Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 10th, ’05

[JackSpratts]

"A copy downloaded, played, and retained on one's hard drive for future use is a direct substitute for a purchased copy." – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago


"Before a million people can buy our record, a million people have to hear our music and like it enough to go looking for it. That won't happen without a lot of people playing us for their friends, which, in turn, won't happen without a fair amount of file sharing. As it happened, for a variety of reasons, our label didn't put copy-protection software on our album. What a shame, though, that so many bands aren't as fortunate." – Damian Kulash Jr.


"That shrinking (movie release) window would dramatically affect cinema admissions. If the industry were to convert to simultaneous release on DVD, or with downloads, that would have devastating impact on the cinema industry." – John Fithian


"'The Family Guy' was one of the most traded shows on peer-to-peer networks. A subsequent DVD release containing episodes of the show generated huge sales, which some analysts speculate means that the file-sharing activity helped build interest in the show." – Jonny Evans


"In this country, the state lacks the authority to ban protected speech on the ground that it affects the listener's or observer's thoughts and attitudes." – U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kennelly


"The trade magazine Mediaweek reported that in 2003, 99 percent of all F.C.C. indecency complaints came from the Parents Television Council." – Caryn James


"For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters." – Wandering


"It's unimaginable how big this is. They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers." – Chen Yu


"Music travels much farther than you travel, and it touches people you never met. Whatever comfort you gave people, they offer that comfort back. And it works. It's good medicine." – Mary Travers


































Update

December 10th, ’05




Court Rules Against Mom in Download Suit
Ted Bridis

A federal appeals court late Friday upheld the music industry's $22,500 judgment against a Chicago mother caught illegally distributing songs over the Internet.

The court rejected her defense that she was innocently sampling music to find songs she might buy later and compared her downloading and distributing the songs to shoplifting.

The decision against Cecilia Gonzalez, 29, represents one of the earliest appeals court victories by the music industry in copyright lawsuits it has filed against thousands of computer users. The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago threw out Gonzalez's arguments that her Internet activities were permitted under U.S. copyright laws.

Gonzalez had rejected a proposed settlement from music companies of about $3,500. A federal judge later filed a summary judgment against her and ordered her to pay $750 for each of 30 songs she was accused of illegally distributing over the Internet.

Gonzalez, a mother of five, contended she had downloaded songs to determine what she liked enough to buy at retail. She said she and her husband regularly buy music CDs and own more than 250.

However, the appeals panel said Gonzalez never deleted songs off her computer she decided not to buy, and judges said she could have been liable for more than 1,000 songs found on her computer.

"A copy downloaded, played, and retained on one's hard drive for future use is a direct substitute for a purchased copy," the judges wrote. They said her defense that she downloaded fewer songs than many other computer users "is no more relevant than a thief's contention that he shoplifted only 30 compact discs, planning to listen to them at home and pay later."

Gonzalez could not be reached for comment. Her lawyer, Geoff Baker, said comparing Gonzalez to a shoplifter was "inflammatory" but declined to comment further until he had more time to review the decision, which was released late in the day.

Gonzalez was named in the first wave of civil lawsuits filed by record companies and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America, in September 2003.

"The law here is quite clear," said Jonathan Lamy, a senior vice president for the Washington-based RIAA. "Our goal with all these anti-piracy efforts is to protect the ability of the music industry to invest in the bands of tomorrow and give legal online services a chance to flourish."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





Angry BellSouth Withdrew Donation, New Orleans Says
Jonathan Krim

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

According to the officials, the head of BellSouth's Louisiana operations, Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert, who oversees the roughly 1,650-member police force.

City officials said BellSouth was upset about the plan to bring high-speed Internet access for free to homes and businesses to help stimulate resettlement and relocation to the devastated city. Around the country, large telephone companies have aggressively lobbied against localities launching their own Internet networks, arguing that they amount to taxpayer-funded competition. Some states have laws prohibiting them.

BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher disputed the city's version of events.

"Our willingness to work with the mayor and the city is still on the table," Battcher said. "We've been working for over two months on this building . . . we are a little surprised by these comments."

Battcher said Oliver spoke directly with the mayor on Tuesday after the WiFi announcement and told him they needed to continue to work through issues regarding the building. He said BellSouth is awaiting the mayor's response.

The police have been scattered in hotels, precinct stations and other makeshift locations since the headquarters was ruined in the hurricane and had been preparing to move to the building after months of discussions with the phone company, city officials said.

The building suffered basement flooding and needs some repairs but has 250,000 usable square feet of space.

Greg Meffert, the city's chief technology officer and a deputy mayor, said he is saddened that BellSouth finds the city's network so objectionable.

"It's a once-in-a-century opportunity to truly show the entire world what can be, instead of just what is, and help write future history in the process," Meffert said. "It's a damn shame they don't see that."

The wireless network covers the central business district and the French Quarter, and the city plans to expand it as the people return.

The network also is used by law enforcement and other city agencies to help speed recovery. Eventually, the city intends to outsource operation of the network's business and consumer services to a private firm, officials said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...120201853.html





VCR-Like Box Boasts P2P Content At Push Of Button
Lars Pasveer



A Dutch company is offering a new Linux-based home media player designed to give Internet users easy access to content from a variety of peer-to-peer networks, including BitTorrent and eDonkey.

Called the LamaBox, the VCR-sized player is "fully integrated with the Internet, including connection to the big peer-to-peer networks," according to the LamaBox Web site. This, the site says, lets users "choose from an impressive collection of audio and video. The latest movies and television shows, playable on your television at the press of a button."

The device also enables users to burn downloads to DVD.

The fact that the LamaBox is designed to access networks where copyrighted material is routinely shared raises legal issues. But a LamaBox representative denied any wrongdoing and said the device only makes such material accessible, much in the same way Internet providers facilitate access to potentially illegal material.

"The sole responsibility lies with the provider and user of content," said LamaBox.

But if a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision gives any indication of the direction international law will take, the LamaBox could find itself unplugged. This summer, the court ruled that companies that build businesses with the active intent of encouraging copyright infringement should be held liable for their customers' illegal actions.

Currently the LamaBox is set to access BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack (the network used by Kazaa), Gnutella and Overnet. Users can also listen to Internet radio stations and view online video streams.

LamaBox said it has seen a lot of interest from abroad and recently translated its Web site into English.

Because the device is based on Linux, open-source software governed by the GNU Public License, users are allowed to modify the device as they see fit. LamaBox currently delivers several hand-built models: The cheapest one has 40GB of storage and costs 279 euros (US$328). A 400GB LamaBox with DVD burner is also available and costs 479 euros (US$564).

The LamaBox can hold as much as 1.5 terabytes of information when all three hard drive slots are in use, according to the company. The Linux Advanced Media Application media center uses a modestly powered VIA processor, chosen to minimise heat generation and the subsequent need for noisy fans.
http://www.cnet.com.au/hometheatre/0...0058703,00.htm





98% of people unconcerned about RIAA threats

P2P "Legal Issues" Not Driving Paid Downloads
Ipsos-Reid

What the research revealed about consumer preferences in online music was quite astonishing. The entry of an à la carte downloading service at 99 cents per song into this simulated market environment immediately captured 19% consumer preference—much more than the three existing subscription services combined. It also appeared to lure many downloaders who had previously embraced peer-to-peer into a fee-based option.

This clearly suggested that a low-cost transaction-based music service that offered flexible usage rights, portability, and burning would have a significant impact on the market. Indeed, flexibility and ownership appeared to be critical components in a fee-based online music service offer.

