Mr. DeWolfe does not seem especially concerned about the perception. He points to what he sees as MySpace’s growth potential and new security and customization features. Users will soon be able to tailor their profile for subsets of friends, “so my colleagues will see a much different page than my college buddies,” Mr. DeWolfe said.

New features for mobile devices are being added, as well as new social applications. And in response to concerns about child predators, MySpace unveiled an accord last week with 49 states to tighten privacy restrictions.

To burnish MySpace’s media credentials, Mr. DeWolfe is leaning on his friends in Hollywood. At the Sundance Film Festival this week, he is playing host to industry parties with the band Maroon 5 and the rapper 50 Cent. MySpaceTV has been the launching pad for a number of Web video series, and it is second to YouTube among Internet video sites.

Mr. DeWolfe is nurturing another project that promises to help MySpace grow: an incubator that will form new companies and function like a start-up. The company, tentatively named Slingshot Labs, will be financed by the News Corporation but exist as a separate company. Mr. DeWolfe anticipates that it will nurture four or five consumer Web sites at a given time.

“We firmly believe that it’s very hard to create a disruptive technology within a larger organization,” he said.

Mr. Chernin said he was not surprised that Mr. DeWolfe and Mr. Anderson had decided to stay with the company they created.

“Think about the size and the scale of MySpace and the opportunity to affect people and the opportunity to play a role in the culture,” he said. “There’s really nothing like it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/te...yspace.html?hp





PC Piracy Levels are "Astounding" Says COD4 Dev
Blake Snow

Infinity Ward's community manager muses, "they wonder why people don't make PC games any more."

"We pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing [Call of Duty 4] Multiplayer (which was fantastic)," writes Robert Bowling, on the game's community blog. "What wasn't fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game."

"The amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding," he added. "It blows me away that people are willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it's not physical or it's on the safety of the internet to do."

PC games sales have decreased in recent years due to rampant piracy of software and other digital goods over internet sharing sites.
http://www.gamepro.com/news.cfm?article_id=156948





The Video Game May Be Free, But to Be a Winner Can Cost Money
Seth Schiesel

Ever since John Riccitiello took over last year as chief executive of Electronic Arts, the video game industry bellwether, he has promised to revitalize the company with new games and new ways of reaching consumers. Now, that may be happening.

In a major departure from its traditional business model, E.A. plans to announce Monday that it is developing a new installment in its hit Battlefield series that will be distributed on the Internet as a free download. Rather than being sold at retail, the game is meant to generate revenue through advertising and small in-game transactions that allow players to spend a few dollars on new outfits, weapons and other virtual gear.

At a conference in Munich, the company intends to announce that the new game, Battlefield Heroes, will be released for PC this summer. More broadly, E.A. hopes the game can help point the way for Western game publishers looking to diversify beyond appealing to hard-core players with games that can cost $60 or more.

E.A.’s most recent experiment with free online games began two years ago in South Korea, the world’s most fervent gaming culture. In 2006, the company introduced a free version of its FIFA soccer game there, and Gerhard Florin, E.A.’s executive vice president for publishing in the Americas and Europe, said it has signed up more than five million Korean users and generates more than $1 million in monthly in-game sales.

Players can pay not only for decorative items like shoes and jerseys but also for boosts in their players’ speed, agility and accuracy. Mr. Florin said that while most users do not buy anything, a sizable minority ends up spending $15 to $20 a month.

With Battlefield Heroes, E.A. hopes to bring that basic system of “microtransactions” to Western players, along with increased advertising. Mr. Florin said the licensing agreements around the soccer game prevent E.A. from inserting in-game advertisements from companies that are not already sponsors of FIFA, the international soccer federation. By contrast, E.A. already owns the Battlefield franchise and will be free to insert whatever advertising it wants.

The game industry is booming worldwide, largely on the strength of two trends: a demographic expansion of the gaming population beyond the traditional young male audience and the rising popularity of online play.

Electronic Arts, once the industry leviathan, has not taken full advantage of those shifts. Meanwhile, one of E.A.’s main competitors, Activision, is riding high on the strength of the mass-market Guitar Hero series and has agreed to merge with Vivendi’s games division, which makes the world’s most popular online game, World of Warcraft.

With Battlefield Heroes, E.A. is trying to capitalize on both trends at once. Not only will Heroes be distributed online, but also it is meant to provide a simpler, more accessible entertainment experience than the relatively complex earlier Battlefield games. The combat-oriented series has sold about 10 million copies since the 2002 debut of the franchise’s first game, Battlefield 1942.

“The existing Battlefield games are fairly deep; you have to be pretty good or you’ll die pretty quick,” Mr. Florin said Friday in a telephone interview from Geneva. “Now we’ve toned down the difficulty, shortened each game session to 10 or 15 minutes and made the visual style more cartoony.”

Strategically, Mr. Florin said the game was a step toward figuring out how to generate multiple revenue streams from a single intellectual property, a maneuver Hollywood has mastered.

“I’ve always envied the movie industry when they put a film out in the cinema, then they go to retail with a different business model and then to pay television and then free TV,” he said. “They have the same content reaching different audiences with different models, and we could never figure out a way to do that. Now with higher broadband penetration, we can use the technology to reach a broader audience.”

Not to mention the fact that popular games distributed online can be more profitable than games sold at retail, a prime driver of the Activision-Vivendi deal. Across China and South Korea, where online games dominate the market, game companies are generating profits far beyond their Western counterparts’ returns.

“The Activision-Vivendi deal changes the landscape for how investors will look at game companies, and that puts pressure on everyone else,” Ben Schachter, an Internet and game company analyst at UBS Securities, said Friday.

“Before it was a battle for a few operating margin points here and there,” Mr. Schachter said, “but when you look at the Asian companies like Shanda or something like World of Warcraft, you talking about a 40 percent operating margin business, which is just in a different league from the U.S. companies. So the U.S. publishers like E.A. have to be looking at those models with envious eyes, and those companies will have to experiment.”

Mr. Florin declined to name names but did say that if Battlefield Heroes is a success, E.A. would soon look to create free downloadable versions of some its other marquee games as well.

Perhaps the prime candidate would be the company’s flagship Madden series, for which sales have slowed. Traditional versions of Madden are extremely complicated, but a simplified downloadable version would be expected to appeal to millions of more casual players.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/te...gy/21game.html





Guitar Hero: the $1 Billion Game, by the Numbers
Ben Kuchera

Do you remember the first time you played Guitar Hero? It seems odd looking back, but it seemed like the game spread mostly by word of mouth. One of your friends bought Guitar Hero, and then everyone who played it got hooked and bought their own copy. Now Guitar Hero is a cultural icon, and for some freakish reason pretending to play music on a plastic instrument is actually considered cool in some circles. Just how big has Guitar Hero become? Activision has sent us some information on the sales of the game, so let's break down Guitar Hero by the numbers.

• Total sales of Guitar Hero games? $1 billion in North America in 26 months
• In units and dollars, Guitar Hero III was the number one title in 2007
• Since 2005, the series has sold 14 million units
• In 10 weeks, gamers have downloaded five million songs for Guitar Hero 3

These aren't large numbers, in the same way the vastness of outer space couldn't really be described as "roomy." These are company-making sales. In fact, Activision posted net revenues of $1.5 billion for the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2007. There has been a South Park episode. Rock Band was released, but so far hasn't come close to matching these sales (although their download business is going very well, thank you). People play Guitar Hero at bars, they use their projectors to play on the sides of houses. People get together weekly to see how much they can five-star.

If we didn't think rhythm games were large before, these numbers prove it. The only thing missing is the flood of imitators. Although I'm guessing that's on its way...
http://arstechnica.com/journals/thum...by-the-numbers





Author Faults a Game, and Gamers Flame Back
Seth Schiesel

The Internet hath no fury like a gamer scorned.

That’s the lesson Fox News and a self-help author learned this week after a program on that channel featured a discussion of the sexual content of the hit video game Mass Effect.

Bound by global message boards, blogs, chat rooms and of course the games themselves, gamers are perhaps the single most intense subculture on the Internet — fiercely protective of their pastime and at ease with the byways of cyberspace.

So the game world has been ablaze with indignation since the Fox News program “The Live Desk With Martha MacCallum” said on Monday that Mass Effect, one of the most critically praised games of 2007, contains frontal nudity and explicit depictions of sexual activity. The assertions of virtual lasciviousness first appeared earlier this month among conservative bloggers incensed by brief YouTube clips excerpted from the 30- to 40-hour game.

Mass Effect, a science fiction game, includes a complicated romantic subplot that is no more risqué in its plot or graphic in its depiction than evening network television.

To exact their revenge, gamers have turned their vitriol on Cooper Lawrence, an author who appeared to mischaracterize the game when she said: “Here’s how they’re seeing women: They’re seeing them as these objects of desire, as these, you know, hot bodies. They don’t show women as being valued for anything other than their sexuality. And it’s a man in this game deciding how many women he wants to be with.”

In fact Mass Effect allows users to play as either a man or a woman, and the few suggestions of intimate contact occur in the context of a detailed interpersonal story line. Asked on the air by Geoff Keighley of Spike TV whether she had ever played the game, Ms. Lawrence laughed and said, “No.”

Irate gamers have flooded the page on Amazon.com selling Ms. Lawrence’s most recent book, “The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace With Your Inner Overachiever,” sending its user-generated rating into oblivion.

By Friday afternoon 412 of the book’s 472 user reviews were the lowest possible rating, one star. Another 48 ratings were for two stars. Only 12 of the ratings were for three stars or higher. In addition, 929 Amazon users had tagged the book with the keyword “ignorant.” Tied for second place with 744 tags were “garbage” and “hypocrisy,” while “hack” and “hypocrite” tied for fourth place with 710 votes. Gamers have also attacked the book on the Barnes & Noble Web site.

Many of the reviewers admit that they have not read Ms. Lawrence’s book.

As one Amazon user put it: “I know all about this book but have never fully read it. Why? Due to the overwhelming backlash, I have no choice but to agree with the 1 star ratings. The rumors are rampant that this book was poorly written and poorly researched. So without verifying the contents myself — I give it a 1 star. Good thing video games aren’t judged in this manner — whew!!!”

On Friday “The Cult of Perfection” was ranked the 346,106th best-selling book on Amazon. Mass Effect, by contrast, has been a hit, selling more than 1.6 million copies since November. An Amazon spokeswoman said the site would soon begin to remove reviews written by users who had clearly not read the book.

In an interview on Friday, Ms. Lawrence said that since the controversy over her remarks erupted she had watched someone play the game for about two and a half hours. “I recognize that I misspoke,” she said. “I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke.

“Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography,” she added. “But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.”

Electronic Arts, the giant publisher that owns Mass Effect, has asked Fox News for a correction. A Fox News spokesman would say only that Electronic Arts had been offered a chance to appear on the channel. An Electronic Arts spokesman said the company had not yet decided whether to accept the offer.

By telephone from Edmonton, Alberta, Ray Muzyka, the medical doctor who is chief executive of BioWare, the Electronic Arts studio that made Mass Effect, said: “We’re hurt. We believe in video games as an art form, and on behalf of the 120 people who poured their blood and tears into this game over three years, we’re just really hurt that someone would misrepresent the game without even playing it. All we can hope for is that people who actually play our games will see the truth.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/26/ar...on/26mass.html





Can’t Tell a Book by Its Cover, or Even Its Title, It Turns Out
Joanne Kaufman

When Missy Chase Lapine, author of the cookbook “The Sneaky Chef” that suggests ways to hide fruit and vegetables in dishes for finicky children, was angered by the publication of “Deceptively Delicious,” a similar book by Jessica Seinfeld (a k a Mrs. Jerry Seinfeld), she had recourse. This month, she sued for copyright infringement and defamation.

But when Raymond Sokolov, the restaurant columnist for The Wall Street Journal, saw that a new food book was coming out with the same title as the cookbook he had published more than 30 years ago, all he could do was stew because book titles cannot be copyrighted.

In 1976, Mr. Sokolov wrote “The Saucier’s Apprentice: A Modern Guide to Classic French Sauces for the Home.” Published by Knopf, the book is now in its 16th printing and Mr. Sokolov, who is also food and wine columnist for the magazine Smart Money, continues to get modest royalty checks.

A few months ago, courtesy of a friend in the publishing industry, Mr. Sokolov learned that W. W. Norton had on its spring list “The Saucier’s Apprentice: One Long Strange Trip Though the Great Cooking Schools of Europe,” by Bob Spitz, author of the highly regarded “The Beatles: The Biography.” (For the record, the humorist S. J. Perelman published an essay called “The Saucier’s Apprentice” in The New Yorker about two decades before Mr. Sokolov’s book).

There are many instances of books with the same titles: “March” by Geraldine Brooks and “The March” by E. L. Doctorow; “Gone” by the mystery writer Lisa Gardner and “Gone” by the mystery writer Jonathan Kellerman; “Leap of Faith” by Danielle Steel and “Leap of Faith” by Queen Noor of Jordan, to name a few.

But in Mr. Sokolov’s view, it’s one thing to duplicate another author’s use of a common phrase or expression and quite another to echo a play on words, particularly when both books are in the same genre. “I think it’s just in bad taste,” he said. “I looked into it, and I’m certain that this was not a blunder, that Norton knew about the existence of my book.”

Mr. Spitz said that he came up with the title when he was working on the proposal for his “Saucier’s Apprentice.” He added that until recently, he had no knowledge of Mr. Sokolov’s title, which is listed on Amazon.com. “I interviewed a lot of people in the food industry for my book,” Mr. Spitz said, “and not one of them mentioned there was already something else with that title. I thought it was a stroke of genius, but as it turns out it was Ray Sokolov’s stroke of genius.”

Nach Waxman, the owner of Kitchen Arts & Letters, a shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, said Norton was wrong to keep Mr. Spitz’s title. “It’s derivative of a book that is still in print in the same field and that has 30 years’ standing,” he said.

Mr. Sokolov said he hoped Norton would “promote the hell out of the book and that a confused buying public will buy my ‘Saucier’s Apprentice’ instead of Spitz’s.”

Although he is not now working on a book, he said, “I am thinking about one, and maybe I should call it ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/bu...a/21sauce.html




Cooking the books

Well Done

The annual report for food company you have to bake before use

Empty pages become filled with content after being baked at 100°C for 25 minutes.

“Well done” created by Bruketa & Zinić is the new annual report for Podravka, the biggest food company in South-East Europe. It consists of two parts:

» a big book containing numbers and a report of an independent auditor
» a small booklet that is inserted inside the big one that contains the very heart of Podravka as a brand: great Podravka’s recipes.

To be able to cook like Podravka you need to be a precise cook. That is why the small Podravka booklet is printed in invisible, thermo-reactive ink. To be able to reveal Podravka’s secrets you need to cover the small booklet in aluminium foil and bake it at 100 degrees Celsius for 25 minutes.

If you are not precise, the booklet will burn, just as any overcooked meal. If you have successfully baked your sample of the annual report, the empty pages will become filled with text, and the illustrations with empty plates filled with food.
http://www.dezeen.com/2007/11/13/wel...-cooked-first/





Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless
Randall Stross

PRINTED books provide pleasures no device created by an electrical engineer can match. The sweet smell of a brand-new book. The tactile pleasures of turning a page. The reassuring sight on one’s bookshelves of personal journeys.

But not one of these explains why books have resisted digitization. That’s simpler: Books are portable and easy to read.

Building a portable electronic reader was the easy part; matching the visual quality of ink on paper took longer. But display technology has advanced to the point where the digital page is easy on the eyes, too. At last, an e-reader performs well when placed in page-to-page competition with paper.

As a result, the digitization of personal book collections is certain to have its day soon.

Music shows the way. The digitization of personal music collections began, however, only after the right combination of software and hardware — iTunes Music Store and the iPod — arrived. And as Apple did for music lovers, some company will devise an irresistible combination of software and hardware for book buyers. That company may be Amazon.

Amazon’s first iteration of an electronic book reader is the Kindle. Introduced in November, it weighs about 10 ounces, holds more than 200 full-length books and can display newspapers, magazines and blogs. It uses E Ink technology, developed by the company of that name, that produces sharply defined text yet draws power only when a page is changed, not as it is displayed.

Sony uses E Ink in its e-book Reader, which it introduced in 2006, but the Kindle has a feature that neither Sony nor many e-reader predecessors ever possessed: books and other content can be loaded wirelessly, from just about anywhere in the United States, using the high-speed EVDO network from Sprint.

This may turn out to be a red-letter day in the history of convenience — our age’s equivalent of that magical moment FedEx introduced next-day delivery and people asked, “How was life possible before this?”

The Kindle is expensive — $399 — but it sold out in just six hours after its debut on Nov. 19. Since then, supplies have consistently lagged behind demand, and a waiting list remains in place.

The Kindle gets many things right, or at least I assume it does. I haven’t had much of a chance to test out my demonstration unit. My wife, skeptical that a digital screen could ever approach the readability of ink on paper, was so intrigued by the Kindle when it arrived last week that she snatched it from my grasp. I haven’t been able to pry it away from her since.

I can see that the text looks splendid. But when one presses a bar to “turn” a page, the image reverses in a way I found jarring: the light background turns black and the black text turns white, then the new page appears and everything returns to normal. My wife said she wasn’t bothered by this at all, and I didn’t have enough of a chance to see if I would soon get used to it.

Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, has nothing to fear from the Kindle. No one would regard it as competition for the iPod. It displays text in four exciting shades of gray, and does that one thing very well. It can do a few other things: for instance, it has a headphone jack and can play MP3 files, but it is not well suited for navigating a large collection of music tracks.

Yet, when Mr. Jobs was asked two weeks ago at the Macworld Expo what he thought of the Kindle, he heaped scorn on the book industry. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

To Mr. Jobs, this statistic dooms everyone in the book business to inevitable failure.

Only the business is not as ghostly as he suggests. In 2008, book publishing will bring in about $15 billion in revenue in the United States, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association.

One can only wonder why, by the Study Group’s estimate, 408 million books will be bought this year if no one reads anymore?

A survey conducted in August 2007 by Ipsos Public Affairs for The Associated Press found that 27 percent of Americans had not read a book in the previous year. Not as bad as Mr. Jobs’s figure, but dismaying to be sure. Happily, however, the same share — 27 percent — read 15 or more books.

In fact, when we exclude Americans who had not read a single book in that year, the average number of books read was 20, raised by the 8 percent who read 51 books or more. In other words, a sizable minority does not read, but the overall distribution is balanced somewhat by those who read a lot.

If a piece of the book industry’s $15 billion seems too paltry for Mr. Jobs to bother with, he is forgetting that Apple reached its current size only recently. Last week, Apple reported that it posted revenue of $9.6 billion in the quarter that spanned October to December 2007, its best quarter ever, after $24 billion in revenue in the 2007 fiscal year, which ended in September.

But as recently as 2001, before the iPhone and the iPod, Apple was a niche computer company without a mass market hit. It was badly hurt by the 2001 recession and reported revenue of only $5.3 billion for the year. This is, by coincidence, almost exactly what Barnes & Noble reported in revenue for its 2007 fiscal year. In neither case did the company owners look at that number, decide to chain the doors permanently shut and call it quits.

Amazon does not release details about revenue for books, but books were its first business. And Andrew Herdener, a company spokesman, said that Amazon’s book sales “have increased every year since the company began.”

The book world has always had an invisible asset that makes up for what it lacks in outsize revenue and profits: the passionate attachment that its authors, editors and most frequent customers have to books themselves. Indeed, in this respect, avid book readers resemble avid Mac users.

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/business/27digi.html





Photo Clues Lead to Camera's Owner
Brian Bergstein

At dusk on New Year's Eve, Erika Gunderson got into a taxi in New York City and entered a digital-age mystery. Sitting on the back seat was a nice Canon digital camera. Gunderson asked the driver which previous passenger might have left it, but the cabbie didn't seem to care. So Gunderson brought it home and showed it to her fiance, Brian Ascher. They decided that the only right thing to do was to find the owner.

But how? The only clues were the pictures on the camera: typical tourist snapshots, complete with a visit to the Statue of Liberty. How could they find a stranger among the huddled masses?

Gunderson is busy in finance for Bear Stearns Cos., so the detective quest fell to Ascher, a 26-year-old law student at New York University. He was on winter break and eager to put off writing a paper about climate change treaties.

He checked whether anyone had reported a matching missing camera to the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission. No dice. He placed ads in lost-and-found sections of Craigslist but got just one response -- from a couple in Brazil who had lost a camera in a cab on Oct. 12, not Dec. 31.

''I guess they thought their camera had been riding around in a taxi for two months,'' Ascher recalls now, chuckling at the notion that such a thing would be possible in New York.

The 350 pictures and two videos on the camera showed several adults, an older woman and three children. Half put them at New York sites like the Empire State Building. The other half had the group enjoying warm weather and frolicking at kid-friendly theme parks.

Ascher easily pinpointed Florida. The group had stood in front of a sign indicating Clearwater, Fla., and posed at Bob Heilman's Beachcomber Restaurant there.

They also took a pirate-themed boat ride where the kids got mustaches painted on their faces. Ascher zoomed in on the group to see name tags on their shirts. He spotted an Alan, an Eileen, a male Noel and a female Noelle, plus a Ciarnan. Under their names was written ''IRE.''

When Ascher checked the videos, he saw nothing telling, just the children dancing and swimming. But in the background, he heard Irish accents.

OK, Ascher figured, the camera's owner is from Ireland.

Ascher called Canon's Ireland division to see if anyone had registered the $500 camera's serial number. No such luck. He posted ads on Irish Web sites. Nothing.

He checked the date stamp on the photos from Bob Heilman's and called to inquire whether anyone remembered serving a big Irish group that day. Without the diners' last names, there was no way to check. It's a nice thing you're trying, the manager told Ascher, but you probably just found yourself a new camera.

Enter some fresh eyes. Ascher's mother, Nancy, and sister, Emily Rann, scoured the pictures for clues he might have missed. Nancy was particularly confident, having reunited people with their lost belongings before. She once found a California woman's wallet in a cab in Florence, Italy, and spent all day on her trail before making a handover at an American Express office.

''I thought, with all this data in the camera, there's no way we're not going to get it back to them,'' Nancy Ascher says now. ''I was hoping it wasn't going to take a trip to Ireland, flashing their pictures everywhere.''

Ascher's mother and his sister noticed that one of the pictures showed a doorman helping someone into a New York taxi. Zooming tight on the doorman's uniform, they made out the logo of the Radisson Hotel.

After several phone calls and a visit to the hotel to show the pictures around, Nancy Ascher persuaded an employee to search the Radisson's guest records by first name and country of residence. Indeed, a Noel from Ireland had stayed there on the date stamped on the photo. Nancy Ascher charmed the hotel employee into sharing the guest's e-mail address.

Wonderful.

Except that when Noel responded to Brian Ascher, he said he hadn't lost a camera.

By now, school was resuming, and Ascher was prepared to give the camera to his mom so she could take over. She had figured out the name of the Florida pirate-boat cruise and was trying to reach its operator.

But first Ascher took a final look at the photographs.

He pored over some from Dec. 30 that didn't include the children. The photos showed signs for bars in Manhattan's East Village: The Thirsty Scholar, Telephone Bar, Burp Castle. There also were multiple interior shots of a tavern, but they didn't seem to fit with what Ascher knew of those other three bars.

Then he stopped on another picture, showing two people outside an apartment building. Seemingly accidentally included in the picture was something Ascher had missed the first time: an awning in the background that read ''Standings.'' Aha! Standings is a bar next to Burp Castle. Ascher checked its Web site, and the interior matched the pictures on the camera.

Ascher found Standings' owner, who reached the bartender who had worked Dec. 30. Yes, he recalled an Irish group. Especially because one of the women was a big tipper and said she worked at another New York City bar, Playwrights. The Standings bartender called Playwrights to ask which employees had been in his bar.

Ascher soon got an e-mail from a woman named Sarah Casey, whose sister Jeanette works at Playwrights. Suddenly everything Ascher had seen on the camera came to life.

The Caseys recently had hosted relatives and friends from Ireland. The group included their friend Alan Murphy, who had journeyed to Florida with family before heading to New York, where the clan stayed at the Radisson. (Their Noel was not the Noel whom Ascher e-mailed.) Murphy ended the trip kicking himself for leaving his camera in a cab in the twilight on New Year's Eve.

Sarah Casey agreed to send it to him. It didn't go to Ireland but to Sydney, Australia, where Murphy lives now.