Perhaps most telling about this research was that it was conducted nine months prior to the release of Apple’s iTunes Music Store, which offered precisely these consumer benefits, and subsequently ushered in a new era in fee-based online music acquisition.

Three years later, the proportion of Americans who have paid to download music (12%) is now nearly equal to those who have used a file sharing services (13%), underscoring the importance of offering consumer-friendly engagement methods when assembling digital content offers and services. Interestingly, legal threats have played a less visible role in this growth, with primary functional benefits more likely cited by fee-based downloaders as purchase drivers. Of people who paid a fee to download music from the Internet, “I only wanted to purchase one song from the artist” (47%) and “more convenient to download songs from the Internet” (38%) were the most popular reasons cited, versus “concerned about legal issues with downloading music” (2%).

Sign-in required

http://www.ipsos-ideas.com/article.cfm?id=2877





Illegal File-Sharing Three Times As Popular As iTunes

Free songs more attractive to youngsters than paid-for…
Jo Best

Illegal downloads are still beating legal online music in Europe, analysts have found.

A report from analyst house JupiterResearch discovered that consumers are three times more likely to get their digital music from illegal file-sharing networks than pay to download the tracks from online song shops such as iTunes and Napster, with 15 per cent of consumers using P2P sites and five per cent using the legitimate online shops.

The taste for illegal music is strongest amongst the young. Of those consumers between 15- and 24-years-old, 34 per cent are illegal file-sharers and, according to the report, have little concept of music as a paid commodity.

Mark Mulligan, analyst at JupiterResearch, told silicon.com that despite the growth in legal sales from services like iTunes, as well as legal actions against uploaders, illegal file-sharing is here to stay.

"The momentum is with the legal services, there's nothing to suggest legal file-sharing is going to go away," he said. "It's a firmly entrenched behaviour and the fact it's free makes it more difficult."

However, the problem is not purely a digital one - young people are happy to get their music illegally whatever format it's available on.

JupiterResearch found that 43 per cent of younger consumers prefer copying CDs to buying them and 40 per cent believe that CDs aren't value for money.

According to Mulligan, the music industry needs to rethink how it deals with young file-sharers. "There needs to be a sea-change in approach," he said. "Instead of [the industry] paying lip service to legal services... there needs to be a whole new layer of free legal services," such as ad-supported downloads, he said.
http://management.silicon.com/govern...9154663,00.htm





Sober Worm Stalls MSN, Hotmail
Greg Sandoval

The pesky Sober worm is to blame for disrupting e-mail traffic between Comcast account holders and users of Microsoft-based e-mail, Redmond said on Friday.

A variant of Sober known as Win32/Sober.Z@mm is pummeling servers at Hotmail and MSN with "unusually high mail load," causing delays in e-mail delivery to Hotmail and MSN customers, said Brooke Richardson, MSN's lead product manager. Richardson also indicated that Internet service providers besides Comcast may be having problems directing e-mail to Hotmail and MSN servers.

"We are working with Comcast and other ISPs to address (the) issues," Richardson said. "We're actively working to take the appropriate steps to remedy the situation as rapidly as possible. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience."

Blog reports say that some Comcast subscribers, when sending e-mail to a Hotmail or MSN account, have received an error message saying their message was not received. However, Microsoft says that all e-mails, while some may be delayed, are eventually getting through.

A Microsoft spokesperson other than Richardson said that the problem began earlier this week but would not give a timetable for when it might be fixed.

The Sober worm first appeared in 2003 and can hijack a Windows-based computer and force it to repeatedly send spam e- mails. The continuous e-mailing can lead to overloaded servers and reduced network performance. Last month, a variant of the Sober worm was spread as an attachment that claimed to be an old class photo sent by a schoolmate.
http://news.com.com/Sober+worm+stall...3-5980987.html





Spitzer Gets on Sony BMG's Case

New York's Attorney General has turned his attention to Sony BMG's copyright-protection fiasco

Sony BMG Music Entertainment is getting a lot of unwanted attention for its use of copyright-protection software that left CD users open to computer viruses. It began with the bloggers, who shed light on the matter, and has spread to the scads of consumers who have used the Internet to urge a boycott of Sony BMG CDs.

A Homeland Security Dept. official has weighed in, accusing Sony BMG of undermining computer security. And Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has alleged, in a suit filed Nov. 21, that Sony BMG violated his state's antispyware laws. Now, the Sony BMG debacle has drawn the scrutiny of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

BUYER, BEWARE. Spitzer's office dispatched investigators who, disguised as customers, were able to purchase affected CDs in New York music retail outlets -- and to do so more than a week after Sony BMG recalled the disks. The investigators bought CDs at stores including Wal-Mart (WMT ), BestBuy (BBY ), Sam Goody, Circuit City (CC ), FYE, and Virgin Megastore, according to a Nov. 23 statement from Spitzer's office.

Sony BMG says it shipped nearly 5 million CDs containing the software, of which 2.1 million had been sold. The company says 52 individual titles are affected.

Spitzer's office urged consumers not to buy the disks, and if they do buy them, not to play them in computers. The disks should be returned to the place of purchase for a refund, Spitzer advises.

MORE PRESSURE. "It is unacceptable that more than three weeks after this serious vulnerability was revealed, these same CDs are still on shelves, during the busiest shopping days of the year," Spitzer said in a written statement. "I strongly urge all retailers to heed the warnings issued about these products, pull them from distribution immediately, and ship them back to Sony."

Sony BMG spokesman John McKay says the company has "commenced a mail-in exchange program and is committed to getting all copies of the 52 affected titles off store shelves. We appreciate the attorney general's reinforcement of our efforts, and on Wednesday [Nov. 23] we sent a follow-up message to remind them to remove XCP content-protected CDs from their inventory." A spokeswoman for Wal-Mart did not return a call seeking comment. A Best Buy spokesman said the company has instructed its stores to remove the CDs from stock and to provide exchanges to customers.

Attention from the aggressive New York attorney general adds to pressure on Sony BMG to resolve a fiasco that came to the public's attention on Oct. 31, when computer-systems expert Mark Russinovich posted a message on his blog revealing that Sony BMG had placed antipiracy software on music CDs that made customers' PCs vulnerable to hacker attacks (see BW 11/17/05, "Sony's Copyright Overreach").

SEEKING FINES. Sony BMG programmed the disks with a software-code set known as a rootkit that secretly installs itself onto a PC's hard drive when the CD is loaded. And computer-security experts have raised questions over whether Sony BMG, a venture of Sony (SNE ) and Germany's Bertelsmann AG, could have known about the rootkit sooner (see BW Online, 11/29/05, "Sony BMG's Costly Deafness").

Spitzer's consumer warning came days after Texas Attorney General Abbott filed the suit against the company in Travis County, Texas. Abbott is seeking fines against Sony BMG of $100,000 per violation. A spokesman for Spitzer's office in New York City declined to comment on the attorney general's plans beyond the consumer warning, other than to say the office is "looking into" the matter.

In April, Spitzer's office had brought suit against Intermix Media, a Los Angeles-based firm. The suit followed a six-month investigation that culminated in allegations that Intermix had installed advertising software on home computers without having given those consumers ample notice. Intermix agreed to settle the suit and was required to pay $7.5 million. The company also had to accept a ban on the distribution of adware programs in the future.