Murphy, an insurance underwriter, had been devastated to lose the pictures from a trip he had planned for years. It was Jan. 10 -- his 34th birthday -- when he heard he would be getting the photos back. ''I was over the moon,'' he says now. ''Best present ever.''

''I owe you one,'' he wrote to Ascher. ''It's good to know there are some honest people left in the world.''
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T





The Capa Cache


Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Randy Kennedy

TO the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as “the Mexican suitcase.” And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway’s early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922.

The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in 1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom.

Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still thinking so. But in 1995 word began to spread that the negatives had somehow survived, after taking a journey worthy of a John le Carré novel: Paris to Marseille and then, in the hands of a Mexican general and diplomat who had served under Pancho Villa, to Mexico City.

And that is where they remained hidden for more than half a century until last month, when they made what will most likely be their final trip, to the International Center of Photography in Midtown Manhattan, founded by Robert Capa’s brother, Cornell. After years of quiet, fitful negotiations over what should be their proper home, legal title to the negatives was recently transferred to the Capa estate by descendants of the general, including a Mexican filmmaker who first saw them in the 1990s and soon realized the historical importance of what his family had.

“This really is the holy grail of Capa work,” said Brian Wallis, the center’s chief curator, who added that besides the Capa negatives, the cracked, dust-covered boxes had also been found to contain Spanish Civil War images by Gerda Taro, Robert Capa’s partner professionally and at one time personally, and by David Seymour, known as Chim, who went on to found the influential Magnum photo agency with Capa.

The discovery has sent shock waves through the photography world, not least because it is hoped that the negatives could settle once and for all a question that has dogged Capa’s legacy: whether what may be his most famous picture — and one of the most famous war photographs of all time — was staged. Known as “The Falling Soldier,” it shows a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling backward at what appears to be the instant a bullet strikes his chest or head on a hillside near Córdoba in 1936. When the picture was first published in the French magazine Vu, it created a sensation and helped crystallize support for the Republican cause.

Though the Capa biographer Richard Whelan made a persuasive case that the photograph was not faked, doubts have persisted. In part this is because Capa and Taro made no pretense of journalistic detachment during the war — they were Communist partisans of the loyalist cause — and were known to photograph staged maneuvers, a common practice at the time. A negative of the shot has never been found (it has long been reproduced from a vintage print), and the discovery of one, especially in the original sequence showing all the images taken before and after the shot, could end the debate.

But the discovery is being hailed as a huge event for more than forensic reasons. This is the formative work of a photographer who, in a century defined by warfare, played a pivotal role in defining how war was seen, bringing its horrors nearer than ever — “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was his mantra — yet in the process rendering it more cinematic and unreal. (Capa, not surprisingly, later served a stint in Hollywood, befriending directors like Howard Hawks and romancing Ingrid Bergman.)

Capa practically invented the image of the globe-trotting war photographer, with a cigarette appended to the corner of his mouth and cameras slung over his fatigues. His fearlessness awed even his soldier subjects, and between battles he hung out with Hemingway and Steinbeck and usually drank too much, seeming to pull everything off with panache. William Saroyan wrote that he thought of Capa as “a poker player whose sideline was picture-taking.”

In a Warholian way that seems only to increase his contemporary allure, he also more or less invented himself. Born Endre Friedmann in Hungary, he and Taro, whom he met in Paris, cooked up the persona of Robert Capa — they billed him as “a famous American photographer” — to help them get assignments. He then proceeded to embody the fiction and make it true. (Taro, a German whose real name was Gerta Pohorylle, died in Spain in 1937 in a tank accident while taking pictures.)

Curators at the International Center of Photography, who have begun a months-long effort to conserve and catalog the newly discovered work, say the full story of how the negatives, some 3,500 of them, made their way to Mexico may never be known.

In 1995 Jerald R. Green, a professor at Queens College, part of the City University of New York, received a letter from a Mexico City filmmaker who had just seen an exhibition of Spanish Civil War photographs sponsored in part by the college. He wrote that he had recently come into possession of an archive of nitrate negatives that had been his aunt’s, inherited from her father, Gen. Francisco Aguilar Gonzalez, who died in 1967. The general had been stationed as a diplomat in the late 1930s in Marseille, where the Mexican government, a supporter of the Republican cause, had begun helping antifascist refugees from Spain immigrate to Mexico.

From what experts have been able to piece together from archives and the research of Mr. Whelan, the biographer (who died last year), Capa apparently asked his darkroom manager, a Hungarian friend and photographer named Imre Weisz, known as Cziki, to save his negatives in 1939 or 1940, when Capa was in New York and feared his work would be destroyed.

Mr. Weisz is believed to have taken the valises to Marseille, but was arrested and sent to an internment camp in Algiers. At some point the negatives ended up with General Aguilar Gonzalez, who carried them to Mexico, where he died in 1967. It is unclear whether the general knew who had taken the pictures or what they showed; but if he did, he appears never to have tried to contact Capa or Mr. Weisz, who coincidentally ended up living the rest of his life in Mexico City, where he married the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. (Mr. Weisz died recently, in his 90s; Mr. Whelan interviewed him for his 1985 biography of Capa but did not elicit any information about the lost negatives.)

“It does seem strange in retrospect that there weren’t more efforts to locate these things,” Mr. Wallis said. “But I think they just gave them up. They were lost in the war, like so many things.”

When the photography center learned that the work might exist, it contacted the Mexican filmmaker and requested their return. But letters and phone conversations ended with no commitments, said Phillip S. Block, the center’s deputy director for programs, who added that he and others were not even sure at the beginning if the filmmaker’s claims were true, because no one had been shown the negatives. (Saying that the return of the negatives was a collective decision of the Aguilar Gonzalez family, the filmmaker asked not to be identified in this article and declined to be interviewed for it.)

Meetings with the man were scheduled, but he would fail to appear. “And then communications broke off completely for who knows what reason,” Mr. Block said. Efforts were made from time to time, unsuccessfully, to re-establish contact. But when the center began to organize new shows of Capa and Taro’s war photography, which opened last September, it decided to try again, hoping that images from the early negatives could be incorporated into the shows.

“He was never seeking money,” Mr. Wallis said of the filmmaker. “He just seemed to really want to make sure that these went to the right place.”

Frustrated, the center enlisted the help of a curator and scholar, Trisha Ziff, who has lived in Mexico City for many years. After working for weeks simply to track down the reclusive man, she began what turned out to be almost a year of discussions about the negatives.

“It wasn’t that he couldn’t let go of this,” said Ms. Ziff, interviewed by phone from Los Angeles, where she is completing a documentary about the widely reproduced image of Che Guevara based on a photograph by Alberto Korda.

“I think it was that no one before me had thought this through in the way that something this sensitive needs to be thought through,” she said. The filmmaker worried in part that people in Mexico might be critical of the negatives’ departure to the United States, regarding the images as part of their country’s deep historical connection to the Spanish Civil War. “One had to respect and honor the dilemma he was in,” she said.

In the end Ms. Ziff persuaded him to relinquish the work — “I suppose one could describe me as tenacious,” she said — while also securing a promise from the photography center to allow the filmmaker to use Capa images for a documentary he would like to make about the survival of the negatives, their journey to Mexico and his family’s role in saving them.

“I see him quite regularly,” Ms. Ziff said, “and I think he feels at peace about this now.”

In December, after two earlier good-faith deliveries of small numbers of negatives, the filmmaker finally handed Ms. Ziff the bulk of the work, and she carried it on a flight to New York herself.

“I wasn’t going to put it in a FedEx box,” she said.

“When I got these boxes it almost felt like they were vibrating in my hands,” she added. “That was the most amazing part for me.”

Mr. Wallis said that while conservation experts from the George Eastman House in Rochester are only now beginning to assess the condition of the film, it appears to be remarkably good for 70-year-old nitrate stock stored in what essentially looks like confectionery boxes.

“They seem like they were made yesterday,” he said. “They’re not brittle at all. They’re very fresh. We’ve sort of gingerly peeked at some of them just to get a sense of what’s on each roll.”

And discoveries have already been made from the boxes — one red, one green and one beige — whose contents appear to have been carefully labeled in hand-drawn grids made by Mr. Weisz or another studio assistant. Researchers have come across pictures of Hemingway and of Federico García Lorca.

The negative for one of Chim’s most famous Spanish Civil War photographs, showing a woman cradling a baby at her breast as she gazes up toward the speaker at a mass outdoor meeting in 1936, has also been found. “We were astonished to see it,” Mr. Wallis said. (The photograph, often seen as showing the woman worriedly scanning the skies for bombers, was mentioned by Susan Sontag in “Regarding the Pain of Others,” her 2003 reconsideration of ideas from her well-known treatise “On Photography,” a critical examination of images of war and suffering.)

The research could bring about a reassessment of the obscure career of Taro, one of the first female war photographers, and could lead to the determination that some pictures attributed to Capa are actually by her. The two worked closely together and labeled some of their early work with joint credit lines, sometimes making it difficult to establish authorship conclusively, Mr. Wallis said. He added that there was even a remote possibility that “The Falling Soldier” could be by Taro and not Capa.

“That’s another theory that’s been floated,” he said. “We just don’t know. To me that’s what’s so exciting about this material. There are so many questions and so many questions not even yet posed that they may answer.”

Ultimately, Mr. Wallis said, the discovery is momentous because it is the raw material from the birth of modern war photography itself.

“Capa established a mode and the method of depicting war in these photographs, of the photographer not being an observer but being in the battle, and that became the standard that audiences and editors from then on demanded,” he said. “Anything else, and it looked like you were just sitting on the sidelines. And that visual revolution he embodied took place right here, in these early pictures.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/ar...gn/27kenn.html





Getty Images Up for Sale, Could Fetch $1.5 Billion
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael J. de la Merced

Getty Images, the world’s biggest supplier of pictures and video to media and advertising companies, has put itself on the auction block and could fetch more than $1.5 billion, people briefed on the situation said Sunday.

The firm hired Goldman Sachs to advise it on a potential sale, these people said. The company has attracted interest from several buyers, mostly private equity firms, including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital and others.

Final bids are due by the end of the month, but people briefed on the auction cautioned that it was unclear which firms would submit a final bid. A sale is not assured, because the tightening of the high-yield debt markets has cut off private equity firms from the lifeblood of their business, making it harder to finance deals.

Getty, founded in 1995 in Seattle, has grown through a series of acquisitions into a go-to source for visual media, claiming an average service of 3.2 billion images and 4 million unique visitors at its Web site each month. The company’s main selling point is the licensing of high-quality images from professional photographers around the world. Among its main clients are advertising agencies and media companies, including The New York Times. It also offers video footage for use in movies, television and the Internet.

A spokeswoman for the company contacted last week said the company does not comment on “rumors and speculation.”

Some of the company’s premium offerings include the distribution of images from the Time Life and National Geographic collections. Early last year, Getty bought its biggest competitor, MediaVast, for $202 million, acquiring the WireImage service in the process. Last year, Getty held takeover talks with the publicly held Jupitermedia Corporation, but the discussions ended quickly without a deal.

Its main rivals, Jupitermedia, and the Corbis Corporation, a private company owned by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, have also made a number of acquisitions, though they remain far smaller than Getty. The Internet — a medium that Getty pioneered by being the first to license images online — has made it easier for clients to find pictures for less money.

Getty’s shares have declined more than 47 percent in the last year. Its shares fell 10 percent in August, when the company lowered its full-year profit estimate because of competition from low-cost rivals. Last November, it reported a third-quarter profit of $25.7 million, down 31 percent from a year ago.

Last April, Getty also restated its earnings and took a $28 million to $32 million charge after an internal investigation into the backdating of stock options grants to executives.

Started by Jonathan Klein and Mark Getty, a scion of the J. Paul Getty oil fortune, the company began striking deals and acquiring the photo archives of companies like PhotoDisc. Its growth began to skyrocket with later acquisitions like its $183 million purchase of Eastman Kodak’s Image Bank in 1999.

But the rise of digital photography and the Web created a host of competitors that charged as little as a dollar for an image. Recent events — from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister, to the latest foibles of the entertainer Britney Spears — have led to a surging popularity of low-quality but on-the-scene photos, many taken by cellphone cameras.

“Getty Images continues to be a company in transition, adjusting from being the leading player in an oligopolistic market to being one of many players in a highly competitive market,” Barbara Coffey, a research analyst with Kaufman Brothers, wrote in a research note earlier this month.

The company made its biggest effort to harness some of that new sector’s profit by buying iStockphoto.com, a site for cheaper if also lower-quality photos, for $50 million in 2006. It has lowered the price for some of its wares and offers low-resolution versions of its photographs for $49.

Getty has moved to diversify in other ways. Last June, it bought Pump Audio, a music-licensing company that draws on works by unsigned musicians, for $42.5 million. Another acquisition, WireImage, which does picture coverage of entertainment events like parties, has helped bolster revenue from magazine and newspaper sales as well.

Still, some analysts worry that other, cheaper rivals could continue undercutting the company’s prices. Last August, Getty announced that it was laying off 100 employees, or about 5 percent of its full-time staff, its second round of cuts in as many years.

Other analysts are more bullish about Getty’s prospects. Ms. Coffey of Kaufman Brothers raised her recommendation of the stock to hold from sell this month after its price fell closer to her target of $24.

Getty’s share price has since fallen, closing at $21.94 on Friday.

Not all of Getty’s troubles stem from competitive pressures. A special committee of the company’s board said last April that it found no signs of “intentional wrongdoing” in the backdating of stock options, but Getty was forced to restate its earnings from virtually its inception until November 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/bu...ia/21deal.html





Shopping for Films but Settling for Some Fun
David Carr

A half foot of perfect, powdery snow fell here on Monday, carrying a message to the frantic crowd in temporary residence at the Sundance Film Festival: Slow down. Forget the branded parties on Main Street and the accompanying marketplace of film, and just enjoy the crunch of snow underfoot as you make your way to the next screening.

Sure. Beats worrying.

After a huge buildup about the commercial prospects of this year’s Sundance — where they said the writers’ strike and ambient private money could fuel a frenzy of acquisitions — buyers have their hands jammed deep into their coats, responding to both the cold snap and the fear that they will spend too much on movies that deliver too little.

Beyond the joy of a new snowfall, of course, there were some messages that this indie playground was welcoming more than movie stars and dollar signs. There were plenty of those, but there were also some movies with nobody special attached that rang out against the din.

On Sunday, for instance, there was a huge ovation for “Trouble the Water,” an intensely personal documentary about Hurricane Katrina that focused on the fight for survival traced by Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts, two New Orleaneans left behind by nature’s brutality and government indifference. They were both present for the screening, she remarkably pregnant and remarkably happy.

And at 6:15 a.m. on Monday, Martin Luther King Day here and everywhere, she gave birth to a baby girl named Skyy Kaylen Rivers Roberts, 7 pounds 1 ounce. Hope floats, in a hurricane, in a ruined city and, yes, at a film festival infested by wannabes and commercial interests.

If both buyers and sellers are a little bereft — there has not been a single significant purchase of feature film in the first five days of the festival — everyone else seemed more than happy to see little movies that may not end up being seen anywhere else. Documentaries, a huge commercial fiasco coming out of Sundance last year, continued to assert themselves artistically, with “Polanski” and “American Teen” kicking up chatter in the bars and coffee shops of Park City; the conversations had nothing to do with the films’ commercial prospects. And little movies like “Ballast” and “Momma’s Man” renewed the festival’s implicit promise of discovery but had no traction in the industry.

Main Street, of course, plays host to a few other activities besides movies. Every night there are frantic scrums in front of all manner of privatized nightlife options, with hierarchies of both need and power calculated by the minute. People in headsets examine hopefuls for credentials, wristbands, status or appearance, then decide whether they merit entrance to the warm and magical places within.

Which were plenty warm in the main, though rarely magical: rooms full of absently good-looking young people who seemed more interested in an incoming text than the people around them. Those who fought their way in soon found themselves fighting equally hard to get out.

Sundance always comes with a soundtrack. On Sunday night Patti Smith played (she is here behind a documentary about her career), and music filled the air deep into the night. When Lil John said, “Make some noise if you’re not from Park City,” the visiting hordes went nuts.

And at the Egyptian Theater “Adventures of Power,” a comedic film about air drumming — air guitar’s dumb brother — had its premiere at midnight. The film, which features Adrian Grenier, the crushed-on star of “Entourage,” was directed by and stars Ari Gold, an actor and longtime friend of Mr. Grenier’s who has the dubious honor of lending his name to the Jeremy Piven character on “Entourage.”

In true Sundance fashion, there was a preparty for the film, an intimate little dinner that was blown out to include hundreds, followed by the movie itself, and then an afterparty featuring a set by the Honey Brothers, a band that includes both Mr. Grenier and Mr. Gold. At 3:15 a.m. they were finally ready to play, but Mr. Grenier could not find — I am not making this up — his drumsticks. Some were finally obtained, and the show, as it always does at Sundance, went on.

Just about everybody who comes to Sundance brings a little something besides a love of movies, and it is all on display in the ad hoc parade that is Main Street: the impossibly tall woman with the impossibly tiny little dog with booties on; the corpulent Ronald McDonald with a huge dollar sign of bling around his neck; the PETA protesters shouting slogans at a crowd whose members not infrequently wear fur. It can be a little bewildering.

“Do you have any idea what we are doing right now?” said Paul Giamatti as he walked down Main Street during his one day in town to promote “Pretty Bird,” a movie about the fight over custody of intellectual and physical property — a jet pack, to be specific. Mr. Giamatti carried a look of wonder and confusion as he was photographed in various media locations. Now sitting at a table outside the MySpace Celebrity Lounge with a bottle of MySpace Ketchup on the table, he was pretty obviously in the midst of a branding moment, as everyone was.

Cue Paris Hilton. She is a fully integrated media company now, with clothing, fragrances, guerrilla pornography and, this being Sundance, even a movie for sale: “The Hottie and the Nottie.” Everybody wants a piece of Ms. Hilton — the rock band the Bravery, MySpace, even Bon Appétit magazine — and she is now as much a part of the fabric of Sundance as obscure documentaries about people you had never heard of.

There has been no big bolt of theatrical lightning this year, no “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Once.” There are movies that will find both audience and distribution one way or another — “Sunshine Cleaning,” starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, seems perfectly confected — but others that rode in on a wave of hype have been just sitting there. After the premiere of “What Just Happened?,” directed by Barry Levinson and starring Bruce Willis and Robert De Niro, people said nice things. But the answer to the question posed by the film? Not so much.

Some of the attendees simply took Park City for what it is. Jason Reitman, the director of the runaway hit “Juno,” acquitted himself nicely in a charity hockey game on Sunday. Tom Bernard, the Sony Pictures Classics executive who might have been out frantically shopping, played as well.

“I would much rather be on the rink than fighting the line to get into a premiere at the library,” he said. “This is safer.”

And Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson, who are here in support of a Hitchcock-inspired train thriller called “Transsiberian,” looked up at the mountains of the village after a night of promoting the film and decided to strap on skis and snowboards on Sunday morning.

“There was this huge run-up with all of this talk, partly because there is so much new money producing films, but when you got here, there was really not much to buy,” said one film executive who did not want to be seen as soiling Sundance’s reputation for commercial and artistic excellence. “There are a lot of bad movies here, movies that should not have been made. And the few ones that could be turned into something in the market are going to have to head into the sweat lodge and wait it out. No one is throwing the kind of money around they were last year.”

It had been expected that the industry would bring a hunger to the festival this year, but instead the pall over Hollywood, cast by shuttered award shows and strike-stalled productions, seemed to come to the event. Civilians, though, have made their way amid the gloom with real enthusiasm.

Because, in the end, what do you mean there is nothing to buy? There are all manner of T-shirts, caps and pullovers on sale here to help document that you were at Sundance 2008, that you saw the thing, that you have pictures of the star. Look, there he is with his arm around me. He’s smiling. What could be better than that?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/mo...2sundance.html





Deals Are Made at Sundance
David M. Halbfinger

And on the fifth night, the wallets opened.

After a weekend marked by too many downbeat dramas and comedies-in-name-only, the Sundance Film Festival’s flock of film buyers finally began seeing movies they could take to the multiplexes — and it was a religious experience.

Just after midnight Tuesday, “Henry Poole Is Here,” Mark Pellington’s light-hearted tale of a terminally ill man (Luke Wilson), his troubled neighbors and a stain on his stucco wall that looks to them like the face of Christ, sold to Overture Films, one of the new movie distributors clamoring for attention and movies.

The price paid was a minimum guarantee of $3.5 million for the rights to release the movie in the United States, three people close to the negotiations said, making it the first major deal of the festival. Overture beat out Warner Independent Pictures and Focus Features, one person involved said.

That agreement came hours after what was perhaps the most rousing premiere of the festival, that of “Hamlet 2,” a bawdy romp starring Steve Coogan as a failed actor turned pathetic high-school drama teacher who stages a musical sequel to “Hamlet,” with a “sexy Jesus” Christ in a starring role.

“Ten minutes after the screening ended, I had e-mails from distributors saying, ‘I must have that film’ and ‘Name your price,’ ” said Micah Green of the Creative Artists Agency, the film’s sales representative.

After a feverish auction, Focus Features emerged at about 3 a.m. the winning bidder for “Hamlet 2” with a price of $10 million – just shy of the Sundance record $10.5 million paid for “Little Miss Sunshine” in 2006 – edging out Fox Searchlight, the Weinstein Company, Lionsgate, Summit, and Warner Independent, according to two people close to the talks. The “to buy or not to buy” questions surrounding other films, meanwhile, seemed to be resolving themselves quickly.

For one example, at around 5 a.m. Tuesday Fox Searchlight agreed to pay a mid-seven-figure price for “Choke,” Clark Gregg’s adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel. The film stars Sam Rockwell as a sex-addicted con man (he forces himself to choke in fancy restaurants), Anjelica Huston as his deranged, hospitalized mother, and Kelly McDonald as her doctor. The United Talent Agency represented the film, which also has religious overtones: Ms. Huston’s character believes her fatherless son is the Second Coming.

One of the festival’s overarching themes has been hope and optimism, as is most evident in films about people facing down death, including “Henry Poole Is Here” and Amy Redford’s drama “The Guitar” (which was less well received in its Friday opening).

In Mr. Pellington’s comedy-drama, written by Albert Torres and produced by Lakeshore Entertainment, Adriana Barraza (“Babel”) plays a woman whose glimpse of the holy visage in a skeptical neighbor’s water-stained stucco wall — complete with tears of blood — threatens to turn his back yard into a suburban Lourdes. All the principal characters are coping with loss of one kind or another (already realized, or looming just ahead) — appropriately enough, since Mr. Pellington decided to make the film while grieving over his own wife’s death in 2004.

Chris McGurk, chief executive of Overture, said he sent an e-mail message to Tom Rosenberg, the head of Lakeshore, from his seat in the theater in the middle of the premiere to say he wanted “Henry Poole.”

In a phone interview, he said that both believers and nonbelievers could find the film validating. “It’s much more than a movie about religion,” he said. “Whether you subscribe to a certain faith or not, it’s a movie you can hook into.”

By contrast, “Hamlet 2,” even as it made sure to offend Christians, gays, Latinos, Jews, the A.C.L.U., and one of its lead actresses (Elisabeth Shue), also managed to subvert the festival’s running theme of death-defying optimism. The film, whose producer is Eric Eisner (son of Michael, the former Disney chief), was one of those Cinderella stories at Sundance: Submitted after the festival had announced its line-up in November, still unfinished, it was absent from the printed festival guides. “The buyers knew we rushed a cut,” said Mr. Green, the film’s agent. “We projected digitally. The film’s really not done — we weren’t done editing, we just stopped to have something to show.”

As acquisition teams from Focus, Fox Searchlight, Lionsgate, Miramax and the Weinstein Company, among others, left the screening to huddle and come up with offers, the non-buying audience hung around for a quick question-and-answer session with Andrew Fleming, the director of “Hamlet 2,” and several members of his cast.

Mr. Fleming said he and his writing partner, Pam Brady (a veteran “South Park” writer), had been working on the script for five years, but the idea of a “Hamlet” sequel was much more recent, and the actual play-within-the-movie was written on deadline. “It was this kind of panicked, last-minute thing — ‘let’s write some songs and put on a show,’ ” Mr. Fleming said.

In the movie Ms. Shue plays herself, oddly enough — or a version of herself that could be so smitten by Mr. Coogan that she’d lick his face (as she did again onstage, for good measure). Why’d she take the role? “I just got the script and it said, ‘A famous actress who’s a has-been, lives in Tucson and is a nurse,’ ” she said. “I had to do it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/movies/23sund.html





Born of ‘Juno’: A Hit Soundtrack With an Uneasy Singer at Its Heart
Ben Sisario

Her songs are all over a hit indie soundtrack, and new fans are mobbing her concerts. Most musicians would see this as good news. But for Kimya Dawson, the 35-year-old den mother of the tiny anti-folk scene, all the attention for her music in the film “Juno” is a little troubling.

“I’m totally scared,” she said recently at Southpaw, a small club in Brooklyn where she was playing a sold-out afternoon show open to all ages. Literally all ages: among the toddlers in attendance was her 17-month-old daughter, Panda, whom Ms. Dawson breast-fed backstage while explaining her fears of getting too famous too fast.

A do-it-yourself singer who writes in childlike, stream-of-consciousness verse and has “LAFF LOUD” tattooed on her fingers, she now finds herself competing with major celebrities like Alicia Keys, Mary J. Blige and Radiohead for the top spot on the Billboard album chart. It’s a strange situation for Ms. Dawson, who with her old band, the Moldy Peaches, became a leader of the loosely knit, underground punk-meets-folk scene.

Last week the soundtrack to “Juno,” the snarky romantic comedy about a pregnant 16-year-old, reached No. 3 in a close contest, selling 68,000 copies, and this week the race for No. 1 looks just as tight. On Monday morning Ms. Dawson is booked on “The View” on ABC to perform with Adam Green of the Moldy Peaches; the group’s song “Anyone Else but You” receives prominent treatment in the film.

“Because of the success of the album, people have all these expectations of what the next steps are for me,” Ms. Dawson said. But she has no manager and no booking agent and promotes herself through her site (kimyadawson.com). And she said she had no plans to leave K Records, a veteran independent label in Olympia, Wash., where she lives.

“I don’t like people seeing me on the street and freaking out,” she added. “It’s never what I wanted.”

“Juno” is the latest indie soundtrack to become a hit just as the popularity of the blockbuster pop soundtrack has faded. A decade ago soundtracks were a dependable cash cow for the music industry, but in recent years their sales have plunged; excluding “High School Musical” and “Hannah Montana” products, few major ones have done well on the charts. Last January the “Dreamgirls” album set a record for the least number of weekly sales for a No. 1 album, with 60,000.

“During the ’90s almost every label had a soundtrack division, and there were some huge sellers,” said Geoff Mayfield, Billboard’s director of charts. “It worked for a minute, but once the consumer got the ability to make their own compilations with iTunes and digital technology, that became less appetizing.”

At the same time the indie soundtrack has come into its own as a stable, if modest, seller. Directors like Wes Anderson (“Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”) established the type with a mix of new independent music and older rarities, and in 2004 “Garden State” accelerated the trend by highlighting the indie band the Shins. One of their songs, Natalie Portman’s character promised in the film, will “change your life, I swear.”

The “Garden State” album went on to sell 1.3 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. More indie-heavy soundtracks followed for “Thumbsucker,” “Stranger Than Fiction,” “The Last Kiss” and others, increasing the pressure on filmmakers to find new and distinctive musical voices.

“As a director there’s a sensitivity to other soundtracks,” said Jason Reitman, who made “Juno.” “You want to find your own artists. I don’t want to be the 100th guy to use Simon and Garfunkel in my movie.”

In recent years some of the more successful indie soundtracks, like last year’s “Once” and “Into the Wild,” have relied on a smaller number of singers or songwriters to create a stronger, unified identity, enticing listeners to buy the whole album instead of just one or two hits. Of the 19 songs on the “Juno” album, 9 are by Ms. Dawson or one of her bands.

Mr. Reitman said he discovered Ms. Dawson’s music before shooting for “Juno” began, when he asked the star, Ellen Page, what band she thought the characters would listen to. Without hesitation she recommended the Moldy Peaches, and Mr. Reitman said their sensibility matched the film’s.

“They have the ability to be ironic and sincere at the same time,” he said. “You believe the love, the sentiment in everything they’re saying, even though they’re being crass or they’re joking around.”

As Ms. Dawson’s solo albums, like “I’m Sorry That Sometimes I’m Mean” and “Remember That I Love You,” have grown more reflective and mature, she has become a figure of wisdom and support for her fans. She said she frequently receives e-mail messages from lonely and depressed young people looking for guidance, and YouTube is chock full of videos of teenagers performing “Anyone Else but You” in bedroom duets.

“I’m into, like, full-audience group-hug kind of stuff,” Ms. Dawson said.

Onstage at Southpaw, playing solo with a guitar, Ms. Dawson closed her eyes and squinted as she sang, and although she made her share of wisecracks, she also seemed to choke back tears when pleading with her fans not to abandon her. “Just treat me normal, please,” she said.

After her last song she announced: “People who have to leave, leave fast. People who don’t, get in a circle and hold hands.”

She walked into the middle of the circle and began to swirl it closely around her: a full-audience group hug.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/ar...ic/21juno.html





Hip-Hop’s Newest Faces: Indie, Fierce and Female
Julianne Shepherd

JWL B. of the Florida hip-hop duo Yo Majesty was not satisfied with her tight-collared, mostly male audience at a New York club last fall. So she nonchalantly peeled off her oversized white T-shirt and black sports bra and performed the next several songs topless, bounding about the stage with the ease of a shirtless male rapper. The audience lit up and finally proceeded to, as the Yo Majesty song “Club Action” commands, get their behinds “on the floor.”

And that is how a lesbian rap group from Florida got an uptight Manhattan crowd to relax a little.

“I got stretch marks, and I’m fat, and I’m wildin,’ ” Jwl B., whose real name is Jewel Baynham, said in a phone interview. “But your boy 50 Cent does his show with his shirt off. Why can’t I? God made me who I am, and I’m comfortable in it. I want people to know you don’t have to look glamorous to be an inspiration.”

It’s a lackluster time for mainstream female rappers, with M.C.’s like Foxy Brown and Remy Ma making more headlines for jail stints than for their music. Lil’ Kim hasn’t gone platinum since 2003, Eve’s comeback album has been delayed several times, and Missy Elliott’s first record in three years isn’t due until late spring. Fergie, with her singsong chants about her feminine wiles, is the closest thing to a female rap superstar these days. But in the wake of the critical favorite M.I.A., a new crop of young, multicultural, female hip-hop acts is causing a stir on the Internet and in indie-label conference rooms.

There’s Kid Sister, a cheeky, charismatic rapper from Chicago who recently released a video featuring Kanye West; Amanda Blank, a nasty-mouthed M.C. from Philadelphia who is associated with the hipster male hip-hopper Spank Rock; and Santogold, a new-wavey singer and dub-style rapper from Brooklyn who toured with Bjork last fall. Though their styles vary from agile wordplay to club-ready choruses, what unites them is their fresh, left-of-center enthusiasm; their bold attitudes; and an expansive approach to female sexuality.

“There is a reason why these artists are having so much early traction online,” said Josh Deutsch, chief executive of Downtown Records, which will release albums by Amanda Blank and Santogold this spring. “And it’s because they have such strong voices and strong points of view. There’s nothing remotely manufactured about them.”

Yo Majesty’s roots go back six years, when Ms. Baynham met LaShunda Flowers, who is known as Shunda K., a track star turned rapper, at a gay club in Tampa, Fla. (A third member, Shon Burt, quit recently.) The group’s early songs were “real gay music,” Ms. Flowers said.

Yo Majesty broke up for a few years, during which Ms. Baynham renounced her homosexuality, found God, married a male Christian missionary, got divorced then reclaimed her lesbian identity. Upon reuniting, the rappers began building a following through MySpace. That led to a recording contract with Domino Records, which will release their debut album this year.

Yo Majesty’s party-rap proudly celebrates everything below the waist, but the duo also grapples with growing up Christian and gay. “At the end of every show,” Ms. Flowers said, “whatever we do, we ask people, ‘Do you know who the Lord is?’ ”

The only religion in Amanda Blank’s music is the kind she is losing. Ms. Blank, whose real name is Amanda Mallory, mimics the pornographic lyrics of Southern rappers like Trina and Khia, but she ramps up the gross-out factor to the point of nigh-absurdity. Her persona is a mix of seediness and street-toughness, which is on display in “Loose,” a recent video by Spank Rock. As several naked, tattooed women writhe all over him, Ms. Blank sits on a toilet, threatening to fight rappers who try to steal her style and making highly unprintable claims about her sexual prowess.

Unlike Yo Majesty and Amanda Blank, Kid Sister spurns sexual frankness in favor of innuendo. Born Melisa Young on the South Side of Chicago, she dismisses unsuitable suitors while strutting her postmodern stuff. “We could be hugged up like hippies on a tree trunk,” she teases in her verse in Chromeo’s “Tenderoni,” while “Telephone” reprimands a guy for calling too much. In the video for her single “Pro Nails,” backup dancers sit in pedicure chairs, lip-synching the chorus: “Got her toes done up with her fingernails matchin’.”

The video underscores Ms. Young’s populist, all-ages aspirations. “It’s music made by a girl who shops at Target, made for girls who shop at Target,” Ms. Young said. “Or girls who work at LensCrafters or Ace Hardware or are sorority sisters or debutantes.”

Angel Laws, editor of the celebrity news Web site Concreteloop.com and an early champion of Kid Sister, said: “I think she stands out. She’s a party rapper, bringing back the ‘80s style with the club-hop.” (Kid Sister’s debut album, “KoKo B. Ware,” is due from Fool’s Gold Records this summer.)

But the artist with the loudest buzz is Santogold, who has already been called the next big thing in many articles. Born Santi White, she parlayed a college internship at Ruffhouse Records into a job as an A&R scout for Sony. After she was executive producer and wrote most of the songs on an album for the R&B singer Res, she left and eventually formed her own punk band, Stiffed.

In 2006 Ms. White, who now lives in Brooklyn, began writing her own songs; “Creator” and “LES Artists” confess to feelings of alienation, but she also revels in her individuality. Singing in a haunting, sensual wail, or toasting in the style of dub M.C.’s, she adds a layer of softness to an unusual mix of synthesizers, dancehall rhythms and percolating new wave.

“She appeals very broadly,” said Martin Heath, the founder of Lizard King Records, which signed Stiffed and is jointly releasing Santogold’s debut album with Downtown. “She’s not cliché one way or the other. She’s not playing on the foxy thing.”

Ms. White said she admires other female artists who try to defy stereotypes. “You get these images of women in sexy clothes, walking around in, like, panties,” she said. “Even Beyoncé — that’s what it is to be a woman and make music. But now there are all these other women doing cool, interesting things, wearing styles they came up with, and it’s not about being naked.”

Since the time seems ripe for underground, unquantifiable female M.C.’s, the Lady Tigra is hoping that pioneers will have a place too. She was half of the ’80s duo L’Trimm, which scored a poppy Miami bass hit with “Cars that Go Boom” in 1988.

After spending the last two decades getting a creative writing degree, managing Manhattan clubs and writing and singing the theme song for the frozen yogurt chain Pinkberry (“Sorry Ice Cream”), she’s preparing for a comeback. Her first solo album, “Please Mr. Boom Box,” released by High Score Records, is available through major digital retailers.

Tigra’s aesthetic hasn’t changed much since the ‘80s. She raps in the same honeyed, high-pitched tone, and there are beefy low-end clicks, handclaps and electro synthesizers, all hallmarks of classic Miami bass music. But contrary to much music of that genre, there is little overt sex; she prefers coy comebacks.

The Lady Tigra, whose real name is Rachel de Rougemont, said she hopes that girls will realize that artists like Fergie and Gwen Stefani were inspired by semi-forgotten female forebears like “L’Trimm and J. J. Fad and M.C. Lyte and get into that.”

“Before, you’d really have to come with it to be considered an M.C.,” she added. “And now women get — if not equal — way more respect and recognition for what they do.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/ar....html?ref=arts





Digital Music Sales Grow, but at Slower Rate
Eric Pfanner

Digital music claimed an increasing share of overall music sales last year, though its growth rate slowed, the music industry’s international trade group said Thursday.

Digital music, distributed online or by mobile networks, accounted for $2.9 billion in sales worldwide, up from $2.1 billion a year earlier, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. It represented 15 percent of overall industry sales last year, up from less than 1 percent in 2003 and 11 percent in 2006.

But after a near doubling in 2006, digital sales grew by less than 40 percent last year. Meanwhile, sales of compact discs continue to fall sharply, and increased digital revenue has yet to make up the difference. Overall industry sales fell about 10 percent last year, to around $17.6 billion, the federation estimates.

A recovery in the music industry, walloped by digital piracy, remains at least a year away, John Kennedy, chief executive of the federation, said in an interview.

The industry’s troubles were highlighted this month when EMI, the smallest of the four major recording companies in terms of market share, announced plans to eliminate as many as 2,000 of its 5,500 employees, amid a steep decline in sales.

While the industry may see another year of decline, Mr. Kennedy said, there were some positive signs in the battle against illegal digital file-sharing, which the record companies cite as the main reason for their woes. In November, Internet service providers in France, in a deal brokered by President Nicolas Sarkozy, agreed to a plan under which they would shut down the accounts of persistent copyright pirates.

Mr. Kennedy said the record companies would step up their efforts to enlist the support of Internet service providers, either through voluntary action or through the courts.

“If people can be made to understand that free is not an option, we could get a dramatic improvement,” Mr. Kennedy said. “That, for me, would be the beginning of a recovery.”

Industry representatives are meeting with service providers in countries like Britain and Sweden, where government-sponsored reports have recommended that Internet service providers play a greater role.

In China, where piracy is rampant, the music industry plans to file a new lawsuit against Baidu.com, the largest Internet provider, within weeks, Mr. Kennedy said.

The music industry lost a previous round of court battles against Baidu, but took hope from a recent verdict against another service provider, Yahoo China, which was found guilty of copyright violations for linking users to file-sharing sites. Mr. Kennedy said regulations in China had been tightened between the filing of the two cases, providing hope for a future legal attack on Baidu.

Though growth in digital sales is easing, Mr. Kennedy said the industry remained on track to reach a previous projection that 25 percent of sales would be digital by 2010. The United States already moved beyond that level last year, reaching 30 percent. But many other markets are far behind; in France, for instance, digital sales were only 7 percent of the total in 2007.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/bu...cnd-music.html





Recording Music Without the Recording Industry
hephaist0s

The 2008 RPM Challenge — to write and record an original album in February, just because you can — is about to begin. Hundreds of musicians from around the world have already signed up. Last year, more than 850 albums were recorded as part of the challenge, a testament to what can be done by independent musicians without a label, without the RIAA, and often without a professional studio. The efforts ranged from an album made entirely on a Nintendo Game Boy to a Speed Racer rock opera, produced by both experienced bands and novice musicians, often in continent-spanning online collaborations. Last year's challenge generated one of the largest free jukeboxes of original music available online, built to stream on-demand all 8500-plus original, artist-owned songs. Imagine if grassroots, independent systems like this foretold the future of recorded music and its distribution.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/26/2129250





Closing the Barn Door After the Cows Have Gotten Out
Verlyn Klinkenborg

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration cleared the way for the eventual sale of meat and dairy products from cloned animals, saying, in effect, that consumers face no health risks from them. The next day, the Department of Agriculture asked farmers to keep their cloned animals off the market until consumers have time to get over their anticloning prejudice. That is one prejudice I plan to hold on to. I will not be eating cloned meat.

The reason has nothing to do with my personal health or safety. I think the clearest way to understand the problem with cloning is to consider a broader question: Who benefits from it? Proponents will say that the consumer does, because we will get higher quality, more consistent foods from cloned animals. But the real beneficiaries are the nation’s large meatpacking companies — the kind that would like it best if chickens grew in the shape of nuggets. Anyone who really cares about food — its different tastes, textures and delights — is more interested in diversity than uniformity.

As it happens, the same is true for anyone who cares about farmers and their animals. An agricultural system that favors cloned animals has no room for farmers who farm in different ways. Cloning, you will hear advocates say, is just another way of making cows. But every other way — even using embryo transplants and artificial insemination — allows nature to shuffle the genetic deck. A clone does not.

To me, this striving for uniformity is the driving and destructive force of modern agriculture. You begin with a wide array of breeds, a truly diverse pool of genes. As time passes, you impose stricter and stricter economic constraints upon those breeds and on the men and women who raise them. One by one, the breeds that don’t meet the prevailing economic model are weeded out. By the beginning of the 21st century, you’ve moved from the broad base of a genetic pyramid to its nearly vanishing peak, which is to say that the genetic diversity present in the economically acceptable breeds of modern livestock is minute. Then comes cloning, and we leave behind all variation.

Cloning is not unnatural. It is natural for humans to experiment, to try anything and everything. Nor is cloning that different from anything else we’ve seen in modern agriculture. It is another way of shifting genetic ownership from farmers to corporations. It is another way of creating still greater economic and genetic concentration in an industry that has already pushed concentration past the limits of ethical and environmental acceptability.

It always bears repeating that humans are only as rich as the diversity that surrounds them, whether we mean cultural or economic diversity. The same is true of genetic diversity, which is an essential bulwark against disease. These days there is less and less genetic diversity in the animals found on farms, and farmers themselves become less and less diverse because fewer and fewer of them actually own the animals they raise. They become contract laborers instead.

It is possible to preserve plant and crop diversity in seed banks. But there are no animal banks. Breeds of animals that are not raised die away, and the invaluable genetic archive they represent vanishes. This may look like a simple test of economic efficiency. It is really a colossal waste, of genes and of truly lovely, productive animals that are the result of years of human attention and effort. From one perspective, a cloned animal looks like a miracle of science. But from another, it looks like what it is: a dead end.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/opinion/23wed4.html





It's Official: Mail is Slow as Snails

It's official. Postal delivery is as slow as snails, at least in Poland.

An IT worker, after receiving a letter on January 3 that was sent on December 20 as priority mail, calculated that a snail would have made it even faster to his home than the letter.

Daily Gazeta Wyborcza said Michal Szybalski calculated that it took 294 hours for the letter to arrive at his home. He also said the distance between his home and the sender was 11.1 kilometers.

Given the distance and the time, the speed of the letter was 0.03775 kilometers per hour. Szybalski calculated that a garden snail travels at around 0.048 kilometers per hour.

(Writing by Karolina Slowikowska; Editing by Ibon Villelabeitia)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...23750920080124
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Repress U
Michael Gould-Wartofsky

Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.

From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.

At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents, and according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, they serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts about his antiwar views.

FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to do all the work. Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free-speech zones," which actually constrain speech, and punishing those who step outside them. Protests were typically forced into "free-assembly areas" at the University of Central Florida and Clemson University, while students at Hampton and Pace universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar fliers, aka "unauthorized materials."

2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames.

Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."

Most of the force used on campuses these days, though, comes in less lethal form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a "form of torture" by the United Nations. A Taser was used by UCLA police in November 2006 to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American student for failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library. A University of Florida student was Tased last September after asking pointed questions of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea "Don't Tase me, bro!" becoming the stuff of pop folklore.

3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally--one that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.

The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have found their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus doubling, tripling or, in a few cases, rising tenfold since September 11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about 200 each.

Often it can be tricky to find out where the cameras are and just what they're meant to be viewing. The University of Texas battled student journalists over disclosure and ultimately kept its cameras hidden. Sometimes, though, the cameras' purpose seems obvious. Take the case of Hussein Hussein, a professor in the department of animal biotechnology at the University of Nevada, Reno. In January 2005 the widely respected professor found a hidden camera redirected to monitor his office.

4. Mine student records. Student records have in recent years been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named Project Strike Back, the Education Department teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist activity."

Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later, the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the creation of a federal "unit records" database that would track the activities and studies of college students nationwide. The department's Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype for such a national database.

It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed forces. The Defense Department has built its own database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, this program tracks 30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the department has partnered with private marketing and data-mining firms, which in turn sell the government reams of information on students and other potential recruits.

5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out. Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in the database.

The database aims to amass and record information on foreign students throughout their stay inside the United States. SEVIS requires thick files on the students from the sponsoring schools, constantly updated with all academic, biographical and employment records--all of which will be shared with other government agencies. If students fall out of "status" at school--or if the database thinks they have--the Compliance Enforcement Unit of ICE goes into action.

ICE, of course, has done its part to keep the homeland security campus purified of those not born in the homeland. The American Immigration Law Foundation estimates that only one in twenty undocumented immigrants who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college--many don't go because they cannot afford the tuition but also because they have good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did make it to college, some before they could graduate.

6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom and the laboratory. Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, DHS has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."

The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to students who fit "within the homeland security research enterprise." Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that encompasses more than 1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the homeland security classroom are the US Northern Command and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium.

OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to "align scientific results with homeland security priorities." In fiscal year 2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland-security-related research. Grants correspond to sixteen research topics selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation and a smattering of scientific advice.

But wait, there's more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own "Centers of Excellence," research facilities that span dozens of universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the funding for which cleared the House in October. The center is mandated to assist a national commission in combating those "adopting or promoting an extremist belief system...to advance political, religious or social change."

7. Privatize, privatize, privatize. Of course, homeland security is not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance and data mining--it's big business. (According to USA Today, global homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a year in 2006, a sixfold increase over 2000.) Not surprisingly, then, universities have in recent years established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the corporations that have the most to gain from their research. DHS's on-campus National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terror (START), for instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald's offering "guidance and direction," according to its chair.

While vast sums of money are flowing in from corporate sponsors, huge payments are also flowing out to "strategic contracts" with private contractors, as universities permanently outsource security operations to big corporations like Securitas and AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes to those guarding the properties, who are often among the most underpaid workers in the universities. Instead, it fills the corporate coffers of those with little accountability for conditions on campus.

Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May, for example, the University of Illinois and its police training institute cut a deal with the firm to share its facilities and training programs with Blackwater operatives. Local journalists later revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on the Blackwater payroll. In the age of hired education, such collaboration is apparently par for the course.
Following these seven steps over the past six years, the homeland security state and its constituents have come a long way in their drive to remake the American campus in the image of a compound on lockdown. Somewhere inside the growing homeland security state that is our country, the next seven steps in the process are undoubtedly already being planned.

Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The new homeland security campus has proven itself unable to shut out public scrutiny or stamp out resistance to its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes such opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled, or the Pentagon's TALON declawed, or a Project Strike Back struck down. A rising tide of student protest, led by groups like the new Students for a Democratic Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in repression from Pace and Hampton, where the university dropped its threat of expulsion, to UCLA, where Tasers will no longer be wielded against passive resisters.

Yet if the tightening grip of the homeland security complex isn't loosened, the latest towers of higher education will be built not of ivory but of Kevlar for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of America.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/gould-wartofsky





IFPI Fantasy: 2008 the Year ISP Filtering "Becomes Reality"
Nate Anderson

When we dubbed 2008 the "Year of Filters" two weeks ago, someone at the IFPI must have been reading. The worldwide music trade group has just released its 2008 report on digital music, and it opens by talking about the "sea change" that is sweeping the globe. No, it's not digital music, it's ISP filtering. According to the IFPI, "2007 was the year ISP responsibility started to become an accepted principle. 2008 must be the year it become [sic] reality." If you don't smell a coordinated, worldwide campaign to prod ISPs to board the Filter Express, it's time to haul yourself to an otolaryngologist.

The campaign has been in progress for some time. Here in the US, the MPAA has been banging on the filtering drum for some time with its argument that content filtering is actually in ISPs' best interests. One the one hand, this is true (filtering can reduce peak traffic loads from P2P software), but it's an argument that fails to acknowledge just how much work ISPs have done at all levels of government to make sure that they are a "dumb pipe" to the Internet. Bills like the US DMCA granted ISPs immunity for the content that travels over their networks, but that immunity could be lost if ISPs start filtering.

The MPAA did score a huge win in 2007 as AT&T publicly committed to implementing some sort of filtering scheme across its network, but it hasn't yet managed to get most universities and colleges to do the same thing (either voluntarily or through government regulation). It has tried—in some cases using data that was inflated to three times the actual level—but so far has had limited success.

The ultimate prize would be a government mandate for filtering of the kind now facing ISPs in France. French President Nicolas Sarkozy supervised a "memorandum of understanding" between the government, ISPs, and content owners last year that achieves modest consumer gains but requires ISPs to disconnect repeat copyright infringers.