In July, Spitzer secured a $10 million settlement from Sony's Sony BMG Music Entertainment record label to settle a probe into an alleged "payola" scheme. Spitzer's office said in July that it had uncovered evidence that the label had offered inducements, expensive gifts, and expensive travel packages to get music played on the radio.

SALES DRAG. Meanwhile, the rootkit blunder continues to inspire consumer outrage and affect sales of artists who produced the affected CDs. The ranking of Van Zant's Get Right with the Man CD plummeted on Amazon.com's (AMZN ) bestseller list in the wake of Sony BMG snafu (see BW 11/22/05, "Sony's Escalating 'Spyware' Fiasco".

And when Sony BMG started pulling CDs, it didn't have enough replacements lined up, says Ross Schilling, of Van Zant's Nashville-based manager, Vector Management.

Sony BMG had promised the CD would be swapped out with non-rootkit CDs. Instead, the rootkit CDs simply were pulled, Schilling says. "It's obviously very bothersome," he says.

"HARMING THE ARTIST." That means Van Zant's CD and others were not on the shelves for the busiest shopping weekend of the year. Sony BMG has told Van Zant to expect a 50% to 80% decrease in sales when the new numbers come out on Nov. 30. That's in a week that should have seen a 50% to 80% increase in sales. The week of Nov. 9 to 16, Van Zant's sales actually jumped a point, a spurt Schilling attributes to exposure from the Country Music Awards.

Now that retailers are pulling the CD, there's potential for a 50,000- to 60,000-unit loss, Schilling says. "I believe they [Sony] went in with good intentions, but it turned into an unprecedented situation," Schilling says. "It certainly is harming the artist.... There's going to have to be some commitment made on Sony's side to their artists." To say nothing of the assurances Sony BMG may need to make to consumers and a couple of states' attorneys general.
http://businessweek.com/technology/c...128_573560.htm






EFF says “not so fast.”

Sony BMG Urges Consumers To Download Security Fix For CDs
AP

Sony BMG Music Entertainment said Tuesday some 5.7 million of its CDs were shipped with anti-piracy technology that requires a new software patch to plug a potential security breach in computers used to play the CDs.

The security vulnerability was discovered by online civil liberty group Electronic Frontier Foundation and brought to the attention of Sony BMG, which has been under fire in recent weeks over security issues with an unrelated CD copy-protection plan.

The company said Tuesday it brought the issue up with the MediaMax software maker, SunnComm Technologies Inc., which has developed a software patch to fix the problem.

``It's a security vulnerability and therefore needs to be dealt with,'' said Thomas Hesse, president of Global Digital Business for Sony BMG.

The MediaMax Version 5 software was loaded on 27 Sony BMG titles, including Alicia Keys' ``Unplugged,'' and Cassidy's ``I'm A Hustla.''

CD copy-protection software is generally designed to restrict how many times computer users can make duplicate versions of a CD in an effort to stem piracy.

A computer security firm working with EFF discovered the security issue with the MediaMax Version 5 CDs and how it affects computers running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

Windows allows for different levels of access to a computer. The copy-protection software installs a file folder in the computer that could allow a guest user to gain unauthorized access to the computer.

``It's a privileged escalation attack,'' said Kurt Opsahl, an EFF staff attorney. ``On Windows you can have users with different privileges, and because of security weakness in the permissions of a folder, it allows a low-ranked user to act as a high-ranked user.''

The problem is commonly found on many computer programs, said Robert Horton, director of NGS Software, which tested SunnComm's software fix for the record company.

The MediaMax problem differs from the security hole discovered last month with the so-called XCP technology by First 4 Internet Ltd. of Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, that Sony BMG placed on more than 50 other CD titles. That copy-protection effort was found to leave computers vulnerable to hackers.

``The main distinction is, with XCP, it was hiding itself so you wouldn't know that it was there,'' Opsahl said.

This one is not hidden, he said, but the average user wouldn't know to look for it unless it was brought to their attention.

Sony BMG recalled the discs with XCP last month and released a way to remove the software from users' computers.

Opsahl said the MediaMax patch addresses the problem, but the EFF, which has a lawsuit pending in California against Sony BMG over its use of copy-protection technology, is continuing to investigate.

``We can't say that the software is now secure,'' Opsahl said. ``We're going to continue to raise these issues with Sony.''

Hesse said the company plans to alert consumers to the patch on artist Web sites and via e-mail, among other measures.

``We have learned that we are in the software business to some extent and we should behave like someone in the software business does ... to make sure the users of our product are safe at all times,'' he said.

Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...y/13347561.htm





Down, but not forgotten

Kazaa Says No to Australians
Thomas Mennecke

Just before the stroke midnight in Sydney, Australia, the Kazaa homepage was altered as expected. Yet there are no pop-ups and no changes to the key word filter. Instead, large red letters appear towards the top of the homepage, warning Australians against the use of Kazaa.

Attention Users in Australia: To comply with order of the Federal Court of Australia, pending an appeal in February 2006, use of the Kazaa Media Desktop is not permitted by persons in Australia. If you are in Australia, you must not download or use the Kazaa Media Desktop.

Other than the above warning, it does not appear that Sharman Networks has made any changes to the Kazaa client. But to Australian users, a much different story exists. When an individual with an ".au" IP address attempts to reach Kazaa.com, an inhibitive website appears. The website warns users "Important Notice: The download of the Kazaa Media Desktop by users in Australia is not permitted."

The rest of the world can see the recognizable Kazaa.com with only the first "Attention" message. All download links and other pages on the site funtion normally. For Australians, the second warning message is all that appears. No site navigation and no download links are available.

Update: Although the Kazaa homepage is unavailable to Australian users, the FastTrack network is still accessible. There were some conflicting reports this morning as to whether Australians were also cut off from connecting to FastTrack, however at this time it does not appear to be the case.

It was expected that Sharman Networks would release a new Kazaa client with 3,000 additional key words added to their existing filter. This does not appear to be the case, at least for now. The banner that Sharman Networks opted for is a far cry from the technical resolution that was anticipated. In all fairness, it's possible the banner may be the start of an extended effort by Sharman Networks.

However judging by the lack of updates in over three years to the Kazaa client, many are questioning whether Sharman Networks even has the technical resources to successfully upgrade their software. The extensive blanket action by Sharman only furthers this speculation.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1015





KOREA: New Internet Copyright Bill Under Fire

Bill purposes Internet companies to supervise file transactions and enforce transfer termination of copyrighted materials
Cho Jin-seo

A copyright bill to strictly control Internet file transfer is facing fierce protests from Internet users and online service providers.

Proposed by Uri party lawmaker Woo Sang-ho, the bill forces Internet companies to supervise file transactions between their users, and to delete or stop them when the contents are copyrighted materials such as music or video files. The bill also says that the companies would be punished for up to 50 million won in penalty, if they don’t follow the government’s instruction.

After the reports on the bill came out, the homepage of ruling Uri party lawmaker Woo Sang-ho was shut down on Wednesday as Internet users swarmed to the bulletin board to post complaints and even curses. Major portal sites such as Naver were covered with thousands of protests from users, too.

The Korea Internet Corporations Association also said Wednesday that it is opposing Woo’s bill, because it will severely damage both the Internet industry and online contents market of South Korea.

"It is a naïve idea that would kill the emerging Internet industry," said the association in a statement. "even if there can be a short-term effects in protecting digital rights. But in the long term it will not benefit the contents’ owners, let alone the Internet users and service providers."