The IFPI's new report says that the "Sarkozy plan leads the way," and the group clearly intends to push for this model to be replicated elsewhere (something similar was also mentioned as a possibility in the UK's Gowers Report from 2006).

Despite 40 percent worldwide growth in digital sales, IFPI claims that the ratio of unlicensed tracks to legal downloads is still about 20 to one. These illicit downloads are said to be the cause of lower sales, though one study cited by the IFPI shows that P2P downloading didn't affect the buying habits of 64 percent of consumers and actually led 6 percent of file-swappers to buy more music. The other 30 percent did say that they purchased less music after grabbing their songs for free, but this is only a minority of P2P users.

In fact, the IFPI's own numbers show that in the US, for instance, 17.6 percent of all Internet users regularly share files. If 30 percent of those users buy less music, that means that file-swapping only leads 5.9 percent of all US Internet users to buy less music. The number is even lower if we take the US population as a whole.

Forgive us if we're skeptical here, but implementing a draconian solution like deep packet inspection of all Internet traffic in order to get a few percent of the population to buy more music doesn't sound much like progress, or even rationality.

In any event, that's not the way the IFPI sees it. Despite the growth of digital (in South Korea, online sales have even overtaken physical sales), the IFPI says that "the time for action is now," because "revolution and innovation are not going to be enough to secure a healthy future for the music industry."

Fortunately, "revolution and innovation" are actually words that can be applied to the music business now, and the IFPI report rightly cites the explosion of interesting new formats and business models for music. Apart from the well-known download services like iTunes, Amazon, and eMusic, subscription services like Napster, Rhapsody, and the Zune Pass offer unlimited music for a monthly fee. Ad-supported music from sites like Imeem and Last.fm makes it easy to explore new tunes legally, while models like Nokia's "Comes With Music" are baking the cost of a music subscription into a consumer electronics device. In addition, musicians are selling directly to fans and even allowing people to set their own prices.

So in many senses, 2008 looks like a bright year for music, but the heavy-handed emphasis on filtering as the One True Answer gives us pause. After all, once ISPs around the world have filtering technology installed and a mandate to use it, it's only a matter of time before they are asked to look for other sorts of crime and defend other sorts of industries.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...s-reality.html





AT&T, P2P Filtering, and the Consumer
Thomas Mennecke

The ISP is a far ranging concept that exists in the online world. ISPs such as Optimum Online, Napster, Usenet Server, and YouTube, offer a rainbow of different services. Some ISPs connect to the Internet, while others allow you to participate on the newsgroups. At the end of the day, however, they are all protected by the grace of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA has a safe harbor provision which effectively absolves the ISP from playing a copyright traffic cop on their network.

This provision has been a blessing for Internet providers such as AT&T, a company who was a significant proponent of the safe harbor provision during its previous iterations. As a result, the Internet community was baffled when AT&T recently stated they would consider filtering unauthorized content. The fact that any ISP would voluntarily police their own network has many scratching their heads. Why bother doing someone else’s job, putting up with the expense, and possible consumer backlash?

James Cicconi, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President-External and Legislative Affairs, reignited the Internet’s attention during a panel discussion at a CES (Consumer Electronics Show) earlier this month. Accompanied by NBC Universal General Council Rick Cotton, James gave new life to the very real possibility that network filtering was coming to an ISP near you. With AT&T in control of a significant portion of the Internet backbone, any decision made could have a ripple effect on millions of customers. The news hasn’t gone over well with bloggers, journalists, and countless AT&T customers screaming bloody murder on an infinite number of forums.

Just about anyone involved in the debate has their own theory why AT&T is doing this. Some compelling theories suggest AT&T is working in conjunction with the entertainment industry. The theory suggests AT&T needs support for eliminating net neutrality, and is playing politics with the entertainment industry to meet this end. Tim Wu of Slate cleverly discusses a few other theories, such as net neutrality and bandwidth control.

So why is AT&T going through the potentially arduous task of policing its own network? Slyck.com spoke with James Cicconi, who discussed why AT&T was taking up the filtering cause.

“We’re not taking on a legal enforcement role,” Jim Cicconi, told Slyck.com. “We’ve been clear. We don’t feel we have a legal responsibility. We’re not doing that in a legal sense. We do recognize it’s a real problem. There are property rights involved with copyrighted content. Simply saying there’s no legal responsibility doesn’t mean we have no responsibility. We also have responsibility to our customers. [A lot] of pirated material is used to transfer viruses, malware, and things of that nature.”

“[Unauthorized content] raises the cost for our customers. We have a very a small percentage using a majority of the bandwidth. The volume of illegal content is a factor of cost.”

“If someone is using a p2p network on a cell 24/7, it can adversely impact the service of their neighbors. It has the effect of not providing the service paid for. Overwhelming usage is from BitTorrent traffic. No one wants to get to the point [where] we say, “You can’t do that.”

As AT&T has begun evaluating and testing their filtering technology, BitTorrent users have been left to wonder if they’ll suddenly wake to an idle transfer. However, James Cicconi told Slyck.com that AT&T hasn’t implemented any filter on their public network just yet. Providing the technology can be developed, it wouldn’t be imposed until a rather lengthy public trial and endorsement. During the CES panel discussion, Cicconi stated “what we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working.” This left us to wonder if AT&T had already begun testing their network.

“It’s not that AT&T has done anything. Rather, the current system isn’t resulting in a reduction in piracy. I don’t believe the current model of suing users is successful or will be in the long term. And so what I was positioning there, we’re working with the industry, a model to identify copyrighted content. I think we’re pretty clear we haven’t [publicly] tested a system...”

“We’ve [internally] tested several systems, and we’re going to see if there’s a way to identify pirated content on the network. That asks the question of what to do if we develop such as technology. The actual deployment raises a lot of questions, [such as the impact on] customer rights and government policy. We wouldn’t proceed without answers to those questions.”

Consumers can take some comfort in the knowledge that AT&T isn’t moving forward until the public and government weigh in. Judging from the current public reaction, however, the unofficial response is an emphatic “no!”. Comments posted to various articles written on this subject matter are overwhelmingly negative against AT&T’s position, citing Internet censorship, cohorting with the entertainment industry, and attempting to defeat net neutrality standards. Regardless of the reason, public opinion thus far has been overwhelmingly against the plan.

“We hear from our customers directly and indirectly. It’s a very competitive business, ravenously so. I think our company is very, very sensitive to customer attitude - we have to consider this.”

AT&T is also looking to be heard from their perspective, and offers consumer protection as a carrot on the filtering stick.

“[There are] a lot of cases where people are being sued - their neighbor using their computer, or unprotected router - and downloading illegal content. If someone develops a system where filtered technology [stops this], one would feel it’s a lot better. Then customers would be protected. I don’t know if it exists, but I point out that if it were child pornography, I don’t think most people would have a problem with that. You have another level of moral dilemma, but it’s still illegal traffic. There are a lot of people defending copyrighted sharing, but how many would say it’s legal and right? Cooler heads need to come together and discuss whether the internet is a zone where there are no morals or standards of content.”

As with any threat of filtering, clamors of free speech violation inevitably surface. However, rectifying the distribution of copyrighted material is difficult to justify, at least to AT&T. There’s also the invisible line between what’s OK to distribute, and what’s not.

“I don’t think downloading a pirated movie is a free speech right. Other areas, such as pornography, people do see a line. What we’re saying [is]…let’s see if we can develop a means to see illegal or pirated material transferring. If we do have a means, how and where should we use it? No one’s running out there and all of a sudden identifying such traffic. We’re not going to do that. We are partnering to identify. If it’s possible, we need to have a policy discussion on what the right thing is to do. Should we ignore it? If we have the means to stop it, can we, without suing someone?”

“We’re not going to take actions of that nature without a thorough vetting with government and customers.”

About 10 years ago, most ISPs, including AT&T, were lobbying for the safe harbor provision in the DMCA. They got their wish, and since then ISPs have enjoyed immunity from any copyrighted material traversing their network. We asked Cicconi whether they felt that voluntarily filtering their network would negate the effectiveness of the DMCA, and put liability back on the ISP.

“No...We’ve made very clear to the content providers that...we don’t have the legal responsibility, except perhaps forwarding notices. We don’t have the responsibility to be an enforcement agent. We’ve also made clear we’re not changing that position. We’ve also said we’re willing to partner with the industry to address this. If they want to hold us to a legal requirement, we’re not going to partner with any such company. Content companies recognize they can’t impose any such responsibly. They’re not attempting to. But, I don’t see any movement to do that. If someone tries, we’ll end up in court. We’re not going to, under any circumstance, undertake enforcement responsibilities.”

Whenever the word “filter” and “P2P” are in the same sentence, fear almost always surrounds the potential loss of legitimate content. As many are already aware, BitTorrent is the de facto standard of distribution for many creative commons and copylefted content. BitTorrent, Inc. has worked to fill their site with both free and pay content, all distributed by this protocol. Additionally, many unsigned and signed bands alike utilize P2P for the distribution of their work. Any filter that’s developed would have to take on the daunting task of separating legitimate content from unauthorized content, and then further distinguishing intentionally free information.

“We’re very sensitive to legal content,” Jim reassured us. “We know World of War Craft updates and patches are distributed over BitTorrent. There are many mainstream applications and patches [that are] distributed via BitTorrent. BitTorrent isn’t an evil protocol, it’s a very efficient means. It’s a challenge for network operators. [Data streams] can run so long cooperatively. The challenge is, that it is constant. With video it’s exponential. The network…is not built to handle the volume.”

According to Cicconi, AT&T is doing everything it can to handle the traffic by investing billions of dollars each year, but even AT&T doesn’t have the money to keep up. Smart traffic management is the answer, especially with a challenging, multi-use application such as BitTorrent.

“There’s nothing wrong with BitTorrent. There’s very legitimate usage, [and] one would hope that it would grow. We’re focusing on pirated content over BitTorrent, [not BitTorrent per se.] The only issue is the sheer volume of traffic. It’s no different than any other traffic management challenge.”

Reflecting on AT&T’s proposal, many file-sharers can recall instances where the entertainment industry was sure it found the golden P2P bullet - only to see the threat slowly fade away. The threat of corrupt files destroying networks never came to fruition, suing network administrators did little to stop the technological advancement of file-sharing protocols, and ISPs that tried throttling bandwidth were met with encryption. While the mainstream P2P user is alarmed at these recent developments, most veterans have come to accept at worst there will be a brief adjustment period. Is AT&T concerned about the inevitable technological arms race spiraling out of control?

“The short answer, sure. That’s part of the learning that’s going on with some of our engineers to understand the experience they’ve had today. Try to anticipate what actions may be taken. Encryption is an obvious challenge. Just because there’s a challenge shouldn’t [mean we] ignore it.”

“Defending the internet doesn’t mean defending all conduct that occurs on the internet. Do we want the internet to be a civil place…or the wild west where you need to protect yourself. We have a lot of bad content [on the network]. Should we find ways to find and stop it? It’s an identical question to other illegal content.”

A common theme throughout our conversation with Jim Cicconi was “obligation” and “responsibility”. Jim Cicconi emphasized these words, as he often drew the analogy of witnessing a shoplifter or mugging. Does one help during that circumstance? We may not be legally responsible, but do we have a moral obligation?

It’s difficult for the average netizen to imagine a large corporation such as AT&T would feel any moral obligation, let alone to one that has helped prop up the broadband and digital entertainment revolution. Yet AT&T sees several issues – their moral obligation to deter theft, the need to save money, and providing a good service to everyone else not using P2P. Whatever the reasons and theories conjured for AT&T’s motivation, there are a few certainties. Filtering isn’t coming any time soon, and if AT&T is honest regarding their sensitivity to the customer’s opinion, it may never actually happen.
http://www.slyck.com/story1640_ATT_P...d_the_Consumer





AT&T Quarterly Profit Profit Rises

AT&T Inc on Thursday posted a higher quarterly profit after better-than-expected wireless growth, sending its shares up almost 3 percent in pre-market trading.

The company also affirmed its outlook for 2008.

The biggest U.S. telephone company said its fourth-quarter profit was $3.1 billion, or 51 cents per share, compared with $1.9 billion, or 50 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. Most of the year-ago quarter excludes earnings from BellSouth, which AT&T bought at the end of 2006.

Before merger-related costs and other special items AT&T's profit rose to 71 cents a share from 61 cents in the year-ago quarter.

Revenue rose to $30.3 billion from $15.9 billion.

The results were in line with the average analyst forecast of earnings per share of 71 cents before items, on revenue of $30.5 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

"We had an excellent fourth quarter, which affirms our outlook for 2008," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said in a statement.

The company also approved a buyback of 400 million shares, or 6.6 percent of its shares outstanding, and expects to complete the transactions by the end of 2009.

AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier for Apple Inc's iPhone, said it added 2.7 million net wireless subscribers in the quarter compared with average estimates of 1.9 million from four analysts contacted by Reuters. Estimates ranged from 1.35 million to 2.36 million.

The company said it maintained double-digit growth in revenue and subscribers for its broadband business and saw subscribers to its U-verse video service rise to 231,000 by the end of the quarter from 126,000 the previous quarter. Stephenson said the company was on track to reach more than 1 million U-verse subscribers by the end of 2008.

AT&T earlier this month said it was seeing some softness in its consumer business, which represents about 20 percent of the company's revenue, but said this had less of an impact in wireless than in wireline services.

Shares in AT&T were up 2.9 percent to $37.60 in pre-market trade. (Reporting by Sinead Carew and Michele Gershberg, editing by Mark Porter)
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...21857520080124





Nokia Profit Soars 44 Percent
AP

Nokia Corp., the world's No. 1 mobile phone maker, on Thursday said that fourth-quarter net profit surged 44 percent to $2.6 billion and that it had reached its long-term goal of 40 percent market share in handset sales. The company's stock soared.

Finland-based Nokia said that net sales in October through December grew 34 percent to 15.7 billion euros ($22.9 billion), and that it sold more than 133 million handsets -- up 27 percent from the same period in 2006.

''Nokia's excellent fourth quarter contributed to a year of high growth and increased profitability for the company,'' Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said.

In Helsinki, Nokia stock surged 12.4 percent to $33.81 after the announcement.

Nokia's strong performance was in stark contrast to that of closest rival Motorola Inc., which saw shares plunge more than 23 percent Wednesday after new CEO Greg Brown said the recovery of its ailing handset division will take longer than expected.

Schaumberg, Ill.-based Motorola said net profit fell 84 percent in the fourth quarter and mobile phone sales were down 38 percent.

Nokia, which is based in Espoo near the Finnish capital, Helsinki, has sales in 130 countries. It employs some 130,000 people worldwide.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...zfweQD8UC7R580





Nintendo Earnings Nearly Double on Wii
AP

Nintendo's profit for the first nine months of the fiscal year nearly doubled from the previous year, propelled by booming sales of its hit Wii game machine, the company said Thursday.

Group net profit at Nintendo Co., which also makes Super Mario and Pokemon games, totaled 258.93 billion yen ($2.43 billion) for the nine months ended Dec. 31, up 96.3 percent from 131.92 billion yen for the same period in fiscal 2006. Nintendo didn't give a quarterly breakdown.

The Wii, with its wandlike remote-controller, is winning over novices -- including the elderly and women -- to video games.

The machines, which first went on sale in late 2006, have been snatched up as soon as they arrive at stores, outstripping the competing PlayStation 3 from Sony Corp. and Xbox 360 from Microsoft Corp.

Nintendo said it has now sold more than 20 million Wii machines worldwide, 14.29 million of them during the latest three quarters.

New Wii games, including ''Wii Fit,'' ''Super Mario Galaxy'' and ''Wii Sports,'' have been a success.

Sales during the nine months jumped rose 84.7 percent from a year ago to 1.316 trillion yen ($12.35 billion) from 712.59 billion.

The Kyoto-based company kept its profit forecast at 275 billion yen ($2.58 billion), for the full fiscal year through March 31, but raised its sales forecast to 1.63 trillion yen ($15.29 billion), up from an earlier estimate of 1.55 trillion yen.

Nintendo said its DS portable machine, which comes with a touch panel, has also been very popular, marking 24.5 million units in sales during the nine months through December 2007, adding to cumulative sales of 64.79 million.

The DS has also introduced new kinds of gaming, including brain teasers, virtual pets and cooking recipes.

Nintendo said it expects to sell 18.5 million Wiis and 29.5 million DS machines for the fiscal year through March 31.

Nintendo shares slipped 2.4 percent in Tokyo to 53,200 yen ($499) shortly before earnings were released.
http://www.physorg.com/news120374181.html





Canadian Artists Stump for Tougher Copyright Laws
Canwest

In anticipation of a new federal copyright law, an alliance representing writers, musicians and actors has released a platform detailing what they think is best for Canadian artists.

The Creators Copyright Coalition's report, released Monday, calls for artists to be given the sole right "to produce or reproduce the work or any substantial part thereof in any material form" and "to transfer the work or any substantial part thereof to another medium."

The group, which includes the Writers Guild of Canada and the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, also wants Internet service providers (ISPs) to "share in the responsibility" for their online content, and to "share liability" when copyright infringement occurs on their networks.

"Creators have been waiting far too long for copyright reform. It is time to protect the rights of all authors and performers in the Internet age," Bill Freeman, chair of the coalitionsaid in a statement.

The government's new copyright law proposal was expected to be introduced before the new year, but was stalled by protests and concerns from various interest groups, including the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group set-up by Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor (and copyright law activist).

Many esteemed artists and coalition members have spoken out in support of the platform.

"While the digital age has offered music creators wonderful opportunities, it is clear that the rampant unpaid online consumption of music and other content has had a devastating effect. We need up-to-date copyright legislation that will protect the value of our rights, ensuring us a future where creators will be compensated for the use and enjoyment of our work," songwriter Stan Meissner said in a statement.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/can...html?id=253564





Canadian Privacy Commissioner: Just Say No to Intrusive DRM
Nate Anderson

Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, is wary of DRM, and she's not afraid to tell other branches of government about her concerns. Stoddart has just sent a public letter to Jim Prentice, the Canadian Minister of Industry, telling him that his impending copyright reform bill should not protect any DRM that gathers and transmits personal data.

Stoddart wouldn't care much about DRM if it "only controlled copying and use of content." But DRM can also collect personal information and send it back to the "copyright owner or content provider, without the consent or knowledge of the user." Even if users do find out (and object), they wouldn't be able to strip the DRM or circumvent it because Prentice's bill will reportedly contain US-style anti-circumvention provisions.

Stoddart points to the Sony BMG rootkit fiasco as a real-world example of the problem. The Windows-only content protection software included on selected CDs cloaked its presence, collected information about what discs were played, and sent the data (and a user's IP number) to Sony BMG. That made the software a privacy concern, not just something for IP lawyers to debate. "That this occurs when individuals are engaged in a private activity in their homes or other places where they have a high expectation of privacy exacerbates the intrusiveness of the collection," Stoddart wrote.

Her concern in the letter is narrow, but it's heartening to see parts of the Canadian government, at least, taking issues of consumer privacy seriously. Canadian law professor Michael Geist, who has spearheaded much of the opposition to Prentice's bill, says that the letter "provides an important reminder that it is more than just copyright law that hangs in the balance as the government's plans could ultimately place Canadians' privacy at risk."

Prentice had initially readied the bill for presentation late last year, but the media firestorm over its introduction has already delayed it for over a month, with no word on when it will be officially introduced.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...usive-drm.html





Long-time DRM foe Yahoo Music Planning DRM-free MP3 Store
Jacqui Cheng

When it comes to opening new online music stores, DRM-free is the name of the game. Now that all of the Big Four music labels have either completely dropped or are in the process of dropping copy protection requirements from their music, online retailers are rushing to sell the newly-freed songs faster than a Mac user gravitates to an iPhone. Although Amazon has now made a name for itself as the first (and currently, the only) MP3 store to offer DRM-free tracks from all of the Big Four labels, Yahoo now plans to throw its hat into the ring later this year.

The news of Yahoo's plans came by way of two anonymous record label execs speaking to the Associated Press. The companies are still working out the details of such a venture and are only holding preliminary talks at this time, but it wouldn't be outlandish to guess that Yahoo is attempting to work out a deal with all of the big dogs—Universal, Sony BMG, Warner Music, and EMI.

Yahoo Music general manager Ian Rogers has long been lobbying the music industry to drop DRM. Yahoo was one of the first to begin testing sales of DRM-free MP3s in December of 2006, when it started selling unprotected tracks from EMI. Since then, the DRM-free music biz has exploded, with DRM-free offerings found through iTunes, Amie Street, Amazon, eMusic, magnatune, PureTracks, and 7digital. But none of them (save Amazon) have DRM-free music available from nearly all major artists, leaving Amazon as the place to go for the widest selection of unprotected music.

Until Yahoo joins the party, that is. Yahoo has the potential to wrangle the Big Four into a deal and become the second major music store to offer DRM-free music from them all (plus, undoubtedly, a smattering of independent labels as the others already do). Why Yahoo and not the others? Because, save for iTunes, the other music stores are either not very interested in big music, or just plain aren't very big (eMusic is a decent size, but focuses mostly on indie labels). The music labels are also still holding out on iTunes a bit to get back at Apple for holding the keys to the castle for so long. So who's left? Yahoo and Amazon.

If 2007 marked the death of music DRM, such a venture through Yahoo could make 2008 the year that DRM-free music actually becomes widely available. Not only that, but all music stores offering DRM-free music will be forced to come up with new ways to appeal to customers. Exclusive content and bundles are something that iTunes already offers, but the competition will surely need to step up.

For example, Yahoo (and others) could offer songs at higher bit-rates than Amazon and the rest of the competition (Amazon currently offers songs at 256kbps), or an entirely lossless format. It could offer ogg support in order to really set the music free. Or, better yet, offer downloads in a variety of formats so that the user can choose whatever he or she wants. AllOfMP3 (technical legalities aside) lets users choose both bitrates and codecs on the fly—how cool would that be in a legit music store?

The store could also give an enormous boost to Yahoo, which has continued to struggle through some restructuring in recent months. The company already offers a music subscription service (in addition to streaming audio and video), but indicated last year that it planned to ease off of the subscription model. If Yahoo does manage to launch a DRM-free music store to rival Amazon, Steve Jobs will surely be fuming over iTunes still being stuck with DRM.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...mp3-store.html





Alchemist Author Pirates His Own Books
Smaran

Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist”, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren’t too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.

Coelho’s view is that letting people swap digital copies of his books for free increases sales. In a keynote speech (embedded below) at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more. He said:

Quote:
In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]

I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]

So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.
He’s convinced — and rightly so — that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales. For him the problem is getting around copyright laws that require him to get the permission of his translators if he wants to share copies of his books in other languages.

So is Coelho just seeding torrents of his books? That’s just the beginning. He took it one step further and, as quoted above, set up a Wordpress blog, Pirate Coelho, where he posts links to free copies of his books on filesharing networks, FTP sites, and so on. He says it had a direct impact on sales:

Quote:
Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…
In his speech he talks about how the Internet is changing language and books, and how online “piracy” and BitTorrent have helped him not only be more widely read, but also sell more books! It’s a must watch.
http://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-au...-books-080124/





It’s the end of the world as he knows it

DRM-Free Music Spells Trouble
Lance Ulanoff

I say we're on the road to ruin. It's one panic after another, and with each new stopgap plan, the music industry—really the entire digital content industry—digs itself in deeper.

Music lovers are dancing in the streets as one major music company, online music service, and online retail outlet after another walks away from onerous digital rights management restrictions. They'll sell you DRM-free music, as long as you accept lower audio quality. Bands like Radiohead and Coldplay are even letting consumers set their own prices.

My colleague Dan Costa applauds these moves, saying "the music just wants to be free." Yuck, since when did Dan start talking like a hippie? It reminds me of that saccharine-sweet "Free to Be You and Me" album from the seventies.

So now it's a good idea to give away music in the hope that people will think you're so cool that they'll pay anyway. Right. There were reports that many people did pay for Radiohead's album, but I'll be surprised if that's repeated very often. Also, not every band is Radiohead or Coldplay—groups that can make money elsewhere (like concert halls). How many bands are touring these days? The ones making money could probably be counted on a couple of hands, and none have the drawing power of teen music queen Hannah Montana.

DRM haters say that DRM-free is the wave of the future. You don't restrict how people consume content. You can't block their right to take it with them on their music players or port it through their homes. I say we're on the road to ruin. It's one panic after another, and with each new stopgap plan, the music industry—really the entire digital content industry—digs itself in deeper.