Despite unfavorable reactions from the public, Woo’s staff said that they are pushing for the bill and expect the National Assembly to approve it within this month. They also said that there was some misinterpretation of the reports bringing negative reaction from the public.

"Instant messaging services such as MSN Messenger, Web mail and portal services will not be subject to the new law. Only peer-to-peer service and Web hard service will be forced to take actions on the illegal file transactions," said Woo’s aide Park Seung-nak.
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/articl...parentid=35128





Music Man Cracks DRM Schemes
Quinn Norton

The ongoing saga of Sony BMG's sneaky, lawsuit-inducing copy-protection software opened a new chapter Monday when the music company released an uninstaller program to allow customers to remove the offending code from their PCs.

The release was Sony's second attempt at erasing its errors -- its previous push of mea-culpaware last month backfired horribly when 24- year-old Princeton University researcher John "Alex" Halderman found that the uninstaller opened up a security hole even worse than the original digital rights management program. And while the discovery shocked outsiders, and embarrassed Sony, it was a little like déjà vu to Halderman, one of a handful of smart researchers who seem determined to hold the recording industry's feet to the fire.

"The same companies keep producing new copy-protection technology, and I keep getting interested in it," says Halderman.

Years before Sony's rootkit scandal made DRM folly a subject of international news, Halderman was already keeping a close eye on the music industry's technological measures. When, in 2003, DRM-maker SunnComm International introduced a new approach to copy protecting audio CDs in its MediaMax software, Halderman checked it out.

His research revealed that the new discs installed software that interfered with the user's ability to copy the audio CD at a kernel level. "It was radically different than anything before; it turned the computer against the user," says Halderman.

The software used a Microsoft Windows feature called AutoRun that executes software on a CD without the user's knowledge or consent. Holding down the Shift key stopped AutoRun and prevented the software from being installed. Halderman wrote about the software, and the "infamous Shift key attack," in an academic paper and posted it online. Within 24 hours, SunnComm was threatening a $10 million lawsuit, and vowing to refer Halderman to authorities for allegedly committing a felony under the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.

By the next day, the company had backed down in the face of public outrage. Looking back, Halderman says, "The whole experience was a whirlwind.... The response was way bigger than (anything I'd) expected."

So Halderman was well prepared when SysInternals security expert Mark Russinovich discovered last October that Sony BMG was using software that works much like SunnComm's MediaMax with an added cloaking technology that could be exploited by more-malicious code.

Halderman and his adviser, Princeton professor Ed Felten, picked up the thread, and began a series of revelatory analyses into the functionality and provenance of the stealthy code, which was called XCP and had been produced by U.K. company First 4 Internet.

His curiosity rewetted by the affair, Halderman even took a second look at the competing SunnComm system -- still in use -- and found new problems, including the fact that MediaMax secretly installs itself even if the user refuses to click on the license agreement giving it permission to do so.

And when Sony released an uninstaller for the First 4 Internet code, it was Halderman who discovered that it came with an ActiveX control that would make users vulnerable to attack through their web browsers.

Sony recalled the uninstaller and went back to the drawing board.

Halderman's interest in copy-protected CDs began when he was an undergrad, and has continued through grad school under the auspices of Felten. "He likes to do work that is relevant, where he can apply his computer-science knowledge to things that matter to regular people," says Felten.

Felten is no stranger to exposing the foibles of DRM schemes. In 2001, the recording industry briefly suppressed Felten's research into a flawed digital-watermarking technology by threatening to invoke the DMCA.

Unlike the situation in 2003, Halderman doesn't see much possibility of a suit against him for his Sony research, but the risk is never far from his mind. He says his chosen field forces him to learn about more than just security and DRM. "It's difficult to be only a scientist in this field, you have to know about law, public policy and the business world."

Halderman doesn't normally encounter CDs with DRM -- he must actively seek them out for his research. "I mostly listen to opera," he says. "There are very few classical-music discs that are copy protected."

The researcher says he plans to dig into Sony's new uninstaller, but he hopes to find nothing negative to report. On future DRM schemes, however, he's not so optimistic. "Manufacturers adopt new tricks with each revision," he says. "If there are new copy-protection programs for CDs, I'll continue to look at them."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,69763,00.html





Review: Apple Tiptoes Into Media Center Domain

Apple hopes its latest iMac G5 will make the computer not only a desktop tool, but the focal point of a household's entertainment center.
AP

When asked a few years ago if they might someday offer a Mac that works like a Microsoft entertainment PC, Apple executives joked that they were instead focusing on the convergence of computers and toasters.

The basic concept of a PC powering a living room multimedia hub -- as pushed by Microsoft Corp., at least -- was flawed, they said.

People simply don't interact with a TV the same way they do with a computer, said Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Fast forward to 2005, and Apple Computer Inc. still hasn't released a better toaster. But it has updated its all-in-one iMac G5 computer with a remote control and a program that shares many of the features of Microsoft's Media Center operating system.

The program, called Front Row, lets you listen to music, watch videos, play DVDs and display photos from a distance with a few clicks of a lighter-sized, six-button remote control.

Its graphically pleasing interface takes over the screen and can be easily viewed from afar.

Apple's way of dealing with the TV problem was to simply ignore it. Front Row doesn't display live TV, though it can be connected to a TV to mirror what's on the computer.

Those missing features certainly make it less functional than a Windows Media Center PC. But, at the same time, the new iMac bundle excels at what it can do.

Sometimes, less is more.

There's still plenty here that, as it evolves in future releases, could end up send the designers of Microsoft's Media Center back to the drawing boards.

Once Front Row is launched by pressing the "Menu" button on the remote, four options are available: Play a DVD, listen to music, watch a video or view photos. They appear on an invisible, virtual lazy susan that's completely controllable by the remote.

The entire program is actually just a shell that makes it easier to control the Mac's underlying programs from a distance with the remote. Each option opens up an underlying library from iTunes (music and video downloads), iPhoto (pictures) or iMovie (home movies).

Throughout, the display is both simpler and pleasing to the eye than the Media Center shell.

Deeper inside, the various menus resemble what you'd find on an iPod's display, and that makes navigating with the remote a lot easier.

Though there is of course no option to view live TV, there are plenty of choices for video. You can watch video podcasts downloaded from iTunes as well as access a number of movie trailers. Home-brewed movies can, of course, be viewed as well.

If you've purchased any episodes of "Desperate Housewives" or "Lost" from the iTunes Music Store, you can watch them on the iMac by choosing "TV Shows."

That's also true of any purchased music videos. (It supports most standard video formats.)

The one thing that you can't do is actually make a purchase through Front Row. That requires running plain old iTunes, which is controlled by sitting close to the computer, moving the mouse and typing on the keyboard.

Unlike a Windows Media Center PC, however, Front Row doesn't dump you in a position where you have to leave the couch and pick up the keyboard. The machine also doesn't have the nasty habit of turning itself back on after it's been put into standby mode.

But even if you don't ever use Front Row or touch the remote, the iMac G5 is an excellent computer. Like previous generations, it's an all-in-one with all the guts of the computer elegantly contained in a white display that's mounted on a silver base.

IMacs now include a video camera built into the top of the screen as well as Apple's recently introduced two-button Mighty Mouse. Both also ship with 512 megabytes of memory, combination recordable CD/DVD drives as well as built-in support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless.

Despite the added hardware, the new iMac is actually slightly lighter and thinner than its predecessors. And the low-end model, which has a 17-inch screen, 1.9 gigahertz PowerPC G5 microprocessor and 160 gigabyte hard drive, is priced at $1,299 -- the same as the last model with the same screen size.

The higher-end flavor has a 20-inch screen, a 2.1 GHz processor, 250 gigabyte hard drive and a $1,699 price tag that's actually $100 less than the previous 20-inch iMac.

Of course, the all-in-one design seriously limits the expandability -- and it means you'll be stuck with its built-in display if you choose to hook it up to an external TV.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/ptech/1....ap/index.html





Upload, Store, Play and Share in a Few Clicks
David Pogue

IN Hollywood, young screenwriters have "elevator pitches" always at the ready - pithy descriptions of their screenplays, intended to capture the imagination of passing movie executives. You know: "It's 'Titanic' on a spaceship." "It's a female 'Harry Potter.' " "It's 'Raising Arizona' meets 'Leaving Las Vegas.' "

Most of the time, high-tech companies can describe their products with equal efficiency, but not always. Take, for example, Glide Effortless, a new Web service that went live yesterday. "What is Glide Effortless?" its news release asks. "It is a compatible browser-based online solution with integrated software and service environments, providing powerful file management, creation, communication, sharing and e-commerce capabilities."

Which leaves only one question: "What is Glide Effortless?"

Here's another stab: it's a personal Web site (www.glidedigital.com) to which you can upload your favorite photos, MP3 files, video clips and even Word, PowerPoint or PDF documents. (A separate companion program speeds the uploading process by letting you drag and drop big batches of files at once.) Once everything's posted on the Web site, you can do two things with it: manage it or share it.

TransMedia, the company behind Glide, has some legitimate gripes about the way you have to perform these tasks on a Mac or PC. For example, you have to learn and use a different program to work with each file format: one to play music files, another to display photos, a third to play videos, and so on. Sending your masterpieces to other people is a drag, too. If you attach your photos or videos to e-mail, you usually wind up overflowing the recipient's in-box and causing headaches for everyone. Posting your files on a Web site or a blog (Web log) is a better solution, but that requires more geeky knowledge than average people care to acquire.

Glide avoids all of these problems. It treats each file type - photos, songs, videos, documents - nearly identically, representing each file as a thumbnail icon in your personal stash. You use a menu to switch from one "environment" (say, photos) to another (like music). At the bottom of each environment is an area where you can create "containers" - that is, playlists (for music and video clips), albums (for photos), address book groups (for e-mail), and so on. You fill up these containers by simply dragging the appropriate thumbnails from the top part of the screen. You can even drag music files into photo or video containers, thereby creating musical soundtracks.

When you want other people to see your stuff, you can send invitations by e-mail. (Glide can import your address book from Outlook or Entourage.) When your recipients click the link in your message, they arrive at a Glide Web page, where they can view or play the files.

THIS system means that you never actually send any files, so you don't clog anyone's in-box. More important, you now have total control over the material. From the moment you upload a file to Glide, it's converted into an online preview. Your visitors can listen to one of your songs or watch one of your videos, but they can't download it, keep it, or even replay it without returning to the Web site.

As a result, you can limit how many times somebody plays or watches something, or specify a window of opportunity (say, Dec. 5 to 20) for people's access. You can even play Big Brother by tracking how many times each person has viewed or played a certain goody.

With just a few clicks, you can also publish one of your containers as either a Web page, complete with embedded pictures and videos, or a blog entry. It's almost automatic, although you have no control whatsoever over the layout of the result.

All of this is fun to use, thanks to a full-blown online operating system that Glide designed itself. After all, thought TransMedia, why make the site look like Windows or Mac OS X, when a custom design could be simpler and better tailored to Glide's functions?

In the Glide OS, each object on the screen - thumbnails, containers and so on - bears a tiny "badge" that resembles a pie chart. When you point to it, a round menu sprouts at your cursor tip. It lists commands pertaining to that object (Delete, Edit or Publish, for example), arrayed like colorful slices of a pizza.

Here's where you first get an inkling that for all of Glide's genius, it's also tainted by some profound problems.

For example, you quickly realize that a circle is not a very good shape for a menu. Because each command's name must be squeezed into a triangular wedge, the number of commands and the lengths of their names are severely restricted. As it is, some of Glide's command names (like "Download") barely fit on their slices.

Then there are those rows of thumbnail images. They make it easy to see what you're dealing with; video thumbnails play a snippet of moving images, and music files bear album-cover art. But once your collection grows beyond one screenful, those horizontal rows of icons present an infuriating challenge. You can't resize them to fit more on a page, and you can't view them as a scrolling list; you can only page through them as you would with results of a Google search. They take their sweet time to appear, too.

Worse, although thumbnails excel at conveying visual information, they fail miserably at conveying text information - like their names. Only a few characters of each file's name fit beneath each Glide thumbnail; on song names, all you get is "12 Rolling Th.." and "10 It's Too L.." The only way to see the full names of your songs is to double-click their icons one at a time, opening successive Info panels.

In spots - notably the e-mail and chat environments - the Glide online operating system gets in its own way, requiring ridiculous multistep procedures for what, in Windows or Mac OS X, would be the work of a few keystrokes. For example, addressing an outgoing e-mail message and attaching a file requires switching back and forth between multiple screens.

Figuring out how to do some simple tasks, like backing out of a photo container to your full collection, are challenges for puzzle lovers only. In rejecting the traditional operating-system elements, TransMedia has thrown out significant bits of baby along with the bathwater.

You can sign up for any of three different Glide Effortless plans. There's a free service with a 100-megabyte storage limit for your files; a $5-a-month plan with 1.5 gigabytes of storage; and a $10 monthly plan with three gigabytes of storage, along with video and audio conferencing. (Discounts are available if you pay for a year up front.) Right now, Glide is for Windows only; according to the company, Mac fans can sign up starting on Dec. 25.

The Glide of today is already a vast collection of tools, integrated into a software ecosystem that's half genius and half nuts. But it's nothing compared with what the company says is on the way: a full-blown Internet music store; an online store that lets you order products by dragging their icons into a shopping-cart "container"; a Unix version; a timeline calendar module; a built-in photo-editing suite; playback of music file formats beyond MP3; and even a corporate version "for the sale, promotion and distribution of media to consumers" that will offer a project-scheduling screen, among other perks.

Furthermore, TransMedia says that soon you'll be able to share one of your songs with friends - and if they like it, they can buy a copy-protected version of their own. The company will profit from the sale, of course, but so will you; you'll get a discount on your next music purchase.

Then there's the cellphone version of Glide, the set-top TV boxes and the customized versions the company hopes to sell to cable, phone and entertainment conglomerates.

All this from a company of only 24 people?

It's a little hard to believe. And sure enough, there are some telltale signs that the company may have bitten off more than it could chew. The company acknowledges, for example, that when the Glide music store opens, it won't offer music from the Big Four record companies - only the smaller independents. There's still no user manual or online help screens. And only 48 hours before the grand opening, big chunks of the service were still being snapped into place.

Still, Glide's core idea is unassailably fresh and useful: a centralized, Web-based scrapbook of so many kinds of files, with the ability to share it without actually giving up control of the files. If TransMedia's plans for world domination fall into place, maybe it won't need an elevator pitch. Maybe "you gotta try this" will be the only pitch it needs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/te.../01pogue1.html





City Is Leader In DVD Piracy
Phyllis Furman

'Revenge of the Sith,' episode three in the Star Wars movies, is a big hit in pirated DVD sales.

Remember the sleazy "Seinfeld" video camera guy who illegally tapes flicks in movie theaters? He's alive and well and thriving in New York.