Let's back up and look at the basic principles of content, commerce, and our economy. I'll start with my daughter. The other day she asked me why everything can't be free. I explained that buying and selling is not a new phenomenon. Bartering goes back thousands of years, and it creates an incentive for people to do things and make things. So people who made wooden chairs could trade them for, say, rice, fresh fruits, or meat. In time, a monetary system was introduced to generate a larger economy. People still created things to get that fruit, but now they could get these goods without having to deliver the chair directly to the guy who wanted to sit. Instead, they could deliver it to someone who would sell dozens of chairs. That guy would give them money and then they could buy the fruits and meats from someone nearby, helping to generate a local economy.

My daughter seemed happy with the explanation, but as I told it, I realized that the content economy is at a tipping point. Growing up, I bought countless books, a bunch of music, and a fair number of videotapes. No one really thought about content ownership. We bought movies and music and figured we owned them. Not that we could do much with them. Sure, we could copy some pages out of a book at the library's photocopy machine, and some people created mix tapes from their favorite albums, and others got in the habit of recording movies from TV to VHS. These were not rampant problems, and no one panicked.

The digitization of everything changed all that. Now we're acutely aware that we really do not own any of the content we consume. We access or play an instance of it, but ownership lies really with the creators or, if they signed the rights away, to the media conglomerate that sold the right to consume it—on a limited basis—to you. Thanks to digitization and the Internet, replication on a massive scale became super-easy. This led to file sharing, Napster, lawsuits, the demise of Napster, its rebirth, the introduction of DRM, and now DRM's slow demise.

The music industry's moves have been terrified reactions to staunch the bleeding of millions of dollars in revenue down the drain. For maybe a year, music companies thought they had the situation under control, but then album sales tumbled. Retailers, musicians, and some music-industry execs thought DRM was the culprit, and they soon joined the chorus of consumers calling for its head. Now consumers are getting their wish, and the music industry will continue to crumble.

Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy, yet everyone's cheering. Has the world gone mad?

Not that the other solutions are any better. I love how intelligent people think subscription-based music services are the way to go. All you can eat for $15 a month. Talk about devaluing your product. People can download enough songs to fill 100 albums and pay under $20. How does anyone make money this way?

Worse yet, if you sign up for a subscription, you're saying that it's okay for the music service to wipe out your music collection if you cancel. Imagine walking into your living room as all your books disappear because you changed libraries, or your DVD collection disappears because you switched from Blockbuster to Netflix.

Both giving away content free of charge and taking everything away from consumers if they cancel fly in the face of everything we know about a functioning economy. People will become dissatisfied. Artists will stop making content because they're not getting paid. When there is no content, people will stop buying gadgets to consume that content. In short order, one part of our digital economy will collapse, and it could be followed by countless others.

I don't have the answer, but I welcome your suggestions.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2251666,00.asp





Apple May be Crippling DTrace to Protect its DRM
Erik Kennedy

One of the more exciting under-the-hood improvements in the latest release of Mac OS X is its support for the powerful DTrace framework for application profiling and system administration. Created and licensed to the open source community by Sun, DTrace is a kernel-level tool for tracing and profiling the execution of code. Our own John Siracusa touched on the benefits that DTrace offers for Mac developers and users in his review of Leopard back in October. The inclusion of DTrace in Mac OS X should lead to better understanding of how applications behave on a Mac and reduce the turnaround time for bugfixes and new releases.

However, there exists a class of applications for which DTrace not only doesn't function, but is actively prevented from producing results. That is the conclusion of DTrace co-creator and Solaris kernel hacker Adam Leventhal anyway, who posted a disturbing blog entry on Friday detailing some of the changes Apple made to its implementation of DTrace.

According to Adam's research, Apple has deliberately crippled DTrace functionality for certain applications. The mechanism involves a process flag called P_LNOATTACH which, when set for a particular process, prevents DTrace from recording any data about that process. Adam uncovered this process flag while trying to track down some unusual DTrace output and discovered an ugly fact: Apple's implementation of the P_LNOATTACH mechanism is designed to prevent certain processes from reporting to DTrace. But, whenever any such process is running, any system-wide analysis will be skewed by the fact that some DTrace reports vanish into the ether. In other words, DTrace may not work properly on the system level whenever a protected process is in the mix.

As one of the applications tagged with the P_LNOATTACH plag happens to be iTunes, it's logical to assume (as Adam does) that this is yet another consequence of digital "rights" management rearing its unsightly head. I'm of two minds on the subject. It's within Apple's right (and potentially a part of its contract) to try to keep people from circumventing its DRM technologies, repugnant as they may be. When it starts to interfere with the proper operation of the OS, though, that seems to be going a little far. Here's hoping Apple can find a way to fix the problems with DTrace to at least retain its usefulness without crippling it.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/appl...rotect-its-drm





iTunes Plus and 30 Cent Upgrades: What's the Deal?
Jacqui Cheng

In May of last year, Apple introduced DRM-free music downloads under the moniker of "iTunes Plus." They went for $1.29—30¢ higher than the typical, protected AAC track through iTunes. At that time, users could pay that 30¢ difference in order to "upgrade" their protected music to 256Kbps AAC files without DRM, which people mostly viewed as an acceptable solution.

But in October, Apple dropped the price of all its iTunes Plus tracks to 99¢. Now, unprotected music from Apple costs exactly the same as protected music, giving the iTunes Plus versions a little more traction in a growing DRM-free market. The only problem? Users still had to pay to upgrade their music to iTunes Plus. We mentioned this odd inconsistency at the time, but chalked it up to the slow and cumbersome turnover that the iTunes Store had that week. Surely, it would be fixed eventually.

Well, it's three months later, and Apple is still charging 30¢ to upgrade a regular old iTunes track to an iTunes Plus track. From a consumer perspective, this sucks. The two cost exactly the same now, so if users had "mistakenly" bought music from iTunes before the DRM-free revolution, they now have to pay to be free. Of course, it goes without saying that customers who have bought nearly any kind of DRMed music have had to re-purchase their music if they want it DRM-free, but Apple advertised this option as an upgrade because of the price difference. Now there isn't one.

A lot of readers have e-mailed us about this, so we tried to do a little bit of digging for y'all.

There are a few reasons why this could be. iTunes may pay a per-file royalty to the music labels, as Audible does. Audible doesn't allow users to re-download purchased content over and over because of the royalty system set up with publishers, the company told Ars. Similarly, iTunes only lets users re-download purchased songs once in a lifetime—if you don't back up that music and have already used up your one re-download quota, tough cookies for you. It wouldn't be outlandish to assume that iTunes has a similar deal with the labels, and therefore can't allow users to merely upgrade their music (and then re-download the unprotected tracks) for free.

We contacted Apple PR to see if we could get an official answer on the topic, but Apple declined to comment. So instead, we inquired with a few of our sources within Apple to try and find out what the real deal was, but we didn't get many answers there either. One person said he he was only aware of bandwidth costs associated with re-downloading the files (of course, this doesn't mean other costs don't exist, just that he wasn't aware of them). He said he thought that 5¢ per song was much more appropriate, but alas, even within Apple, company decisions are often a mysterious thing.

Does that answer many of your questions? Not really. But we'll keep poking and prodding and let you know if we find anything else.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/appl...whats-the-deal





With This Bridge Device, Songs Can March Directly From One iPod to Another



Danielle Belopotosky

If a friend’s digital music collection leaves you with playlist envy, instant gratification is one step closer. MiShare lets music connoisseurs swap files between iPods on the fly.

The device serves as a bridge between two iPods (though not the Shuffle or Touch models) and allows sharing of songs, videos and photos. It can transmit a 3-megabyte song in about 6 seconds, or a 60-megabyte album in under 2 minutes. Pushing a button copies the most recently played song; holding it down copies the whole playlist.

But miShare doesn’t eliminate the need to connect to a computer altogether. When you sync your iPod with iTunes, you are prompted to unlock any songs and videos that are protected by Apple’s anticopying system by entering the original purchaser’s user name and password.

Unprotected songs are available for immediate playback (but sharing responsibly is always a good idea).

The device, which will be available this month for $100 from mishare.com, is simple in form, but the manual is a must-read for the technologically timid.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/te...h/17share.html





The Rough-and-Tumble Online Universe Traversed by Young Cybernauts
Felicia R. Lee

A baby-faced eighth grader, viciously bullied online, hangs himself. With a click of her mouse, a young woman with anorexia uses cyberspace to find tips on starving. A high school student, with a world of plot outlines available on the Internet, admits that he cannot recall ever actually reading a book.

If 21st-century parenthood is not scary enough, “Growing Up Online,” a documentary to be broadcast on the “Frontline” program on most PBS stations on Tuesday night, uses those real-life stories to ask an increasingly important question: What does it mean to be part of the first generation coming of age steeped in a virtual world seemingly outside parental control? The documentary touches on the much discussed fear of online sexual predators, as well as concerns about the ease of cut-and-paste plagiarism, using the Internet. It also examines how notions of privacy and the meaning of friendships change when a computer button can ferry your words and your images to strangers.

“It’s one of those societal shifts that’s happening so quickly there’s not a lot of good data on what this means for our kids’ brains or hearts,” said Rachel Dretzin, the writer of “Online.” Her documentary credits include “Failure to Protect,” a series about Maine’s child welfare system, and “Hillary’s Class,” about the 1969 Wellesley College graduating class that included the future Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Ms. Dretzin has also produced a 15-minute video on middle-aged sexuality for nytimes.com.)

Ms. Dretzin co-produced and directed “Online” with John Maggio, whose documentary work includes “Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America: Einstein’s Letter,” part of a series on the History Channel.

“We came out of it feeling, you find what you’re looking for online,” Mr. Maggio said of making the film, adding that parents had a distorted fear of the online boogeyman. “If you’re basically a grounded kid, you’re going to be fine,” he said. “We need to teach people good citizenship, a sense of morality, right and wrong, that transfer to the Internet.”

Mr. Maggio and Ms. Dretzin, who are parents, maintain that for most young people, being online is no disaster and can be a source of creativity and information. In any case, there is no going back. “Growing Up Online” estimates that more than 90 percent of teenagers use the Internet.

The film begins with a look inside some homes and classrooms in Morris County in northern New Jersey. There affluent youths have their own computers, and the ones who live in housing projects crowd around computers at community centers. In each group some youngsters play war games, tweak their personal profiles, pose for racy photographs.

In one home a 7-year-old, Kurt, goes to the Club Penguin Web site (clubpenguin.com) to socialize, while upstairs his 13-year-old brother, Clay, picks the last name Calamity to freshen his MySpace profile.

Such behavior on its own is benign, but from a parent’s perspective, it opens the children to an unknown world. “It’s really hard to control what our kids are doing online,” says Anne Collier, a writer who provides online safety information for parents. “What we have here is really kind of the new Wild West. Nobody is really in charge.”

This is a virtual Wild West, though, conducted through cellphones, MySpace and Facebook.

“I have had, like, relationships with guys online, but like in school or in public, we’re not actually friends,” says a 16-year-old identified as Sara. She has an eating disorder and visits sites that celebrate anorexia.

Sara’s parents knew nothing of her eating disorder until after her interview with “Frontline.” Similarly, Greg Bukata, a teenager who lives in Chatham, N.J., reveals the tricks he employs to wriggle out of his father’s attempts to monitor his computer use.

“I’d go on my way and do what I wanted, and he’d think I’d be researching monkeys or something,” Greg says. He also says that he can’t remember the last time he read a book. Recently, he adds, he took five minutes to read an online condensed version of “Romeo and Juliet.”

At Chatham High School, Michael LaSusa, a co-principal, concedes that the classroom must compete with the flash of cyberspace.

“We have to be interactive because they’re accustomed to sitting in front of a screen and they’ve got five windows up and they’re talking to three people at the same time,” Mr. LaSusa says.

The younger generation regards online not as a separate place “but as just a sort of continuation of their existence,” says Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

“Cyberspace mirrors and magnifies offline behaviors, scaling up both the good and the bad,” Ms. Boyd said in an e-mail message. “On one hand, this is terrifying. On the other, it provides a great opportunity for parents, educators, social workers and other concerned professionals to understand and reach out to youth at an entirely new level.”

“Growing Up” shows one young woman with body piercings using the Internet to find the popularity and acceptance that have eluded her elsewhere, but it also shows the Halligan family of Essex Junction, Vt., confronting the very worst. Their son, Ryan, 13, killed himself in October 2003 after enduring online bullying.

After his son’s death, John Halligan logged on to Ryan’s computer to discover that he had been caught in a smear campaign of rumors about his sexuality. A popular girl at school flirted with him, using instant messaging, and then announced that the flirtation was a joke, Mr. Halligan learned. And Ryan had made an online friend with whom he visited a Web site that discusses the best suicide methods.

“The computer and the Internet were not the cause of my son’s suicide, but they helped,” Mr. Halligan says. “I believe they helped amplify and accelerate the hurt and pain that he was trying to deal with that started in person, in the real world.”

By the end of “Online,” Greg Bukata, for one, has quit the Internet, if only temporarily. He is seen graduating from Chatham High School, with plans to attend the United States Coast Guard Academy, where Internet use is prohibited for several weeks.

“It’ll be hard, but I need to disconnect,” he says. “I need to just pull the plug on this Internet life for a little bit and see what it’s like.”
http://nytimes.com/2008/01/22/arts/t...ront.html?8dpc





Coroner Baffled at Spate of Suicides
David Batty, Jemima Kiss and agencies

A coroner in south Wales said today he had "no idea" what lay behind the rising spate of suicides by young people in the area.

The comment by Philip Walters came as local police downplayed suggestion that they were investigating an internet "suicide chain" following claims that the deaths of seven young people were linked to the social networking site Bebo.

The latest victim, Natasha Randall, 17, was found dead at her family home in Blaengarw, near Bridgend last week. Two other teenage girls who knew her attempted to harm themselves the following day. Last night, one of them was still on a life support machine in hospital, while the second girl was discharged from hospital.

Police believe that all the victims may be linked, possibly because they met online.

Walters, the coroner for Bridgend, Rhondda Cynon Taff and Merthyr Tydfil, said the number of suicides in the area had been increasing "year on year" over the past three years.

He said: "There seems to be a larger number in Bridgend. The problem is that we've got these young suicides, but in very few cases do we get to the bottom of anything. I can't understand it.

"In the vast majority of these cases, we can't find any underlying reason for it. The thing that concerns us most of all is that we never know why."

South Wales police seized Natasha's computer and officers said they were attempting to trace any internet communication between the victims.

But a police spokeswoman denied that the force had ever said there was an established link between the deaths, which the tabloids have labelled "copycat suicides".

She said: "We have taken Natasha Randall's computer to see what kind of things she was saying and to build up a picture of what happened, rather than to investigate any specific site. That is a routine part of investigating a sudden death and we have never said we were looking at any internet sites."

The divisional commander of Bridgend police, Superintendent Tim Jones, said earlier there was no direct link between Randall's death and the suicide attempt made by a 15-year old girl in Pontycymmer on Friday.

He said police were tracing friends of the girls and visiting local parents

Over the past year six young men have killed themselves in the area, several of whom had posted profiles on the social networking website Bebo. Following their deaths other youngsters set up memorial sites where friends post messages and contribute a "virtual brick" to a "remembrance wall". Postings on the page for Natasha included messages reading: "RIP chick", "Sleep Tight Princess" and "Sweetdreams Angel".

Walters has already held inquests into the deaths of friends Dale Crole, David Dilling and Thomas Davies, but said there was nothing linking them to social networking sites.

He said: "The sites are global, so why would they cause an issue in Bridgend in particular?

"You can't link any of the deaths to these websites. There was no mention of them in any of the inquests that have already taken place."

Walters said an inquest into Natasha's death was opened and adjourned on Monday, and would be concluded later this year.

He said the cause of her death was not yet known, and added that he was awaiting toxicology reports, ordered in the case of every suspected suicide.

Before her death, Natasha, a first year student at Bridgend college, had also posted messages dedicated to people who had killed themselves. One message, dedicated to Liam Clarke, 20, who was found dead in a Bridgend Park on December 27, read: "Tasha Randall says: 'RIP Clarky boy!! gonna miss ya! always remember the gd times! love ya x' 'Me too!'"

Clarke was friends with another victim, Thomas Davies, 20, who killed himself just two days after the funeral of a third young man, David Dilling, 19, who also killed himself.

Yesterday, Davies' mother Melanie warned parents to keep a close eye on their children's internet use. She said: "I think the problem is they do not know how to speak like adults about serious issues like this. They can speak to each other on the computer but do not know how to express their emotions in other ways.

"Thomas would spend about three hours a night on the computer, talking to his friends. The thing is that most parents don't understand what they are doing or what they are talking about.

"He did go on Bebo and apparently he had a page on there. He must have discussed his other friends dying on there because it had upset him. Like most parents, I have no idea how to get on these sites or what other kids are talking about."

Police are also linking the deaths of Dale Crole, 18, of nearby Porthcawl, and Zachary Barnes, 17, of Bridgend, with the other deaths. Two weeks ago Gareth Morgan, 27, was found dead in his bedroom at his home in Bridgend.

A Bebo spokeswoman said: "The loss of any young life is always distressing. We will work closely with the authorities to provide any assistance which will help them with their investigations. We have close relationships with our member community, law enforcement agencies, and public safety partners to provide support and advice for our users. We are committed to providing our members with the safest possible environment online."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/23/news1





Don't Do the Dew

A case involving a pornographer and two teenage girls highlights a legal gray area.
Dave Maass

Tucson porn-proprietor Tyrone Henry wants you to know that blowing your load on the faces of blindfolded, underage girls who think they're participating in a facial cream marketing study is not fraud or any other crime, no matter what the Arizona Court of Appeals said last month. He also wants you to know he was framed.

Whether he did it or not, he's serving a seven-year sentence because of the creative legal work of a Pima County prosecutor, Brad Roach

In the summer of 2000, Roach was assigned to prosecute Tyrone Henry after two teenage girls said he lured them to his home to try out a product called "White Dew" facial cream he was developing. Instead of exfoliation, they said they got ejaculation.

The girls, 15 and 16 years old at the time, said Henry showed them examples of women with "clumpy" white cream on their faces and then blindfolded them. The girls said they heard heavy breathing and Henry say, "It's coming," and then felt a thick, warm substance applied to their faces. They said he took photos, paid them $10 a piece and convinced them to make follow-up appointments. Thinking about it later, they realized they'd been hoodwinked and called the police.

Roach admits the hardest part of the case was figuring out what charge he could hang on Henry. It wasn't sexual assault because he didn't touch the girls sexually, and they didn't touch him. And it wasn't indecent exposure because the girls were blindfolded.

"It was fascinating," Roach said. "I don't want to say it was a once-in-a-lifetime case, but it's only once in awhile do you get something this bizarre."

In the end, the only charge Roach could get to stick was "fraudulent scheme and artifice." The Division II of the Arizona Court of Appeals concluded that Roach had made the right decision, knocking down Henry's appeal.

"It was a huge loophole," Roach said. "No one in the Legislature had ever thought of it. It's not the sort of crime that had come up before."

A 30-YEAR-OLD WITH A degree in political science and one of the first black columnists for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, Henry defended himself in court, arguing that it couldn't be fraud since he didn't cheat them out of money or property. The court disagreed, finding that he duped them in order to obtain "sexual gratification," which could be considered a fraudulent "benefit" under state law.

"I was incredulous, absolutely incredulous," Henry said recently in a phone interview from the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence. "We've all been in night clubs. You know how guys lay it on thick to lure girls back to their rooms. Under this ruling, that would be illegal because they achieve some sort of sexual gratification based on lies."

Henry said he will appeal next to the Arizona Supreme Court.

According to Roach, Henry will probably keep the state appeals attorneys' hands full. Henry and his mother, Raye Stiles, he said, are bulldog litigators.

"The thing to understand about Tyrone and his mother is that they're very active in weeding out people they perceive to be treating them unfairly," Roach said. "How that's played out is that they've filed complaints against nearly everyone in the Pima County Attorney's Office, the trial court, the appeals court, the clerk of the court and the court reporters. I didn't even know you could file a complaint against court reporters."

In person, Stiles doesn't have much hard edge. She's a lady in all senses of the word, and it makes discussing pornography with her difficult.

A year before, Tyrone was brought up on charges of child porn possession. Shortly after, Stiles, who didn't even know it was called "lobbying" at the time, successfully convinced the Arizona Legislature to loosen the state's illegal Internet porn statutes. At the time, she claimed Pima County was prosecuting innocent folk for possessing illegal material that had been sent to their e-mail accounts as spam. Although she was dismayed when she learned her son was running a porn site, she believes in his innocence.

Henry claims there was no scam. True, he was operating the "WhiteDewOriginal Facials.com" Web site, but that was just his perfectly legal shot at the American Dream.

ADULT WEB SITES cater to a wide variety of specific fetishes. The culmination of oral sex--the cumshot--is where Henry said he found his niche.

He went online in January 2000. In the first month, he only took in $800, but by June, he was pulling in $1,200 a month. If he was still in operation, he believes he'd be making between $15,000 and $20,000 a month.

Henry advertised for models in the Wildcat and hung fliers in campus laundry rooms. When potential models called, he said he would explain what his Web site was about, show them examples, and they'd sign two contracts: one for terms of compensation and the other a photo release.

He had previously dealt with about 10 models, each of whom earned between $100 and $200 an hour. Henry says the two teenagers knew exactly what they were getting into and they wanted the money.

"Once they got to my home, I figured out in the course of speaking with them that they were not adults and seized everything," Henry said. "They created a ruse to get that money for very little work. I think they got mad at me because I busted them."

The girls also testified that while blindfolded, they saw a camera flash several times. Henry's side of the story is that the girls gave him a "sob story" about how they needed the money, so he snapped a headshot of one of the girls and paid them $20.

Henry's story is corroborated by the prosecution's evidence. When the police searched his home, they found between 300 and 500 photos of women in various stages of getting cum on their faces. However, the only photo of the girls upturned was a single, nonsexual frame on an undeveloped roll of film.

In order to compensate for this weakness in the state's argument, Roach supplied the jury other "facial" images from Henry's Web site gallery. Henry protested this in his appeal. (In a separate, unpublished ruling, the Appeals Court denied hearing the complaint on procedural grounds.)

In all, the sole material evidence in the case was a globule of his sperm found on one girl's sweater. Henry claims the girls were playing with everything in his apartment, including his laundry basket.

"I'm a red-blooded American man and I operate an adult site; if you look through my clothes, you're going to find semen," Henry says.

It's more or less a game of "he-said they-said"--except what "they said" fit with Henry's MO. The girls' testimony matched that of several UA students who told the police a year before they'd been conned by Henry.

Stiles points to foul play. She said it's no coincidence that police arrested her son in the White Dew case the day after she threatened to file a complaint against the prosecuting attorney in the child porn offense. Raye also says the prosecution may have had racist motives.

"Frankly, I didn't even know he was black until months into the case," Roach said.

Roach says there are people--in his own office--who find it hard to believe that these girls could possibly be so stupid.

"I've got to come out on (the girls') defense," he said. "We as a society don't teach girls to be as assertive as they should. Teenage girls especially are in a position of low self-esteem....

"Tyrone's a good con man. He's good at what he did, and he's very smart. It's easy for us not being in their place to say they're stupid. I don't really believe they deserve blame."
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Cu...tent?oid=47130





Age is More than a Number

Australian researchers develop a software tool which determines a person's age; tool will be useful for national security, law enforcement -- and for restricting children’s access to inappropriate Web sites

An improved technique for estimating a person’s age that will have implications for national security, law enforcement, and restricting children’s access to inappropriate web sites, has been developed by Deakin University researchers in Australia. The head of Deakin’s School of Engineering and Information Technology, Professor Kate Smith-Miles, and Ph.D. student Xin Geng, are working on the automatic age estimation project known as AGES (AGing pattErn Subspace). "While recognition of most facial variations, such as identity, expression and gender, has been extensively studied, automatic age estimation has rarely been explored," Smith-Miles said.