The city may be known as show biz central, but now it's earned a much less appealing distinction: DVD piracy capital of the world.

Some 50% of those bootlegged discs sold by peddlers on street corners in cities across the globe originate right here, according to figures to be released tomorrow by the Motion Picture Association of America.

Piracy has long been Enemy No. 1 of the movie biz and despite efforts to stop the bootleggers, they're sapping more and more film dollars.

The industry estimates annual losses from piracy of $300 million in the U.S. and $3.5 billion worldwide. Last year, the number of illegal discs seized by the cops nearly doubled to 1.8 million and that number will likely be surpassed this year.

A movie fan can pick up a pirated DVD in Chinatown or in midtown for $8 - a fraction of the $23 cost of a new release at Blockbuster.

"All you have to do is walk down Canal Street to see that New York is the piracy capital of the world," State Assemblyman Joseph Lentol (D-Brooklyn) told the Daily News.

Lentol has sponsored a bill that would make New York's piracy laws much tougher. Tomorrow, he and other state legislators will listen to reps from the movie industry who are coming to town to highlight the bootlegging problem.

For now, New York has some of the most lenient DVD pirating laws in the country. Walking into a dark theater with a camcorder is considered a misdemeanor, no worse than a getting a parking ticket. Lentol's pushing to make illegal camcording a felony, punishable with up to four years of jail time.

New York City has much to lose if movie fans keep buying bogus DVDs. New York's show biz trade generated an estimated $5.4 billion in wages in 2003 from production, post-production, distribution and other entertainment businesses, the MPAA said.

After receiving recent tax breaks, film production is up in New York.

Those who oppose making the laws tougher say they don't want to be prosecuting kids who bring cameras and camcorders into theaters.

But piracy has become big business here in the city where there are labs and distribution centers set up to keep churning out the goods in places like the North Bronx.

As technology has improved, so has the quality of bootlegged flicks. Tens of thousands of illegal copies of films often hit the streets on the same day that they are released on the big screen. A recent anti-piracy raid found bootlegged versions of "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" and "Fantastic Four."

Bootleggers slip easily into theaters with four-inch camcorders. They clamp their cameras on to the seat in front of them and plug into the hearing impaired system to improve the sound. A coat is often draped over their cameras.

But the pirated DVDs are still not perfect and the movie industry is cautioning fans to stay away. "You may hear a cough or see some blank tape. It's not such a bargain," said Bill Shannon, deputy director of U.S. anti-piracy operations for the MPAA. "It's a theft."

Recognizing pirated movie

What to watch for, according to the Motion Picture Association of America:

· Movie is still in theaters.
· Packaging is a plastic envelope rather than shrink-wrapped.
· Cover art has sharp-edged corners rather than rounded.
· Cover has "Coming Soon" at bottom (this indicates a photograph of a theater poster).
· Disk itself has no art on label.
· Burned rather than replicated (back of disk is purple or blue, rather than gold or silver).

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/sto...p-316448c.html





French Government Lobbied to Ban Free Software

Friday November 18th, 2005, French Department of Culture. SNEP and SCPP have told Free Software authors: "You will be required to change your licenses." SACEM add: "You shall stop publishing free software," and warn they are ready "to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code" should the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department"[1] bill proposal pass in the Parliament.

It appears that publishing Free Software giving access to culture is about to become a counterfeiting criminal offence. Will SACEM sue France Télécom R&D research labs for having published Maay and Solipsis (P2P pieces of software used to exchange data)[2]?

Up to this point, the rather technical debate surrounding the issues addressed by DADVSI bill (copyright and neighbouring rights in the information society) makes one ask: Just how much control do the Big Players in the field of culture want to seize? It now looks like years of quibbling have put an end to compromises.

What should have been the last meeting of CSPLA[2] Sirinelli Commission turned into an arranged battle dealing with the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department" bill. EUCD.INFO[4] cofounder Christophe Espern, representing Creative Commons France, had to argue for 13 hours to defend the right of Free Software to exist, but he lost the argument. The preliminary conclusions seem to regret that the bill "cannot be proposed by CSPLA in before the deadline." Maybe the new meeting scheduled today, November 25th, 2005, at 6:30pm, in the offices of the French Department of Culture, aims to impose the text ?[*]

"Havoc is breaking loose," says Christophe Espern. "How can people possibly both pretend to defend culture and then want to ban the only software giving universal access to it? Actually, the contradiction may be only superficial: I think what they are truly after is the control of the public... culture is just a excuse."

Absurd as it may seem, the DADVSI bill will bring an indifferent public a surprise gift [5] for Christmas nothing less than complete Orwellian control of digital culture.

We could avoid this disaster if the cabinet of Prime Minister started by declaring the DADVSI bill a non emergency issue. This would give the democratic debate a chance.
[*] The Sirinelli Commission adopted the bill proposal. This one will be examined during the next plenary session of the CSPLA (December the 7th).
http://www.fsffrance.org/news/article2005-11-25.en.html





China Wants Mobile Phone Users to Register

China will soon require all mobile phone users to register with telecom providers or face a cutoff in service, state media reported Friday.

The new rule, announced by the Ministry of Information Industry, is part of a crackdown on telephone fraud and illegal text- messaging practices, and the country's thriving trade in counterfeit and otherwise illegally obtained mobile phones.

It is also expected to help authorities control "improper political commentary," the news report said.

Many Chinese mobile phone users already are registered with major telecommunications companies such as China Mobile and China Unicom.

But a large share use prepaid phone cards and buy the subscriber identity module, or SIM, device that activates the phone without any form of registration. Up to 200 million of China's 377 million mobile phone subscribers use prepaid cards, the report said.

Implementation of the new requirement is expected to begin by the end of the year, with customers having to comply within six months or lose their phone services, the state-run newspaper China Daily reported.

Subscribers must present their identity cards in order to register, it said.

"It's unfair if we require only new mobile phone users to register and ignore existing customers," the report quoted Chen Yuping, a senior official at the ministry's China Academy of Telecommunication Research, as saying. "More important, the registration mechanism loses its effectiveness."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051202/..._mobile_phones





Artists Ask For Increased Payout From Downloads
Jill Treanor

Composers and songwriters are arguing in the UK copyright tribunal that they should receive 7p to 9p from every track downloaded from the internet, instead of the current 5p. The demand, issued by the Music Alliance, which works on behalf of composers, is being made to counter steps by the record companies' association, the British Phonographic Industry, to cut their earnings to 2p per download. They want the record companies to disclose the amount of money made from downloads, arguing that their pay rise could be recovered from record company profits rather than customers.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/new...656878,00.html





Senate Summons Pentagon to Explain Effort to Plant News Stories in Iraqi Media
Eric Schmitt and David S. Cloud

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee summoned top Pentagon officials to a closed-door session on Capitol Hill on Friday to explain a reported secret military campaign in Iraq to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media. The White House also expressed deep concerns about the program.

Senior Pentagon officials said on Thursday that they had not yet received any explanation of the program from top generals in Iraq, including Gen. John P. Abizaid, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. and Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, the three most senior commanders for Iraqi operations.

After reports about the program circulated this week, General Casey initially protested that it should not be discussed publicly because it was classified.

One senior Pentagon official said, however, that General Casey was told that response was inadequate. The official asked for anonymity to avoid possible reprisals for disclosing the general's reaction.

At a briefing with reporters, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, responded to a barrage of questions about the program, which military contractors and officials said also pays friendly Iraqi journalists with monthly stipends.