Logging on to inappropriate websites by under-age computer users would be more difficult with the AGES technique able to determine whether the face of the person at the keyboard conforms to the age they say they are, Smith-Miles said. "That’s just one practical and obvious way in which the work we’re doing could be used," she said. It could also be used to estimate a user’s age and automatically choose the vocabulary, interface, and services suitable to the user, or by law enforcement officials to determine the age of a suspect more accurately and efficiently. Using mathematical algorithms, the AGES technique has proven to be more accurate in estimating age based on photographs of people’s faces than other existing methods. "In extensive experiments of over 2,000 faces, our method outperformed the existing approaches, and even outperformed human perception of age estimates when the humans were given only the same tightly cropped face images to view as those fed into our algorithm," she said.
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5407





Editor Fires Parting Shot At His Chain
Richard Pérez-Peña

The ousted editor of The Los Angeles Times on Monday offered a scathing critique of the newspaper industry and specifically his longtime employer, the Tribune Company, arguing that cost cuts, a lack of investment and an aversion to serious news was damaging the business.

The editor, James E. O’Shea, left after he refused to carry out another in a series of newsroom budget cuts sought by the publisher in Los Angeles, David D. Hiller — 15 months after Mr. Hiller fired the previous editor over the same kind of dispute.

The current showdown and Mr. O’Shea’s parting comments made for a remarkable statement by an editor who was seen as a Tribune loyalist and was sent to Los Angeles to calm a rebellious staff.

“I disagree completely with the way that this company allocates resources to its newsrooms, not just here but at Tribune newspapers all around the country,” Mr. O’Shea wrote in a memo to the newspaper’s staff, echoing farewell remarks he made Monday morning in the newsroom.

The chairman and chief executive who took control of Tribune a month ago, Samuel Zell, sided with Mr. Hiller. Mr. Zell had criticized the previous management’s cost-cutting and said that further reductions were not the road to prosperity. But he has also said that he was giving Tribune managers greater autonomy.

“I’ve said loud and clear that I’m returning control of our businesses to the people who run them,” Mr. Zell said in a statement, in response to coverage of Mr. O’Shea’s departure. “That means David Hiller has my full support. He carries direct responsibility for the staffing and financial success of The L.A. Times. I understand that David and Jim, together, came to the conclusion that Jim’s departure was the best decision for the direction and future of The L.A. Times.”

Mr. O’Shea said repeatedly that he was forced out; other Times executives said he was fired. But Mr. Hiller said in an interview Monday, “I thought it was a mutual conclusion that it was time to part ways.”

Times executives, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said the confrontation had been brewing for more than a month and reached a turning point about a week ago.

Speculation about a successor focused on Russ Stanton, formerly the business editor at The Times, who has been the innovation editor for a year, overseeing the newspaper’s Web site. Mr. Hiller said he expected to name an editor in a few days.

Mr. O’Shea argued in the memo that The Times had shown several times — in revising its Sunday magazine, in adding fashion coverage — that it could generate more revenue and higher profit by offering more, not less.

“Even in hard times, wise investment — not retraction — is the long-term answer to the industry’s troubles,“ he wrote, while suggesting that Tribune executives have been unable to see the logic of anything but budget cuts.

“Journalists and not accountants should seize responsibility for the financial health of our newspapers,” he wrote, “so journalists can make decisions about the size of our staffs and how much news remains in our papers and Web sites.”

But Mr. Hiller said the paper was investing as much as it could, especially in its Web site, and the cuts were nothing more than an acceptance of reality.

“Last year, our operating cash flow went down by about 20 percent,” he said.

“Can you solve the newspaper industry’s problems by spending more?” Mr. Hiller said. “It’s an attractive theory, but it doesn’t work.”

Mr. Zell took control of Tribune last month in an $8.2 billion transaction that took the company private. He said at the time that he was confident that the company could find revenue.

In the last year, the newspaper industry has suffered a steep decline in advertising revenue, and Tribune has been hit harder than most. The slumping real estate markets in California and Florida have cut deeply into real estate ads, and Tribune has big papers in both states. In addition, analysts say that years of turmoil at The Times has hurt ad sales; Mr. Hiller agreed that the tumult has been a distraction.

The company’s most recent detailed financial report, for the third quarter of 2007, said that classified ad revenue was down 18 percent from the period a year earlier, including a 26 percent drop in real estate ads. Los Angeles had one of the worst declines.

Through three quarters last year, the company had an operating profit margin of 16 percent, down from 19 percent the year earlier. But with sharply higher debt service costs because of the takeover, net income fell by more than half, to 4 percent.

Times executives say the paper still has a double-digit operating profit margin, though the number has dropped steeply.

Mr. Hiller said that Mr. O’Shea asked for a $3 million increase in the newsroom budget. He said he told Mr. O’Shea at first that he expected to keep the figure at $120 million, unchanged from last year.

Mr. O’Shea argued that a flat budget amounted to a 4 percent cut, given the costs of covering a presidential campaign and the Olympics in Beijing — to say nothing of inflation.

Tribune took over the Times Mirror Company, the parent company of The Times in 2000, and with executives in Chicago repeatedly seeking a smaller newsroom, relations with Los Angeles have been rocky ever since. The Times has a news staff of about 870 people, down from more than 1,100 a few years ago, but still larger than the roughly 600 of the flagship paper, The Chicago Tribune.

Since the takeover by Tribune, turnover has been frequent in The Times’s top positions, in the newsroom and on the business side. Mr. Hiller is the third publisher installed by Tribune, and Mr. O’Shea’s successor will be the fourth top editor.

John S. Carroll, the first editor installed by Tribune, quit in 2005 rather than make more newsroom budget cuts. The next year, his successor, Dean P. Baquet, and the publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson — who, like Mr. O’Shea, was a longtime Tribune employee — were fired when they refused to do more cutting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/bu...a/22paper.html





'Do Not Deliver' List Would Bar Papers
Kristen Wyatt

Connie Finch doesn't read a newspaper, but she picks up plenty each morning. At least one free newspaper is dropped at the end of her driveway each day, and she picks up more newspapers left by her neighbors.

All of them end up in the garbage.

''We're not asking for it,'' Finch said. ''And it's just littering our streets.''

Complaints from the Westminster resident Finch and others about free home-delivery newspapers in Maryland have inspired State Del. Tanya Shewell to propose a ''Do Not Deliver'' registry that would work similarly to the ''Do Not Call'' registry for telemarketers. If approved, would be the first of its kind in the nation.

Shewell said her constituents complain that they're just ignored when they call a newspaper asking that delivery be stopped. She said people can't stop deliveries even when they leave town, meaning papers are left around as an invitation to burglars. The newspapers often litter roadsides and storm drains.

''I love free newspapers. We're not trying to hurt the business of the newspapers,'' Shewell said. ''All we're asking is for them to stop delivering to people who ask them to stop. People don't know where to call. They don't know how to stop it.''

The complaints started soon after the 2006 launch of The Baltimore Examiner, a free paper which delivers about 230,000 of its total 250,000 circulation to Maryland homes six days a week, making it the state's largest daily.

''I started getting calls from people who called numerous times and were promised it would stop, and it didn't,'' Shewell said. ''They're trashing up our community.''

Examiner representatives did not respond to several messages seeking comment.

However, the head of the Examiner's parent group said in Friday's edition of the newspaper that he is concerned about the complaints.

''My desire for the newspaper to not go to those who don't want it far exceeds their desire to stop getting it. ... I hate it when we annoy readers, and keeping that annoyance to a minimum is among my highest priorities,'' said Michael Phelps, CEO of Clarity Media Group's Baltimore-Washington Examiner Newspaper Group.

The newspaper industry is fighting the proposed registry, saying it isn't needed.

''Nobody wants to send out papers that are wasted, that people just throw away,'' said Jack Murphy, executive director of the Maryland-Delaware-District of Columbia Press Association.

Shewell's bill would give newspaper publishers seven days to comply with a request to stop an unsolicited home delivery. If the deliveries continue, publishers could be fined $100 a day. It would also require free newspapers to print a toll-free phone number in a conspicuous location for people who would want delivery stopped.

Shewell's bill is likely to run into opposition from lawmakers in both parties who worry it could violate constitutional free speech protections.

''I like information,'' said state Sen. Catherine Pugh. ''If people are out of town, they can make arrangements for people to pick up materials in their yards. I just don't think government needs to do everything. We can take some responsibility for our own lives.''

The bill could prove a legal morass, said T. Barton Carter, a media law expert at Boston University. It's uncertain how valuable a ''Do Not Call'' analogy is, he said.

''Usually, when you're talking about print media and just delivering it to the outside, that's not seen as intrusive as calls. So, it's not clear it would survive a similar First Amendment analysis,'' Carter said.

If the law banned newspaper deliveries, it would also likely have to set up a ''Do Not Deliver'' registry for pizza delivery ads and other flyers routinely delivered to homes, Carter said.

''I know of all kinds of flyers for services, so would you be eliminating all of those? If you aren't, now you have a real problem in that you're singling out a certain type of distribution,'' said Carter.

George Wilbanks, publisher of the East County Times in Baltimore County, is among the opponents of Shewell's bill. His weekly newspaper has a circulation of 45,000, half of which are delivered to homes.

Wilbanks said newspapers already try to avoid sending papers to people who don't read them.

''If a person calls to us and says, 'We don't want your cotton-pickin' paper,' we don't want to be sending it to them anyway,'' Wilbanks said.

Most people do want the papers, Murphy said.

''Free newspapers in this state are very well read. And many, many people love them and read them every day,'' he said.

Finch, the frustrated Westminster homeowner, insists something should be done to stop newspaper deliveries people don't want. She said many of her neighbors put signs in their yards asking that papers not be delivered -- but the signs don't work.

''They literally throw the newspaper at the signs, so there's blatant disregard for what their wants and desires are,'' Finch said.

''If we wanted to subscribe to one, we would,'' Finch said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...8S18.DTL&tsp=1





BBC Follies
Jack

How one man’s decision to forgo TV led to a flurry of threatening letters from the beeb.
http://www.bbctvlicence.com/2006%20letters.htm





MySpaceTV, BBC Worldwide Link Up in Video Deal

MySpace on Wednesday said it signed an agreement with BBC Worldwide to bring short video clips from programs such as "Doctor Who" and "Top Gear" to its online community.

The agreement will allow MySpaceTV users to subscribe to a BBC Worldwide channel, then view and share clips from current and archived content. Clips will be available to MySpaceTV users globally.

Other BBC programs that will be featured include "Robin Hood," "Torchwood," "The Catherine Tate Show," "Red Dwarf" and "The Mighty Boosh."

Jeff Berman, the newly appointed executive vice president of marketing and content of MySpace, said the deal involved advertising revenue sharing, but declined to disclose specific details.

MySpace is owned by media giant News Corp, which also operates the Fox TV network, and has been pushing to add more video content.

The MySpaceTV feature launched in June 2007. Among other content, MySpaceTV features "Roommates," "LonelyGirl15," and "Prom Queen."

(Reporting by Paul Thomasch; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...39384720080124





Robots and Ogre Power Paramount to Box Office Lead

From menacing Spartan warriors to chipper singing chipmunks, 2007's boxoffice attractions spanned the gamut. Following a heated summer, there was a cooling-off spell during the fall, but the year still saw the domestic box office gross climb to a record $9.62 billion.

As a result, when it came time for the major studios to carve up the pie, there were plenty of healthy slices to go around. For the first time ever, five studios crossed the $1 billion mark with their domestic tallies, led by Paramount Pictures with $1.49 billion.

The studio benefited mightily from its 2005 acquisition of DreamWorks, which contributed such early hits as "Norbit" ($95.3 million) and "Blades of Glory" ($118.2 million). Paramount got a $321 million shot of adrenaline by distributing DreamWorks Animation's "Shrek the Third." By the Fourth of July weekend, the $319.1 million-grossing "Transformers," a DreamWorks/Paramount co-production, assured the Melrose Avenue studio's eventual victory. The only studio to boast two $300 million-plus grossers, Paramount claimed a market share of 15.5 percent, up from its fifth-ranked 2006 share of 10.4 percent.

Warner Bros., which dipped to an uncharacteristic fourth place in market share in 2006, bounced back to second thanks in part to "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" ($292 million), the second-best domestic grosser in the series. Additional fantasy in the form of "300" ($210.6 million) and "I Am Legend" ($206 million to date) fueled the flames. For the year, the studio earned $1.42 billion with a 14.7 percent share, up from 11.6 percent in 2006.

Disney (No. 3, $1.36 billion) and 2006 champ Sony (No. 4, $1.24 billion) relied on the tried and true with respective threequels "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" ($309.4 million) and "Spider-Man 3" ($336.5 million), the year's No. 1 movie. Both lost market share.

Disney, which sharpened its focus on family-friendly fare, enjoyed a late hit with "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" ($143 million to date). Its market share fell to 14.1 percent from 16.1 percent in 2006, when it ranked No. 2.

Sony found a couple more $100 million grossers in "Ghost Rider" and "Superbad," and the studio's Screen Gems label delivered admirable returns from such movies as "Stomp the Yard" ($61 million) and "Resident Evil: Extinction" ($51 million). Its market share slid to 12.9 percent from 18.6 percent.

Universal rose one place to No. 5 as its market share jumped to 11.4 percent from 8.7 percent. "The Bourne Ultimatum" ($227.4 million) built on the success of its predecessors, while the studio also found lucrative laughter in "Knocked Up" ($148.7 million) and "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry" ($119.7 million).

D'oh! Fox slid three places to No. 6, and its market share dropped by almost a third to 10.5 percent. Thanks to holiday audiences' warm embrace of "Alvin and the Chipmunks" ($154 million to date), Fox squeaked into the billion-dollar club with $1.1 billion. Its top release was "The Simpsons Movie" ($183.1 million).

As they did in 2006, New Line and MGM brought up the rear, with respective shares of 5.1 percent and 3.8 percent, both about double from the year before.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...54312420080104





Airwaves, Web Power At Auction
Stephen LaBaton

The auction for rights to a highly valuable swath of the nation’s airwaves will begin Thursday and is expected to include multibillion-dollar bids from the nation’s two biggest wireless phone companies, Verizon and AT&T, as well as Google.

Although industry executives and analysts agree that Google is unlikely to win any licenses, the company already has an invaluable victory: in setting the auction rules, the Federal Communications Commission has forced the major telephone companies to open their wireless networks to a broader array of telephone equipment and Internet applications.

The radio spectrum licenses, which are to be returned from television broadcasters as they complete their conversion from analog to digital signals in February 2009, are as coveted as oil reserves are to energy companies. They will provide the winners with access to some of the best remaining spectrum — enabling them to send signals farther from a cell tower with far less power, through dense walls in cities, and over wider territories in rural areas that are now underserved.

And the licenses are on the auction block just as it is becoming obvious to industry players and investors that wireless broadband is rapidly becoming the next big thing, the mobile Internet.

The latest government report indicates that in 2006, mobile wireless high-speed subscribers grew nationwide by more than 600 percent, and that during the last half of the year, those subscribers made up nearly two-thirds of the total growth in all high-speed lines.

Equipment makers and content providers are rushing to bring out new products as consumers increasingly use mobile phones and laptop computers to wirelessly connect to the Internet.

“The spectrum that we are auctioning off is going to be the building blocks for the next generation of broadband services,” said Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in an interview last Friday. “It can carry lots of data, penetrates walls easily, travels far and allows for very good broadband wireless service. It will allow a wireless platform to be another competitor in the broadband space.”

The F.C.C. has set a minimum price of $10 billion for five blocks of licenses — 1,099 in all. The largest amount received by the commission in a previous license spectrum auction was $13.7 billion in 2006. Some analysts believe that record could be exceeded when this so-called 700 megahertz auction is completed in the next few months.

Each day, the commission will post the leading bids, but only the amount bid, not the names of the leading bidders.

The auction’s daily bids can be watched on the Web site, auctions.fcc.gov.

Because the commission’s anticollusion rules preclude the bidders from discussing their strategies or possible bids, none of the major companies involved in the auction would comment for publication.

In setting the rules for the auction to some of the most valuable radio spectrum licenses ever issued, the F.C.C. decided last year to endorse one of Google’s proposals by requiring that the winning bidders open their networks to a wider array of applications and phones. (Verizon and AT&T objected to the decision.)

The new rules have already begun to reshape the rapidly emerging wireless broadband industry. It prompted Verizon and AT&T to change their policies and open their networks to new applications and devices, just as Google and its allies had hoped.

“The issue has melted away,” Mr. Martin said. “It is no longer as controversial, as the major providers have moved to open up their networks.”

While Google has promised in return to bid at least the minimum reserve amount of $4.6 billion for one block of licenses, most analysts expect the company will be outbid because it is not expected to go higher.

“Google’s intent was to win the open access rule, and that’s what its bidding is about,” said Blair Levin, a former senior F.C.C. official who is now an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus.

Despite losing the battle in the fight over whether to open their networks to rival software and equipment makers, Verizon and AT&T are likely to be winners in the auction. Since the licenses and build-out requirements for the networks are so expensive, experts say, it is unlikely that a new entrant will prevail, although some niche players in a handful of regional markets could take home some licenses.

“Most are of the view that we are unlikely to see a major new entrant coming in and establishing a new presence,” said Carol Mattey, the national leader of the telecom regulatory consulting services at Deloitte & Touche. “Given the amount of money that would have to be spent not only 0n the auction but also on building a new network, it is pretty unlikely that anyone new will come out.”

Verizon and AT&T as winners could be a mixed blessing for consumers. While the two companies would be able to offer more and faster services over greater areas, it also could mean that prices, which have already stabilized as a result of the widespread industry consolidation, will not fall.

One of the most closely watched licenses will be the so-called D-block, which is heavily discounted because the winning company must share the spectrum with public safety officials. But this month, a company interested in the license, Frontline Wireless, announced that it had closed, apparently because it was unable to obtain financing for the license, which has a reserve price of $1.3 billion.

The company was founded by Reed E. Hundt, a former chairman of the commission, along with veteran wireless executives and a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

The commission has not said what rules it would rewrite for a second auction if no bidder meets the minimum price of $1.3 billion for the D-block.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/bu...2spectrum.html





Top Bids $2.78 Bln as US Wireless Auction Opens
Peter Kaplan

Top bidders put up a total of almost $2.78 billion on Thursday in the opening rounds of the Federal Communications Commission's auction of coveted U.S. government-owned airwaves.

The figure represents the highest bids received for five separate blocks of spectrum at the beginning of the auction, which is eventually expected to net the federal government at least $10 billion.

Companies qualified to bid include major carriers AT&T Inc and Verizon Wireless, as well as possible new competitors like Internet company Google Inc, EchoStar Communications Corp and Cablevision Systems Corp.

Identities of bidders will be kept secret, under FCC rules, until the entire auction ends.

Analysts say the major carriers could use the new spectrum to offer consumers more advanced services such as broadband access via mobile phones and wireless broadband to laptop computers.

Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications Incand Vodafone Group Plc.

The $2.78 billion worth of opening high bids included a $472 million offer for a closely watched block of spectrum, known as the "D" block, which will have to be shared with public safety agencies under FCC rules.

It also included an opening high bid of about $1.24 billion for the sought-after "C" block, which carries another condition requiring that it be open to all devices and software applications as long as the minimum price is met.

Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus, said there was nothing unexpected in the bidding so far, and it will be until middle of next week before "we will start seeing what the likely outcome is going to be on the D block and whether the open-access conditions will be triggered on the C block."

The FCC issued results of the first two rounds of bidding for the government-owned spectrum shortly after the rounds ended at noon (1700 GMT) and 4:30 p.m.(2130 GMT).

The FCC has set minimum prices of $1.3 billion and $4.7 billion for the D and C blocks respectively. These blocks could be used to create a national network.

Other spectrum includes local chunks set aside in blocks designated "A" and "B". The final, "E" block, is considered less useful because it is limited to one-way data transmission.

The 700-megahertz signals are valuable because they can go long distances and penetrate thick walls. The airwaves are being returned by television broadcasters as they move to digital from analog signals in early 2009.

The electronic auction is expected to continue for weeks or even months and will end when no more bids are submitted. The FCC plans to hold multiple rounds of back-and-forth bidding each day on each of five blocks of spectrum available for sale.

Results from each round are made publicly available on the FCC's Web site about 10 minutes afterward.

Starting on Friday, the FCC is scheduled to hold three rounds of bidding each day until further notice. Bidding typically accelerates as the auction progresses. (Editing by Tim Dobbyn, Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...25560720080124





Security of Ballot Not 100%

Critics expect flaws as Md. switches systems
Stephanie Desmon and Stephen Kiehl

Outraged by the butterfly ballots and hanging chads of the disputed 2000 presidential election, political activists nationwide pushed for user-friendly voting systems that wouldn't lead to a repeat of the confusion that left the outcome in Florida - and the nation - in doubt.

Less than eight years later - after taxpayers in Maryland and other states spent hundreds of millions on easy-to-use, all-electronic, touch-screen voting machines - the debate has come full circle.

Fear of hackers and lost votes that can never be recovered is forcing out the new technology and giving new life to old-fashioned scanning machines that read tried-and-true paper ballots.

By 2010, four years before its $65 million touch-screen machines will be paid off, Maryland expects to be back on the paper trail, following states such as Florida and California, which have also decided that all-electronic systems make it too easy to compromise elections.

This week, Gov. Martin O'Malley proposed an initial outlay of $6.8 million toward the purchase of optical-scan machines, which will eventually cost $20 million. Lawmakers approved a return to the machines last year, but only if the governor could come up with the money.

Although optical scanners have produced occasional glitches, many experts say the system that Maryland plans to buy for the 2010 election is one of the most reliable and accurate available. The reason: It's backed up by paper ballots that can be saved and recounted if necessary.

"It's still a computer; you could still manipulate an election" with an optical scanner, said Dr. Avi Rubin, the Johns Hopkins University security expert whose findings helped launch the national anti-touch screen movement. "But if there's anything suspicious about the total, you have those paper ballots."

There have always been worries about election integrity. Even paper ballots produced talk of stuffed ballot boxes and tales of ballots getting "lost" on the way to election headquarters. When lever machines appeared in the 1930s, there were concerns that mechanical failures would deprive many of their franchise.

The debate seems to surface every time the technology changes.

A 2006 review of popular electronic voting systems by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that "the three most commonly purchased today are vulnerable to attacks and errors that could change the outcome of statewide elections. ...

"Indeed, it is impossible to imagine a voting system that could be impervious to attack," the report concluded.

Voters using optical-scan machines fill in a "bubble" or complete the drawing of an arrow pointing to their candidate. Then they feed their ballots into a scanner at the poll. If they've filled the ballot out incorrectly, the machine spits it back and the voter can try again. If a recount is needed, the ballots are stored so they can be re-scanned or hand-counted.

Touch-screen voting devices operate like automated teller machines: voters cast their ballots on computer screens and have a chance to review their choices before they're completed. But in the case of a recount, there is no paper ballot to examine - just an electronic record on the machine's magnetic memory card.

In recent years, backers and critics of electronic voting have vigorously debated whether hackers can break into a touch-screen voting system and sabotage an election - or steal it.

John Willis, Maryland's former secretary of state and a government professor at the University of Baltimore, said this discussion makes no sense today. Airlines, he noted, are abandoning paper tickets for electronic ones. Doctors are moving toward electronic prescription pads.

"In every other part of life, we're going the other way," he said. "I think it's a giant step backward. I can predict our elections will be no more secure and they will be less accurate - that's what the evidence shows."

Among the 19 Maryland jurisdictions using scanners in 2002, Willis said, there were nearly 15,000 voters who did not cast a ballot in the top-of-the-ticket race for governor. In 2006, when everyone used touch-screen machines, fewer than 10,000 voters failed to cast a ballot for governor.

But the Brennan Center study showed that nationwide, optical-scan machines had fewer residual or "no-votes" than touch-screens, meaning more people had their votes counted properly with optical scanners.

Maryland has had just two major elections with touch-screens - the 2004 presidential race and the 2006 gubernatorial election. Still, it isn't the only state to abandon them quickly.

Florida has also flip-flopped. In Sarasota, voters approved a measure requiring paper ballots after nearly 20,000 votes cast on touch-screen machines were not recorded in a close 2006 congressional race.

In Ohio last month, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner ordered Cuyahoga County to abandon its touch-screen voting and use optical scanners for this March's presidential primary election. The county's touch-screen server crashed twice on election night last November.

Her decision came after a state review of voting systems found "critical security failures" with the electronic machines. A spokesman said Brunner has urged the legislature to replace all of Ohio's touch-screens with optical scan by the November election.
But that decision has generated an entirely different controversy. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Thursday complaining that Cuyahoga County's optical scan ballots will be counted at a central location - not at the polls as Maryland intends. That means voters will not have a chance to correct errors on their ballots.

Optical systems do occasionally have problems. In Volusia County, Fla., outside Orlando, hundreds of votes were not initially counted in 2000 after an election worker turned off a machine that would not accept a ballot.

When the machine was restarted, its counter reset to zero even though 310 ballots had already been fed through. The error was found during a recount.

One of the original benefits of touch screens was that they allowed blind voters a chance to cast their votes secretly - a requirement of the Help America Vote Act, which funded new voting technology nationwide.

Optical-scan machines did not allow that. Now, though, technology has improved and an accessible, hybrid optical-scanning system is on the market.

In Volusia County, each precinct now has touch-screens for the disabled, as well as optical scanners. Voters can choose, but they overwhelmingly opt for the optical-scan machines, said elections supervisor Ann McFall.

Of 4,000 votes cast this week in early voting for the presidential primary, only 10 were cast on the touch-screens.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nat...,1820162.story





How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next Cubicle
Tim Harford

As a columnist (which is fancy for "journalist in jammies"), I ought to personify the conventional wisdom that distance is dead: All I need to get my work done is a place to perch and a Wi-Fi signal. But if that's true, why do I still live in London, the second-most expensive city in the world?

If distance really didn't matter, rents in places like London, New York, Bangalore, and Shanghai would be converging with those in Hitchcock County, Nebraska (population 2,926 and falling). Yet, as far as we can tell through the noise of the real estate bust, they aren't. Wharton real estate professor Joseph Gyourko talks instead of "superstar cities," which have become the equivalent of luxury goods — highly coveted and ultra-expensive. If geography has died, nobody bothered to tell Hitchcock County.

Maybe it's because society hasn't wholeheartedly accepted the idea of working remotely. Or perhaps communications technology just isn't all it's hyped up to be. After all, the journalists and consultants who tell us that location is insignificant are biased. Like me, they're the people whose lives have been most transformed by the Internet and cell phones.

But I think the truth is more profound than either of those glib explanations: Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh.

The most obvious example is online dating. With sites like BBW (Big Beautiful Women) Datefinder and Senior People Meet, it's a lot easier to find like-minded flames. But that's not much use unless you live within driving range of your 98 percent-compatible love connection. The kind of contact that follows online winking is far from virtual.

It follows that matchmaking is most effective in densely populated areas, where there are plenty of fish but an awfully big sea. If you live in Los Angeles, online dating is the killer app. If you live in a small town, you've likely already met all your potential mates at church or a bar.

Of course, the rest of life isn't like courting. Or is it? In big cities, our communication tools are especially helpful because they keep us from getting lost in the crowd (which is not something you worry about in a one-street town). There are even services that tell you where your friends are by locating their cell signals.

New technologies can strengthen ties within your business, too. A 2007 study by economists Neil Gandal, Charles King, and Marshall Van Alstyne looked at the networks formed by 125,000 email messages from the staff of an executive-recruiting firm. It found that email's real value isn't in communicating with Kuala Lumpur but with Betsy in the next cubicle. The most productive workers have the densest intracompany email web.

This shouldn't surprise us. Email makes it quicker and easier to reach your colleagues — you don't have to interrupt them, and messages are easy to process. But email doesn't stop you from wanting facetime, too. Just the opposite: By enabling us to maintain productive business relationships with more people, it encourages more face-to-face contact. Have you noticed business travel dying out? Neither have I. Air travel is at record highs.

One day, perhaps, virtual communication will become so good we'll no longer feel the need to shake hands with a new collaborator or brainstorm in the same room. But for now, the world seems to be changing in a way that actually demands more meetings. Business is more innovative, and its processes more complex. That demands tacit knowledge, collaboration, and trust — all things that seem to follow best from person-to-person meetings. "Ideas are more important than ever," Glaeser says, "and the most important ideas are communicated face-to-face."

Which explains why the highest-tech industries are the most dependent on geography. In a study published in the American Economic Review, researchers examined 4,000 US-based commercial innovations and found that more than half came from just three areas: California, New York/New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Almost half of all US pharmaceutical innovations were invented in New Jersey, a state with less than 3 percent of the nation's population.

In theory, technology should allow new-economy firms to prosper as easily in Nebraska as in Silicon Valley. But far from killing distance, it has made proximity matter more than ever.

As for me, I've been finishing off this essay between a coffee date with my wife and some essential chitchat with my publishers at a central London restaurant. This old city isn't cheap, and it isn't easy. But with my cell phone and laptop to back me up, I can't afford to live anywhere else.
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifesty...16-02/st_essay





Network Solutions Follow Up: Even Dumber and More Evil Than Before!
Vishen

A few days ago we wrote a post on how Network Solutions screwed us out of a domain and we recommended that people avoid Network Solutions at all cost.

The post made it to the front page of Reddit and got referenced on a number of blogs. Superb!

But here’s an interesting little development.

Most of the comments on my post were positive.

But one post stood out, from a guy called Jeff. He said:

Quote:
Just wait 5 days, and then buy domain name from GoDaddy. Bit of a hassle. but no biggie. On the other hand, if you are going to use your new blog like this one (repost other peoples info in a way that’s more boring then how they did it. Or, taking a reddit thread, creating a bs post arround it, submitting it to reddit, and etc.) please don’t bother with it.
For the record, Jeff jeff, this was an original post, not a copy, nor did we use any threads from Reddit. We quoted a press release… So I was puzzled by this comment.

Furthermore, Jeff accidently left his email address (required when you comment on a post) as XXXXXX@NetworkSolutions.com.

Was he joking or did he really work for Network Solutions? I mused for 3 liberating seconds.

Digging deeper, I traced his IP address to come from Reston, VA, which according to Google Maps is just 6 short and evil minutes from Herndon, VA -

… the location of the Network Solutions Main Office!

Hmmmm. Somehow I suspect Jeff might be working for Network Solutions.

Well Jeff, whether you work for Network Solutions or not, let me reply as to why what they’re doing is wrong.
Trapping Internet Users into Paying Inflated Prices for Network Solutions’ Service by Holding Their Domains Hostage Is Atrocious

Network Solutions Has the #1 and #2 Spot on Google for “Who Is” and “WhoIs” respectively. Most users seeking to check a domain’s availability will end up on your site.

NOWHERE on the site does Network Solutions mention that they’re going to LOCK the domain for 5 days if you do not buy from them immediately.

You accused me of faking my post Jeff. But what I experienced was real.

And you claimed this policy by Network Solutions was no big deal and that I could buy my domain 5 days later from GoDaddy.

Well, actually it was a big deal.

My blog editor and I were shattered when we went on GoDaddy to purchase the domain (which your WHOIS had claimed was available) only to find it “had been snatched up.” We never knew that we could claim it in 5 days. How on earth are most internet users supposed to know that?

We knew someone had watched our search. And we passed on that domain as lost. We went with another domain for our blog.

This, I suspect, happens to most users. Your company’s policy causes innocent people to either think their domains are lost and give up - OR pay you ridiculously inflated prices for these domains.

What’s worse - is that you adopted this policy AFTER thousands of websites linked to your Who Is service and pushed it to the top of Google.

Now THAT is a betrayal of public trust.

So my opinion stands. Network Solutions should be avoided AT ALL COSTS.
http://blog.mindvalleylabs.com/netwo...an-before/345/





The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey
Michael Fitzgerald

INNOVATION usually needs time to steep. Time to turn the idea into something tangible, time to get it to market, time for people to decide they accept it. Speech recognition technology has steeped for a long time: Mike Phillips remembers that in the 1980s, when he was a Carnegie Mellon graduate student trying to develop rudimentary speech recognition systems, “it seemed almost impossible.”

Now, devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to hit the mass market, thanks to entrepreneurs like Mr. Phillips. He is the chief technology officer and a co-founder of the Vlingo Corporation, an 18-month-old start-up in Cambridge, Mass., that is selling services to cellular carriers and other software companies that want to give their customers the ability to let their mouths do the walking — and the searching.

Vlingo’s service lets people talk naturally, rather than making them use a limited number of set phrases. Dave Grannan, the company’s chief executive, demonstrated the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi John Hurt (try typing that with your thumbs), for the location of a local bakery and for a Web search for a consumer product. It was all fast and efficient. Vlingo is designed to adapt to the voice of its primary user, but I was also able to use Mr. Grannan’s phone to find an address.

The Find application is in the beta test phase at AT&T and Sprint. Consumers who use certain cellphones from those companies can download the application from vlingo.com.

Mr. Phillips has spent more than 15 years in the trenches at companies that nourished speech recognition. In 1994, he was one of the founders of Speechworks, which made early interactive voice-response systems, the now-ubiquitous automated services that answer when we call a company. In 2000, Speechworks was acquired by ScanSoft, which five years later bought Nuance Communications, keeping Nuance as the name. Mr. Phillips left that year to work at M.I.T. as a visiting researcher.

In 2006, he and a colleague from ScanSoft, John Nguyen, started Vlingo because they thought that speech recognition technology, cellular networks and phones were all becoming powerful enough to allow voice navigation systems on cellphones. “We couldn’t have done this five years ago,” he says.

Now, Mr. Phillips is in a race for market share. Another start-up, Yap Inc., based in Charlotte, N.C., is running a beta test of its service, which is similar to Vlingo’s but already has text messaging. Igor and Victor Jablokov, Yap’s co-founders, decided to start the company because they saw their teenage sister text-messaging while in a car.

She wasn’t driving at the time, but Igor Jablokov says cellular companies tell him in meetings that two-thirds of their teenage customers have either sent or read a text message while behind the wheel.

Big companies are also attracted to this market. Nuance started its Nuance Voice Control system last August, the same month that Vlingo’s appeared. Nuance’s system is in use at Sprint and Rogers Communications and can be downloaded to 66 models of hand-held phones, with many more on the way.

Microsoft is a significant potential competitor, thanks in part to its purchase of TellMe Networks last March. TellMe offers a speech-driven search application for cellphones that is available to customers of AT&T — only those who were part of Cingular before the merger — and Sprint. TellMe’s system is built-in on the new Mysto phone from Helio, a mobile phone operator started by Earthlink and SK Telecom, and is the engine for 1800call411, a free directory information service.

Over all, speech recognition was a $1.6 billion market in 2007, according to Opus Research, which predicts an annual growth rate of 14.5 percent over the next three years. Dan Miller, an analyst at Opus, said that companies that have licensed speech recognition technology would probably see faster revenue growth, as more consumers used the technology. The cellphone market holds the most potential, given its billions of phones, but cellular providers are still working out the business model for such services.

Igor Jablokov, Yap’s chief executive, says that he wants his application to be supported by advertising, but that the carriers with whom he is negotiating, which he declined to name, want to charge customers for the service.

To be sure, speech recognition technology has been available on personal computers since 2001 in applications like Microsoft Office, but few people use it. But in cellphone and other markets, speech recognition “is on the cusp of a curve,” says Bill Meisel, editor of Speech Strategy News, an industry newsletter.

Speech recognition, already used in high-end G.P.S. systems and luxury cars from Cadillac and Lexus, is now spreading to less expensive systems and cars — witness those slapstick Ford Sync commercials, featuring vignettes like one showing a young woman who approaches her office building and says “door open,” expecting it to respond the way her car does. It doesn’t, and she and her coffee cup smack directly into it.

Sync was developed by Microsoft and Ford, and based on Nuance technology. And the speech technology chief at I.B.M. Research, David Nahamoo, says the company has an automotive customer testing speech recognition to help drivers find songs quickly while driving — no more pushing buttons.

Then there’s SimulScribe, a New York company that is one of several businesses using speech recognition to convert voice mail into e-mail. “Voice recognition has finally hit the point where someone like ourselves can take it over the hump for specific applications,” says James Siminoff, SimulScribe’s chief executive.

James R. Glass, a principal research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T., says speech technology “is going to end up everywhere speech can be useful.” He says machines will keep improving their ability to recognize the way humans naturally talk, even if they have strong accents, and that the technology will find myriad new uses.

THIS doesn’t mean that people will always choose to speak. Genevieve Bell, director of user experience at the digital home group of Intel, says people are unlikely to want to use speech recognition to handle their finances, at least in public spaces. It also may not work well in the living room.

Ms. Bell jokes that if she could, she would yell “cricket!” at the television anytime she walked into a room, so her favorite sport would appear on the screen.

Even a digital expert like her cautions that some people may never be satisfied with the quality of speech recognition technology — thanks to a steady diet of fictional books, movies and television shows featuring machines that understand everything a person says, no matter how sharp the diction or how loud the ambient noise. But soon we will be able to speak our minds to many of our machines, and have them obey our commands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/business/27proto.html





Bad Idea: Non-Skippable Ads on DVDs

Is that hurtling car gonna crush Bruce Willis? Find out—right after these messages.

Yes, most standard DVD movies already come loaded with an annoying number of previews and coming attractions (which, thankfully, you can usually skip). But try this on for size: the bloggers at Zatz Not Funny unearthed a patent application from IBM that would allow for non-skippable ads at any point on a DVD. Wonderful.

According to the patent filing, a DVD could come embedded with a certificate that determines whether the disc should be played with advertisements; if the DVD is flagged for ads, then the non-skippable commercials could run at any point during the video. The ads could also be grabbed from the Internet (provided the player in question has a Net connection) or simply come pre-loaded onto the disc.

Now, before we all freak out, keep in mind that IBM's patent was filed over a year ago, and that there's a good chance the idea will never work its way onto our DVDs. Also, writer Davis Freeberg suggests some relatively benign possibilities for the patent: for example, maybe the ads would only be activated on budget versions of a disc (say, a $3.99 copy of the new "Die Hard" flick, as opposed to the standard $29.95 version) or even free DVDs.

I guess that's fine, as long as the no-commercial discs are still available. But here's what worries me: the possibility of downloading fresh ads from the Internet, an idea that might entice advertisers who've been loathe to buy commercial time on DVDs in the past. (Most standard DVD players can't connect to the Net, but Ethernet-equipped HD DVD players and upcoming Blu-ray decks certainly could.) In that case, I could easily envision discs with pre-roll ads—similar to those in movie theaters—through which you'd be forced to sit. Would disc prices drop if pre-movie ads became part of the package? Sadly, I doubt it; after all, the last time I checked, movie ticket prices continue to climb despite all the pre-roll commercials.
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/8635





High Court Allows Computer Program Patent Claims

In a surprising (to this Kat at least) turn of events, the Honourable Mr Justice Kitchin has ruled today that the current UK Patent Office practice of flatly rejecting patent claims to computer program products is wrong. The judgment, in the matter of several GB patent applications in the name of Astron Clinica and others, is not yet available on BAILII, but the IPKat is making it available to his readers here at least until it is. Many thanks go to John Gray of Murgitroyd & Co. for passing the news on.

After comprehensively summarising the last couple of decades of legal developments, covering the usual suspects (Gale, the oft-misspelled Merrill Lynch, Fujitsu and various EPO decisions), Kitchin J arrived at the main question in this appeal, which was whether the UK-IPO was correct in construing that the Court of Appeal judgment in Aerotel/Macrossan inevitably prohibited the patenting of all computer programs, or whether the old approach of considering the 'potential' technical effect of a computer program (following the EPO approach) could be taken into account, in a similar way to considering the effect of a method claim that would inevitably be carried out by running a program (which all of the applications under appeal contained). The UK-IPO had concluded that Aerotel/Macrossan ruled out computer program product patent claims, and consequently reverted to its old practice of rejecting such claims.

Kitchin J, however, considered that the point did not actually arise in Aerotel/Macrossan, because the court was not even asked to consider the question of computer program products claims. Although the Court of Appeal had criticised many EPO decisions, it had not criticised the main decisions relating to this point, being T 1173/97 and T 935/97. Also, the new four step test approach should produce the same result as the 'old' approach, and the Court of Appeal had said as much by saying that Merrill Lynch must be followed.

Probably more importantly, Kitchin J recognised that it was highly undesirable to have provisions of the EPC construed differently at the EPO as compared with the courts in the different contracting states, and that decisions of the Boards of Appeal should be highly persuasive. Mention was also made of the contrasting approach taken in Germany, where the EPO line tends to be followed closely.

The apparent approval of the UK-IPO's rejection of computer program product claims in Oneida Indian Nation's Application was either rejected by Kitchin J as not actually meaning that, or was in the alternative respectfully disagreed with (as the High Court is allowed to do, in contrast with the Court of Appeal), depending on the different possible interpretations of Christopher Floyd's judgment.

In conclusion then, Kitchin J found that the appeals should be allowed. Each application concerned a computer related invention where the examiner had allowed claims to, in effect, a method performed by running a suitably programmed computer and to a computer programmed to carry out the method. The Hearing Officer had rejected corresponding program claims on the basis that they were necessarily prohibited by Article 52, and in Kitchin J's judgment he had erred in doing so. The cases were remitted to the UK-IPO for further consideration in light of the judgment.

The IPKat is, frankly, quite amazed by the judgment, because he was (apparently quite wrongly) convinced that there was no room for manoeuver after Aerotel/Macrossan, in particular in light of one of the central points of A/M being that the scope of the monopoly must be considered when construing the claim, which appears to have formed the basis of the UK-IPO's change of practice. He wonders whether the story has run its course for now, and if we can simply all go back to falling into line with the EPO, or if the UK-IPO will judge that this one is worth going further on. Will they? Can they? Should they? What would/does the embattled Lord Justice Jacob think? The IPKat would very much like to know, and he suspects his readers may be just about to tell him...
http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2008/01...r-program.html





Prince Charles ‘Appears’ at an Energy Summit
Andrew C. Revkin

Prince Charles gave a keynote lecture at a summit meeting on advanced energy technologies in Abu Dhabi on Monday — not in the flesh, but as a three-dimensional hologram. By not flying there and back, he avoided adding about 20 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (the carbon cost of flying him and his entourage), according to conference organizers.

The technology for such holographic appearances is still in its early stages. The prince’s speech, for example, was not live (he recorded it weeks ago), but contained on a server flown to the Persian Gulf and now on its way back to London. The main constraint limiting live “telepresence” at this level of quality is the need for vast amounts of data flow.

According to a news release from Musion Systems, the British company that provided the projection technology, one reason for the holographic visit was critical British press coverage of the prince’s recent visit to the United States to accept an environmental prize. That trip generated tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

So far, the market for such imagery has been limited mainly to theatrical performances, like Madonna’s appearance with the band Gorillaz at last year’s Grammy Awards, or presentations by computer or Internet companies, most notably Cisco Systems, seeking to develop and promote such Web-based “travel.”

In his brief talk, Prince Charles, seen walking and gesturing at full height, stressed the importance of such technologies in a climate context. As John Vidal of The Guardian described it:

“His appearance was the talk of the 2,500 delegates at the World Future energy summit, most of whom had flown thousands of miles to discuss renewable energy and climate change and how to save emissions. The very sight of Prince Charles caused many to gasp….”

The scene has the feel of one of those early-days moments in the history of television. Could a true Star Trek-style Holodeck be in the offing?

Musion executives say it’s only a matter of time, and bandwidth.

For the moment, I’ve been doing a lot of still-rough Skype video chats with college and high-school students as a way to avoid flying.

Another route to relatively guilt-free travel is the approach taken by Sir Richard Branson, who is trying to develop sustainably produced biofuels suitable for jet engines. The test flight he announced recently is still scheduled for next month.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/20.../index.html?hp





Author Says Welch's Tough Talk Strengthened GE

Jack Welch transformed General Electric Co from an old-economy manufacturer into a modern conglomerate, in part because of his insistence on a culture of straight talk, according to a new book by his former speechwriter.

In "Jacked Up: The Inside Story of How Jack Welch Talked GE into Becoming the World's Greatest Company" (McGraw-Hill; $26.95), author Bill Lane recounts how the former chief executive insisted on sometimes-brutal directness and shoved aside tolerance for muddy thinking.

The man who earned the nickname "Neutron Jack" for violently overhauling the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company in the early years of his 1981-2001 reign comes across as a passionate, sometimes rude boss, quick to praise people whose ideas he admired and ready to pounce on those who did not meet his standards.

For example, Lane recalls the tirade resulting from his choice of a photo of Welch for GE's annual report.

"You a------!" Lane quotes the corporate chieftain as saying. "You put the wrong picture in the back."

Welch, who co-authored two of the more than a dozen books about him, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

'Exaggerated Everything'

During Welch's tenure, GE's stock price rose 50-fold, a run Lane credits in part to the chief's aggressive communications.

"He exaggerated everything," Lane said in an interview. "From the first day he got up there, he said we're going to be better than the best and every individual must give 110 percent of their effort."

Such rhetoric was "very, very effective," particularly with Wall Street, said Lane, who described his book as the first on Welch written by a GE insider.

GE shares have shown little growth after dropping sharply in the wake of the 9/11 attacks -- shortly after Welch's retirement.

"Jack was probably overpaid as far as stock price while he was there," Lane said. "I think (Welch's successor and current CEO) Jeff Immelt is being underpaid for GE's performance."

At Welch's insistence, Lane writes, GE managers eliminated the five-year strategic plans that had driven corporate planning meetings like the company's big annual gathering of its top brass in Boca Raton, Florida.

"Anyone who even claimed they could see four or five years into the future was considered a bullshitter," Lane writes.

Instead, Welch expected his team to provide simple but clear explanations of the challenges their businesses were facing and how they planned to overcome them.

"The old GE corporate civility, where a droning bore or dissembler worked through his script and was thanked regally by his boss, was over," Lane writes. "Civility was no longer a corporate virtue. Spatters of blood began to fleck conference room walls."

While much of the 315-page book focuses on Welch's tough-guy persona, there are lighter moments.

He gorged on frozen yogurt when he first discovered it, until he realized that even fat-free foods could pack on the pounds, Lane writes. In another anecdote, Welch stumbles around the darkened estate of Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, unable to figure out the computerized lamps.

In the late 1990s, when GE was under fire from peace activists for producing weapons, Welch boarded a corporate helicopter and flew to a rural convent to meet with a Catholic nun who had been leading protests against the company.

The protests "really bothered Welch," Lane writes. "He wanted GE to be loved by everyone."

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/busin...47486620080126





Bono Gives IPod to Japanese PM for Aid
AP

Rock star Bono bowed deeply and gave Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda an iPod at the start of a meeting Saturday to try to get more Japanese support for the fight against poverty in Africa.

The gift broke the ice as Fukuda sat down with Bono, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other major supporters of more aid for Africa.

Fukuda asked the U2 frontman if his music was on the red recording device.

''No, but you can download it,'' said Bono.

''My son has some of your music,'' Fukuda told him.

After the private meeting, Fukuda told government and business leaders at the World Economic Forum that African development would be one of the three major themes of the G-8 meeting he is hosting in Japan this July.

Part of the proceeds from sales of the special-edition red iPod go directly to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Africa.

Earlier this week, Bill Gates said the Red-branded products have generated $50 million for the fund in the last year and a half.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j...vuT4AD8UDJOCG1





Gates Foundation to Give $306 Million to Assist Poor Farmers
Celia W. Dugger

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has spent billions of dollars to improve the health of poor people in developing countries, will reach into its deep pockets on Friday for a newer philanthropic mission: to increase the productivity of impoverished farmers.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, intends to announce $306 million in grants that aim to provide the rural poor with better seeds, healthier soil and access to new markets for their crops, the foundation said Thursday. Three-quarters of the world’s poorest people live in the countryside. The grants to be announced Friday by the foundation will bring its total for agriculture to $660 million, and it says it will increase the total to $900 million by next year.

This infusion of money and interest from one of the world’s most influential philanthropic families is helping to revitalize a field that has been starved of resources in the past two decades as foreign aid for agricultural development has plummeted. Several factors led to the fall, including competition for aid for health and education, as well as earlier failures in agricultural development.

The Gates grants come as global warming is likely to intensify droughts and floods in Africa and worsen the staggering rates of rural poverty on what already is the hungriest continent.

“People, ourselves included, recognize this is an urgent problem and is only going to get worse,” said Rajiv J. Shah, the foundation’s director of agricultural development. “We need to come together now.”

The foundation’s approach seeks to avoid problems that have led to disappointing results for other aid-financed agricultural projects.

Instead of relying on professionals from wealthy countries who eventually leave and take their skills with them, it seeks to educate, train and employ people from poor countries to conduct the scientific research and advise farmers about crop techniques and livestock care, among other tasks.

Rather than see the benefits of projects captured by better-off farmers, as in some past projects, the nonprofit groups receiving Gates foundation grants will focus on poor women because studies have found that they are more likely to use gains in income to educate their children and improve their families’ well-being.