"We're very concerned about the reports," the White House spokesman said. "We have asked the Department of Defense for more information."

Under the program, the Lincoln Group, a Washington-based public relations firm working in Iraq, was hired to translate articles written by American troops into Arabic and then, in many cases, give them to advertising agencies for placement in the Iraqi news media.

At a time when the State Department is paying contractors millions of dollars to promote professional and independent media, the military campaign appeared to defy the basic tenets of Western journalism.

Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, said he had directed Pentagon aides to describe and justify the program on Friday in a closed briefing for senators and staff aides.

"I am concerned about any actions that may undermine the credibility of the United States as we help the Iraqi people stand up as a democracy," Mr. Warner said in a statement.

"A free and independent press is critical to the functioning of a democracy, and I am concerned about any actions which may erode the independence of the Iraqi media," the committee chairman's statement said.

Asked about the issue on Thursday, the top military spokesman in Baghdad appeared to defend the practice without referring specifically to the Lincoln Group's activities.

The spokesman, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, said that Iraq's most-wanted militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was also using the news media to advance his terrorist goals.

But General Lynch said the similarities ended there because the American military was disseminating truthful information.

"He is conducting these kidnappings, these beheadings, these explosions, so that he gets international coverage to look like he has more capability than he truly has," General Lynch said. "He is lying to the Iraqi people."

General Lynch continued: "We don't lie. We don't need to lie. We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact, not based on fiction."

Another military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, later confirmed in an e-mail message that the Lincoln Group's effort was aimed at promoting the allied efforts in Iraq. "We acknowledge that a program exists to get factual information into the Iraqi media," Colonel Johnson said. "Leadership is reviewing this program and how it is being executed, but there has been no decision yet on how to proceed."

One Pentagon official said it was possible that the program began as an effort to buy space in Iraqi publications for articles identified as coming from the United States government and then evolved into something where the government and contractor roles were hidden.

"If the whole intent of this is really an effort to provide false information to the people of Iraq, then that's more of a problem," said the official, who added that officials could decide to refer to the matter to Defense Department inspector general.

The Lincoln Group, which includes some businessmen and former military officials, was hired last year after military officials concluded that the United States was failing to win over Muslim public opinion.

In Iraq, the effort is seen by some senior commanders as an essential complement to combat operations in the field.

Lincoln's media work for the Pentagon in Iraq included a multimillion dollar campaign to influence Sunni Arab voters in Anbar Province before the national referendum on the new Iraqi Constitution in October, according to military contractors and officials.

The campaign, the officials said, included television and radio spots that did not disclose their American sponsorship and the disbursement of more than $1 million in cash.

"It wouldn't be obvious it came from Americans," said one official, referring to the media messages.

Laurie Adler, a spokeswoman for Lincoln, confirmed the company worked for the military in western Iraq but refused to provide any details.

The company's most senior executive in Iraq is Paige Craig. His résumé, contained in Pentagon documents spelling out some of Lincoln's work, highlights his role in "designing and leading the development of numerous government and corporate intelligence projects."

It goes on to say "Paige Craig graduated first in class from the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center in 1996."

The descriptions of the Lincoln Group's activities, first reported by The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, have spurred debate in Washington about how the United States should promote free and independent news media in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

"The State Department is working with journalists in Iraq to help them develop the skills that you all have in terms of reporting and journalistic ethics and practices," the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, told reporters on Thursday.

"That's important," the department spokesman said. "This is a country where free media didn't exist for decades, so they are learning. We think it's important to assist them in that."

But if the nascent Iraqi news media are perceived by ordinary Iraqis to be a tool of American interests, that effort will be ruined, some lawmakers said.

"How are people going to get information that's reliable?" said Senator Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican who heads the Foreign Relations Committee. "Who can they trust? If you are a devout Shiite or Sunni, and you suspect that the press has been bought, why, then you wouldn't respect the press."

Jeff Gerth contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/po...ropaganda.html





Ten hut! Deadly P2P!

Computer Misuse Anything But Harmless Fun
Ed Beemer

The next song you download may put your unit, your clearance, your job, or even your life at risk.

Whether you are doing it from a newsgroup, illegal site or a legitimate music provider, it potentially unlocks the door for intruders. The same is true for other related activity. Unauthorized use of a government computer, or the installation of unapproved or illegal software, invites system compromises.

Downloading music or videos, chatting, playing online games, or engaging in similar activities on a government computer is not only illegal use of government resources, but more importantly, it puts information and people at risk.

What might seem like an innocent way to kill free time could allow spyware, aggressive, malicious software or intruders directly into the system. This activity often requires downloading unauthorized software onto an Army computer, a clear violation of AR25-2. Installation of unauthorized Peer to Peer, or P2P, applications is strictly forbidden and network monitoring is being conducted to identify illegal activities associated with users performing such activity.

This problem is widespread, even in the civilian world. Five major Internet companies have formed a coalition to put a stop to sites and advertisers that knowingly download spyware, adware, trackware and other malicious software.

Federal and state laws are being enacted to address such activity as well. While annoying marketing companies generate most of this software development, some applications are capable of recording every keystroke and sending that information to unknown and often untraceable, entities.

Industry sources estimate that approximately 91 percent of civilian computer users have made some modification to their systems to avoid this type of software. They do it to avoid ads; military personnel need to do it to protect information and our forces.

Misuse of government equipment is a punishable offense. But that is not the only crime. More importantly, the use of such subversive technologies exposes your computer, your network, your unit and yourself to cyber attacks, intrusions, and data exfiltration that could end up costing lives.

If after you have downloaded the latest tune or selected your team for fantasy football, the way you log onto your computer, the next briefing you prepare, your sensitive personal information, or your unit’s capabilities could be sent directly to a terrorist, hacker or insurgent group. This information is sent without any indications or warnings, and once sent can never be recovered.

In addition, 9.9 million individuals were affected by identity theft last year. That official document saved on your system may contain personal information such as your social security number that can be unknowingly shared as a result of the illegal software installation.

Personal information is usually sold or traded in underground communities, and accounts or credit cards are rapidly established under your identity. Outcome: it will cost you thousands of dollars and potentially years to correct. And if any download activity violates federal copyright laws it carries a secondary penalty.

The Army is taking this very seriously because of the potential harm to our forces. Every soldier must realize it is their duty to protect their fellow Soldiers and not engage in unauthorized online activities.

If you’re involved in such activity, it’s time to stop and think of the consequences.

Is an online game or a few new songs worth the risk? (Or playing a Sony CD? – Jack.)
http://www.emilitary.org/article.php?aid=5255





Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar
Katharine Q. Seelye

ACCORDING to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler's biography, true?

The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby."

"Nothing was ever proven," the biography added.

Mr. Seigenthaler discovered that the false information had been on the site for several months and that an unknown number of people had read it, and possibly posted it on or linked it to other sites.

If any assassination was going on, Mr. Seigenthaler (who is 78 and did edit The Tennessean) wrote last week in an op-ed article in USA Today, it was of his character.

The case triggered extensive debate on the Internet over the value and reliability of Wikipedia, and more broadly, over the nature of online information.

Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries.

Mistakes are expected to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users.

The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.

It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.

Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?

And beyond reliability, there is the question of accountability. Mr. Seigenthaler, after discovering that he had been defamed, found that his "biographer" was anonymous. He learned that the writer was a customer of BellSouth Internet, but that federal privacy laws shield the identity of Internet customers, even if they disseminate defamatory material. And the laws protect online corporations from libel suits.