Instead of counting on free markets to generate opportunities spontaneously, the nonprofit groups managing some of the grants will intervene to help farmers form groups to sell goods in bulk and provide them with access to the agronomic advice, processing facilities and transportation they need to take advantage of growing markets for products like milk and coffee.

In Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, for example, Heifer International — working with other groups and institutions — will help women who tend cows gain access to refrigeration plants, enabling them to sell milk for distribution to stores distant from their farms.

The foundation’s largest grant — $165 million — will go to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa to improve the degraded soils of four million farmers in a dozen African countries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/wo...q=gates&st=nyt





Analysis: Metcalfe's Law + Real ID = More Crime, Less Safety
Jon Stokes

"We have a saying in this business: 'Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'" Thus spake security consultant Ed Giorgio in a widely-quoted New Yorker article on the US intelligence community's plans to vacuum up and sift through everything that flies across the wires. But Giorgio is wrong—catastrophically wrong. The story of Fidencio Estrada, a drug runner who bribed Florida Customs agent Rafael Pacheco to (among other things) access multiple federal law enforcement databases on his behalf, suggests that when it comes to the government collecting data on innocent civilians for law enforcement purposes, privacy and security are essentially the same thing.

The factual background in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals' recent decision to uphold a lower court's conviction of Estrada details how in early 2000, Pacheco accessed DHS's billion-record Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS) database looking for any information that the feds had on Estrada. (Hat tip to CNET's Declan McCullough, whose blog post brought this story to my attention.) Pacheco also went into the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database in order to dig up information on the warrants that were out for Estrada's arrest. Pacheco then fed the info back to Estrada, who was better able to elude law enforcement in as he plied his narcotics trade.

Estrada and Pacheco were eventually busted, sentenced, and are currently doing time for their crimes, but their story shows exactly why the United States' headlong rush to build government databases full of data on noncriminals (i.e., mere suspects, like OneDOJ, and the completely innocent, like Real ID) are such a spectacularly awful idea. All it takes is one bad apple with the right level of access, and the entire database is compromised.

With great (network) power comes great responsibility vulnerability

Here's an ugly prediction that you can take to the bank: as the amount of data that the feds collect on innocent civilians grows, so will the number of people who are victims of crimes that were made possible by unauthorized access to a government database. I'm not just talking about identity theft, though that is a huge danger with Real ID, but violent crimes as well. As I explained in the OneDOJ post linked above, this prediction is just Metcalfe's Law at work:

This is, of course, a fundamental problem inherent in the very nature of any massive, centralized government data-sharing plan that spans multiple agencies and connects untold numbers of state and federal law enforcement officers: the usefulness of such a system to any one individual (a white hat or a black hat) grows roughly with the square of the number of participants who are using it to share data (Metcalfe's law). So the more white hats that any of these programs manage to connect to each other, the more useful the network as a whole will be to the small handful of black hats who gain access to it at any point.

That such databases will be "useful" to black hats means any number of things—useful for identity thieves, and useful for terrorists who seek to impersonate lawful citizens.

While I'm citing laws and trends from the world of computing that shortly will have a direct impact on all of our ability to carry out our lives in relative safety, let me bring up two more trends worth factoring into our deteriorating privacy/security equation: the rapidly diving cost-per-bit of mass storage and the increasing amount of bandwidth available on networks both public and private.

So the government wants to collect tons of detailed data on citizens in these large databases; meanwhile, the speed at which an attacker could siphon off that data is increasing, as is the frightening but real possibility that ever-larger swaths of that database can fit onto a single lost or purloined hard drive.

But perhaps all this talk of government databases squeezed onto hard drives that then fall into the wrong hands is just fear-mongering, and that's probably best left to professionals.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ss-safety.html





Airport Screeners Use Black Lights to Inspect ID Cards

TSA screeners at about 400 U.S. airports have began checking IDs with hand-held black lights; black lights help screeners inspect ID cards by illuminating holograms, typically of government seals, which are found in licenses and passports

Keep it simple. The newest tool at airport security checkpoints is three inches long and costs only a few dollars: A hand-held black light. USA Today's Thomas Frank writes that airport screeners are starting to use them this month to examine driver's licenses and other passenger ID cards presented at checkpoints to spot forgeries or tampering. Passengers with suspicious documents can be questioned by police or immigration agents.

Black lights will help screeners inspect the ID cards by illuminating holograms, typically of government seals, which are found in licenses and passports. Screeners also are getting magnifying glasses that highlight tiny inscriptions found in borders of passports and other IDs. About 2,100 of each are going to the nation's 800 airport checkpoints.

The closer scrutiny of passenger IDs is the latest Transportation Security Administration (TSA) effort to check passengers more thoroughly than simply having them walk through metal detectors. In the past six months, the agency has been taking over the checking of passenger IDs and boarding passes at airport checkpoints. For years, security guards hired by airlines have done that. "This is a significant security upgrade," TSA chief Kip Hawley says. Screeners are trained in spotting forged documents and will get some training in studying suspicious passenger behavior to pick out people who merit deeper scrutiny at the checkpoint, Hawley says.

The TSA screeners, unlike security guards, also get daily briefings on the latest airport security concerns. More than forty passengers have been arrested since June in cases when TSA screeners spotted altered passports, fraudulent visas and resident ID cards, and forged driver's licenses. Many of them were arrested on immigration charges. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Airport security consultant Rich Roth says screeners will do a better job than security guards checking identification because they have training and "a little more authority" to question passengers. Airlines welcome having screeners observe passengers while checking their IDs and boarding passes. "That's the kind of resources the TSA can devote to the document-checking that the airlines didn't," says David Castelveter of the Air Transport Association, a trade group of major U.S. airlines.

The TSA has taken over document-checking in about 400 of the 450 airports where it operates. The agency will take over the remaining 50 in the next couple of months, TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe says.
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=5386





Senate Rejects Surveillance Law Renewal
AP

Senate Republicans blocked Majority Leader Harry Reid's attempt Tuesday to extend the life of a surveillance law due to expire Feb. 1, raising the stakes for a vote expected later this week on a new version of the law.

Reid, D-Nev., failed to get the unanimous consent he sought to extend the Protect America Act, which Congress hastily adopted last summer in the face of warnings from Bush administration officials about dangerous gaps in the government's ability to eavesdrop on terrorist e-mails and phone calls.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., objected to the extension, saying there was enough time before the law expires to pass a longer-term renewal of the government's terrorist surveillance authority.

Reid plans to bring to the Senate floor on Thursday competing versions of an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. If a bill is not approved then, Reid said he would require the Senate to work through the weekend to a bill passed.

The original FISA law requires the government to get permission from a special court to listen in on the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States. Changes in communications technology mean many purely foreign to foreign communications now pass through the United States and therefore require the government to get court orders to intercept them.

The Protect America Act, adopted in August, eased that restriction. Privacy and civil liberties advocates say it went too far, giving the government far more power to eavesdrop on American communications without court oversight.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...veillance.html





Phone Companies Likely to Get Immunity for Wiretapping

Dems lack votes to block, but may delay it
Eric Lichtblau

Senate Democrats concede they probably lack the votes needed to stop a White House-backed plan to give immunity to phone utilities that helped the National Security Agency's eavesdropping, and they are seeking to put off the vote for another month.

The Senate delayed a vote in December, and it is scheduled to take up the issue again beginning Thursday.

Putting off the vote for a second time riled White House officials and Republicans on Tuesday, because they insist national security will be put at risk if Congress does not meet a Feb. 1 deadline to amend the eavesdropping law.

"We've had six months to get this done," said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman. "We shouldn't need more time to get this done."

The debate has percolated since the disclosure in December 2005 that President Bush had authorized the security agency to eavesdrop without warrants on the international communications of Americans suspected of terrorist ties.

Since then, Congress has struggled with how it should respond to the president's actions. A temporary solution developed in August, when Congress, in a rushed vote just before its summer recess, agreed to give Bush many of the broadened eavesdropping powers he had sought.

Democrats came under fire from their supporters for submitting to White House pressure. The August measure expanded the powers of the security agency for six months, with the broadened authority expiring Feb. 1. It left out one element long sought by the White House, legal protection for telephone carriers against civil suits or criminal prosecution growing out of the eavesdropping.

The White House has continued its efforts to make the broadened eavesdropping permanent and for immunity for the utilities. Vice President Dick Cheney is scheduled to give a speech on the topic today at the Heritage Foundation.

The House approved a bill in November that omitted the immunity, as lawmakers opposed to the concept insisted that the companies should not be rewarded with legal protection for taking part in what some legal experts say was an illegal operation.

AT&T and other utilities face multibillion-dollar suits over their reported roles in the program.

The immunity issue has splintered Senate Democrats. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-Va., who leads the Intelligence Committee, has received approval from his committee for a plan that includes immunity.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has won passage of a competing plan that leaves it out.

Even if the Senate does approve a bill that includes immunity, it seems unlikely that such a plan could be signed into law before the Feb. 1 deadline, congressional officials said.

Because the House has passed a measure that did not include immunity, the issue would first have to go before a conference committee to work out an agreement between the two versions. That could take weeks.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8052110





Web Site Assembles U.S. Prewar Claims
John H. Cushman Jr.

Students of how the Bush administration led the nation into the Iraq war can now go online to browse a comprehensive database of top officials’ statements before the invasion, connecting the dots between hundreds of claims, mostly discredited since then, linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda or warning that he possessed forbidden weapons.

The Center for Public Integrity, a research group that focuses on ethics in government and public policy, designed the new Web site to allow simple searches for specific phrases, such as “mushroom cloud” or “yellowcake uranium,” in transcripts and documents totaling some 380,000 words, including remarks by President Bush and most of his top advisers in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Warnings about the need to confront Iraq, by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and two White House press secretaries, among others, can be combed line by line, and reviewed alongside detailed critiques published after the fact by official panels, historians, journalists and independent experts.

There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the crescendo of statements that led to the war. Muckrakers may find browsing the site reminiscent of what Richard M. Nixon used to dismissively call “wallowing in Watergate.”

The database is online at www.publicintegrity.org.

Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the research center say their work has documented “at least 935 false statements” on hundreds of occasions, particularly that Iraq had unconventional weapons, links to Al Qaeda, or both.

The database shows how even after the invasion, when a consensus emerged that the prewar intelligence assessments were flawed, administration officials occasionally suggested that the weapons might still be found.

The officials have defended many of their prewar statements as having been based on the intelligence that was available at the time — although there is now evidence that some statements contradicted even the sketchy intelligence of the time.

President Bush said in 2005 that “much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong” but that “it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/wa...tabase.html?hp





Judge: NYC Can't Use Secret Arguments
AP

The city must disclose its arguments about why documents on police surveillance of protesters before the 2004 Republican National Convention should be kept confidential, a judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV in Manhattan said the court won't consider a sealed affidavit by David Cohen, the New York Police Department's commissioner for intelligence.

''Permitting the submission of secret argument is antithetical to our adversary system of justice,'' Francis wrote, ruling that a revised statement by Cohen must be submitted publicly.

The New York Civil Liberties Union is suing on behalf of some of more than 1,800 people arrested at the convention.

Cohen said in the declaration dated Dec. 7 that some information ordered disclosed by Francis in August could reveal the identities of undercover officers and confidential informants. It could also disclose methods of operation that would undermine law enforcement, Cohen argued.

Francis said in his ruling that Cohen could refer to secret documents without revealing sensitive information, since the magistrate judge has viewed the documents himself.

Gail Donoghue, special counsel in the city law office, said: ''We are reviewing the ruling and considering all possible legal actions.''

Christopher Dunn, associate legal director at the NYCLU, said the ruling is another example of the federal court making it ''clear that the details of the NYPD's aggressive convention tactics cannot be kept behind closed doors.''

He added: ''If the NYPD wants to rely on its political-surveillance operation to defend its tactics, the department must disclose the details of that operation.''

The NYCLU is seeking police records for the lawsuits stemming from the four-day convention at Madison Square Garden, where President Bush accepted his party's nomination for a second term in office. The NYCLU said the arrests violated the protesters' civil rights.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...n-Arrests.html





Collapsed UK Bank Attempts to Censor Wikileaks
James Hardine

Wikileaks has released a couple of hilarious legal demands over a confidential briefing memo entitled Project Wing — Northern Rock Executive Summary. Northern Rock Bank (UK) collapsed spectacularly late last year on the back of the sub-prime lending crisis and was re-floated by the Bank of England at a cost of over £24bn.

The memo was used by the Financial Times, the Telegraph and others. It attracted a number of censorship injunctions, as reported by the Guardian, which only Wikileaks continues to withstand. In their legal demand to Wikileaks, Northern Rock's well-known media lawyers, Schillings, invoke the DMCA & WIPO, claim it'll be 10 years in prison for Wikileaks operators for not following the UK injunction, but then, incredibly, refuse to hand over a copy of the order unless Wikileaks' London lawyers promise not to give it to Wikileaks. Finally they claim copyright and more — on their demands!

The letters raise a serious issue about the climate of censorship in the UK, where one can apparently easily obtain a censorship order — a judge made law — that everyone is meant to obey, but no one is meant to know.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/21/1318224





Google's Share of Search Market Falls, Nielsen Says
Bloomberg

Google, owner of the world's most popular Internet search engine, lost market share last month for the first time since June, according to Nielsen Online. Google's share of U.S. Web queries fell to 56.3 percent in December from 57.7 percent the previous month, Nielsen said Friday in a statement. Yahoo dropped to 17.7 percent from 17.9 percent. The companies lost market share to Microsoft, which upgraded its search engine in September to include shopping, health, map and entertainment options. The Redmond, Wash., company captured 13.8 percent of searches, up from 12 percent in November. Shares of Mountain View-based Google fell 54 cents to $600.25 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Sunnyvale-based Yahoo dropped 44 cents to $20.78. Microsoft slipped 10 cents to $33.01.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8018514





Three U.S. Lawmakers Back XM/Sirius Merger
Diane Bartz

Three U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers have come out in favor of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc's proposed purchase of its rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc, the companies said on Thursday.

Republican Connie Mack of Florida backed the merger, as did Democrats Joe Baca and Bob Filner of California, the two companies said in a statement.

The Justice Department is evaluating whether the merger of the only two U.S. satellite radio companies would hurt competition. Congress has held hearings on the proposed deal but has no say in the Justice Department's antitrust evaluation.

On Thursday, shares of the two companies rebounded after falling sharply late Wednesday on concerns about whether the merger would win approval from antitrust regulators.

Democrat John Conyers of Michigan, who chairs a House antitrust task force, and Republican Steven Chabot of Ohio sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey earlier in the week expressing concern that senior department officials might intend to approve the merger over the objections of staff lawyers.

In afternoon trading, Sirius was up 16 cents or 4.86 percent at $3.45 a share while XM rose 85 cents or 6.43 percent to $14.06.

Sirius and XM also said that General Motors Corp supported the merger and had urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid putting conditions on the deal. GM installs XM Satellite Radio in some of its vehicles. The FCC is reviewing the deal to determine its impact on the public.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...21997920071213





NCNW Opposes Satellite Radio Merger
FMQB

The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) submitted a letter to the FCC on Thursday to voice their opposition to the proposed merger of XM and Sirius Satellite Radio, saying that it "poses a clear, present and unmitigated threat to decency and greater diversity of media ownership." The NCNW feels that if one satcaster was the home of a collection of so-called shock jocks such as Howard Stern, Opie & Anthony and Bubba The Love Sponge, then it would cater to the "lowest-common-denominator" of programming.

"One only has to evaluate the current programming now offered by Sirius and XM to recognize that our concerns and fears are well founded. Programming such as Howard Stern, Opie and Anthony, and Bubba the Love Sponge - which help to perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes in our culture - drive the business of both companies," reads the letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. "A Sirius - XM satellite radio monopoly will focus its resources on only its most profitable audiences, with more of the same lowest-common-denominator programming of the Howard Stern variety. Yet the audiences of those shows do not reflect the broader spectrum of the American listening public."

The letter goes on to voice support for private equity firm Georgetown Partners, which is asking that Sirius and XM be required to hand over 20 percent of their channel capacity in order to "create competition and diversity" in satellite radio and ensure some family-friends programming. The NCNW wrote, "In achieving the triple imperatives of programming decency, diversity of programming, and diversity of ownership in the satellite radio market, Georgetown's proposal offers a bright future for this critically important medium that stands in stark contrast to the 'at risk' position promised by the Sirius - XM combination as currently proposed by the companies."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=558786





Nice ass

FCC Fines ABC Over 'NYPD Blue'; Network to Appeal

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday said it plans to fine the Walt Disney Co's (DIS.N: Quote, Profile, Research) ABC network $1.4 million for airing an episode of "NYPD Blue" in 2003 that showed a woman's nude buttocks.

The company said it opposes the fine and plans to appeal.

In a notice filed on Friday, the agency said 52 television ABC stations in the Central and Mountain time zones had aired the scene at 9 p.m. in violation of federal restrictions against broadcasting "obscene material" between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

The agency said it received "numerous complaints" about the scene, in which a young boy walks in on a nude woman about to take a shower.

Stations in the Eastern and Pacific time zones were exempt because they broadcast the Feb. 25, 2003, episode at 10 p.m. local time.

ABC said in a statement that it had broadcast the episode and others from the cop drama, which ran from 1993 to 2005, with appropriate parental warnings and with V-chip enabled program ratings when they were available.

The network added that the show had been on the air for nearly a decade when the episode in question aired "and the realistic nature of its storylines was well known to the viewing public." (Reporting by Gina Keating; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssT...30635020080126





Advertiser Sues Don Imus for Unscripted Comments

A book publisher that bought an ad on Don Imus's radio show is suing the shock jock and his former bosses at CBS Radio for more than $4 million, saying Imus insulted the book he was paid to promote.

It was the latest controversy to follow the radio personality, who was fired by CBS Radio in April 2007 for insulting a women's basketball team with a racial slur. He has since returned to the air with another network.

Flatsigned Press said in a New York state court lawsuit filed late on Wednesday that Imus' show had agreed to a script for the 30-second spot in January 2007 to promote a book by former President Gerald Ford on the investigation into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Imus laughed as he read the script, calling it "cheesy," the lawsuit said. "These bastards have been waiting for him to croak so they can unload" the books, Imus said on the air, according to the lawsuit.

Martin Garbus, Imus' lawyer, said "The lawsuit is without merit and will be dismissed."

Ford served on the Warren Commission that conducted the official inquiry and his book "John F. Kennedy: Assassination Report of the Warren Commission" was published shortly after Ford died in December 2006.

"Imus unilaterally changed the language of the live read, which was completely contrary the agreement agreed upon by the parties," the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also names Infinity Broadcasting Corp., Sports Radio 66-WFAN and CBS Radio. Infinity, which used to be a division of Viacom Inc., became part of CBS Radio when CBS and Viacom split in 2006.

"Imus in the Morning" was produced and broadcast by the CBS-owned WFAN radio station in New York and syndicated on some 60 stations nationally. The program also was simulcast on cable television's MSNBC, but MSNBC did not air the ad and was not sued.

In December, Imus returned to radio with a nationally syndicated show broadcast out of WABC in New York in a deal with ABC Radio Networks, which is owned by Citadel Broadcasting Corp. (Reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Eric Beech)
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...28377720080125





In the Fatosphere, Big Is in, or at Least Accepted
Roni Caryn Rabin

For years, health experts have been warning that Americans are too fat, that we exercise too little and eat too much, that our health is in jeopardy.

Some fat people beg to differ.

Blogs written by fat people — and it’s fine to use the word, they say — have multiplied in recent months, filling a virtual soapbox known as the fatosphere, where bloggers calling for fat acceptance challenge just about everything conventional medical wisdom has to say about obesity.

Smart, sassy and irreverent, bloggers with names like Big Fat Deal, FatChicksRule and Fatgrrl (“Now with 50 percent more fat!”) buck anti-obesity sentiment. They celebrate their full figures and call on readers to accept their bodies, quit dieting and get on with life.

The message from the fatosphere is not just that big is beautiful. Many of the bloggers dismiss the “obesity epidemic” as hysteria. They argue that Americans are not that much larger than they used to be and that being fat in and of itself is not necessarily bad for you.

And they reject a core belief that many Americans, including overweight ones, hold dear: that all a fat person needs to do to be thin is exercise more and eat less.

“One of the first obstacles to fat acceptance is breaking down the question of whether being fat is a choice,” Kate Harding, founder of the blog Shapely Prose, said in an interview. “No fat acceptance advocate is saying you should sit around and wildly overeat. What we’re saying is that exercise and a balanced diet do not make everyone thin.”

Ms. Harding, a 33-year-old yoga enthusiast from Chicago, promotes the idea of health at any size (she is a 16). She started Shapely Prose (kateharding.net) last April, after noticing that posts about fat in her personal blog hit a nerve. Since then, it has quickly become one of the most popular fat acceptance blogs, with an average of 3,710 page views per day, according to Sitemeter, a Web statistics program.

People come in different shapes and sizes, bloggers like Ms. Harding say, and for those who come extra-large, dieting is futile. Many of the bloggers label their sites “no-diet zones.” (Don’t even mention weight-loss surgery.)

“You relapse, and then you go on a diet again, and this time you’re going to do it, it’s really going to be it this time,” Marianne Kirby, a 30-year-old blogger from Orlando, Fla., who writes The Rotund (therotund.com), said in an interview. “And it still doesn’t work, not long-term — you end up heavier than before. And you say to yourself: Why did I fall for this again?’ ”

The blogs have drawn their share of negative, even vicious comments. But for overweight readers, the messages are empowering — and liberating.

“Girlfriend, let me tell you, I am finally coming to grips with myself,” one fan commented on Ms. Harding’s site. “I will always be fat. I accept that now.”

Harriet Brown, a 49-year-old blogger in Wisconsin and an occasional contributor to The New York Times, encourages readers to take her “I Love My Body Pledge” (at harrietbrown.com), in which they promise not to talk “trash” about “how fat my thighs or stomach” are, and not “call myself a fat pig.”

Fat Fu’s anonymous blog (fatfu.wordpress.com) has a ruthless deconstruction of recent research like the “fat friends” study, as well as one of the most comprehensive lists of links to the fatosphere, including online communities, fashions and health sites for fat people. The Big Fat Deal blog (bfdblog.com) suggests 10 ways to be a “body positivity activist,” including “Be yourself,” “Understand that a lot of people are hateful morons” and “Don’t be afraid to order the cheesecake.”

Many of the bloggers are women whose writing has a distinctly feminist flavor, but there are male fat-acceptance bloggers like Red No. 3 (red3.blogspot.com), who says: “See, I don’t have a problem with fat. My body is simply adorned, and I’ll take that.”

But some experts say this sort of message is dangerous and undermines public health efforts to rein in obesity. “We do have to be careful not to put all the blame on the individual,” said Dr. Walter C. Willett, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. But he added, “The large majority of people who are overweight are overweight because of lifestyle.”

The bloggers argue that changes in definitions over time, along with flaws in the body mass index formula, have pushed more Americans into the “fat” and “obese” categories, and they point to provocative studies suggesting that there may be benefits to being overweight, including a large study that found that underweight Americans are more likely to die than those who are moderately overweight.

Several other recent studies on heart patients and dialysis patients have also reported higher survival rates among heavier patients, suggesting that the link between body size and health may be more complex than generally acknowledged. Another study of people over 60 found that being fit has more bearing on longevity than simply being thin.

The bloggers’ main contention is that being fat is not a result of moral failure or a character flaw, or of gluttony, sloth or a lack of willpower. Diets often boomerang, they say; indeed, numerous long-term studies have found that even though dieters are often able to lose weight in the short term, they almost always regain the lost pounds over the next few years.

Ultimately, these bloggers argue, being skinny may have far more to do with the luck of the genetic draw than with lifestyle choices.

“We accept that some people are tall and some people are short,” said Rachel Richardson, 28, of Cincinnati, who writes a blog called The F-Word (the-f-word.org). “Yet we seem to think all people should be thin — it just doesn’t make sense.”

Fat acceptance bloggers contend that the war on obesity has given people an excuse to wage war on fat people and that health concerns — coupled with the belief that fat people have only themselves to blame for being fat — are being used to justify discrimination that would not be tolerated toward just about any other group of people.

“I’m not surprised there are so many of these blogs now,” Ms. Richardson said. “Anti-obesity hysteria has reached a boiling point. Blogging is a way for people to fight back.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/health/22fblogs.html


















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