He could have filed a lawsuit against BellSouth, he wrote, but only a subpoena would compel BellSouth to reveal the name.

In the end, Mr. Seigenthaler decided against going to court, instead alerting the public, through his article, "that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool."

Mr. Wales said in an interview that he was troubled by the Seigenthaler episode, and noted that Wikipedia was essentially in the same boat. "We have constant problems where we have people who are trying to repeatedly abuse our sites," he said.

Still, he said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site's strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems.

In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.

The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.

All of this struck close to home for librarians and researchers. On an electronic mailing list for them, J. Stephen Bolhafner, a news researcher at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote, "The best defense of the Wikipedia, frankly, is to point out how much bad information is available from supposedly reliable sources."

Jessica Baumgart, a news researcher at Harvard University, wrote that there were librarians voluntarily working behind the scenes to check information on Wikipedia. "But, honestly," she added, "in some ways, we're just as fallible as everyone else in some areas because our own knowledge is limited and we can't possibly fact-check everything."

In an interview, she said that her rule of thumb was to double-check everything and to consider Wikipedia as only one source.

"Instead of figuring out how to 'fix' Wikipedia - something that cannot be done to our satisfaction," wrote Derek Willis, a research database manager at The Washington Post, who was speaking for himself and not The Post, "we should focus our energies on educating the Wikipedia users among our colleagues."

Some cyberexperts said Wikipedia already had a good system of checks and balances. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford and an expert in the laws of cyberspace, said that contrary to popular belief, true defamation was easily pursued through the courts because almost everything on the Internet was traceable and subpoenas were not that hard to obtain. (For real anonymity, he advised, use a pay phone.)

"People will be defamed," he said. "But that's the way free speech is. Think about the gossip world. It spreads. There's no way to correct it, period. Wikipedia is not immune from that kind of maliciousness, but it is, relative to other features of life, more easily corrected."

Indeed, Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 and a longtime Internet analyst, said Wikipedia may, in that sense, be better than real life.

"The Internet has done a lot more for truth by making things easier to discuss," she said. "Transparency and sunlight are better than a single point of view that can't be questioned."

For Mr. Seigenthaler, whose biography on Wikipedia has since been corrected, the lesson is simple: "We live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research, but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/we.../04seelye.html





The DMCA Should Not Protect Spyware
Ed Felten

Yesterday was the deadline to submit requests for limited exemptions from the DMCA’s ban on circumvention of access control technologies. This happens every three years. Alex Halderman and I submitted a request, asking for an exemption that would allow the circumvention of compact disk copy protection technologies that have certain spyware-ish features or create security holes. We’d like to thank Aaron Perzanowski and Deirdre Mulligan of the Samuelson Clinic at UC Berkeley, whose great work made this possible.

Many people decided not to submit exemption requests in this round, because of the way previous rounds have been handled. For example, the EFF argues that the process is so strongly tilted against exemptions, and the Copyright Office tries so hard to find excuses not to grant exemptions, that there is no point in asking for one. Even Seth Finkelstein, the only person who has had any real record of success in the process, decided to sit out this round. I submitted requests for research-related exemptions in 2000 and 2003; and having seen how those requests were handled, I sympathize with the skeptics’ position.

Nevertheless, I think it’s worth asking for this exemption, if only to see whether the Copyright Office will acknowledge that copy protection technologies that install spyware or otherwise endanger the security or privacy of citizens are harmful. Is that too much to ask?

To most readers here, the most interesting paragraph of our exemption request is this one:

Researchers like Professor Edward Felten and Alex Halderman waste valuable research time consulting attorneys due to concerns about liability under the DMCA. They must consult not only with their own attorneys but with the general counsel of their academic institutions as well. Unavoidably, the legal uncertainty surrounding their research leads to delays and lost opportunities. In the case of the CDs at issue, Halderman and Felten were aware of problems with the XCP software almost a month before the news became public, but they delayed publication in order to consult with counsel about legal concerns. This delay left millions of consumers at risk for weeks longer than necessary.

The DMCA exemption process continues, with reply comments due February 2.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=938





amicima Releases amiciPhone P2P Communicator

New product demonstrates the power of amicima's Open-Source Protocol Suite with peer-to-peer Voice-over IP, text messaging, file transfer and user presence.
Press Release

How do users show off the power of an open-source peer-to-peer secure media protocol? amicima answers that question today with its new amiciPhone, a P2P communications application that provides users with two lines of secure Voice-over IP calling, text messaging, file transfer and real-time user presence.

MFP, amicima's Secure Media Flow Protocol, is used by amiciPhone for prioritized, congestion-managed delivery of voice, text, and files over the Internet. MFP encrypts all communications end-to-end using the Advanced Encryption Standard, and uses RSA for authentication and AES key negotiation. MFPNet, amicima's peer-to- peer layer for MFP, handles peer discovery, firewall and NAT traversal, and provides a public-key infrastructure.

"Writing an application like amiciPhone is easy, given the power of the MFP and MFPNet libraries," said Michael Thornburgh, amicima co-founder and one of the amiciPhone developers. "The application developer doesn't need to worry about locating peers, multiplexing real-time voice with lower-priority bulk file transfers, or traversing NAT and firewall devices. MFP and MFPNet handle all those details for you, letting you concentrate on application logic and user interface."

The amiciPhone application may not be the first with these features, but it is the first that is built upon a set of powerful open- source network protocols -- a protocol stack that third parties already are incorporating into other applications they have developed.

"We hope that seeing our technology in action will inspire even more third-party developers to build upon our work and introduce network applications we haven't even thought of," said Matthew Kaufman, the other co-founder of amicima.

Developers and end-users are encouraged to download amiciPhone and use it to exercise the unique capabilities of MFP and MFPNet by quickly transferring files while simultaneously talking over a VoIP call, changing IP addresses of endpoints while calls are in progress, and observing its performance on the real Internet, the best and only place to fully test how Internet protocols perform.

Availability

The amiciPhone application for Windows XP is available for download now at the amicima Web site (www.amicima.com). Also available now are the GPL-licensed MFP and MFPNet libraries, which may be downloaded and used immediately by developers of open-source applications. A commercial license option is available for developers of proprietary applications.

amicima, Inc. is a privately held corporation, founded in 2004 to develop improved Internet protocols for client-server and peer- to-peer networking and to develop new applications and services based on these protocols.

The amicima protocol suite is a secure multi-layer solution for point-to-point and group communication with features specifically suited to peer-to-peer networking.

This layered approach to solving the problem of scalable interactive communication on a global scale is both unique and powerful, and supports the rapid development and deployment of future client-server and peer-to-peer applications by amicima and third- party application developers. The entire protocol suite is implemented in C and runs without modification on Unix, Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2.../emw317672.htm





Talk To Anyone For Free, Any Time, Anywhere - ¿Hablas PeerMe?
Press Release

PeerMe Inc. (www.PeerMe.com), a peer-to-peer voice communication technology company, today announced the launch of its first beta product that provides free, unlimited voice communications over the Internet to Spanish speaking internet users world-wide. Targeting users in Mexico, The United States, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and Latin America, the Spanish version joins the previously available English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese versions.

PeerMe has developed a messaging environment supporting PC-to-PC and PC-to-handheld voice communications and instant messaging over public Internet connections. PeerMe's technology can be used independently by connecting on a peer-to-peer basis or integrated into Web communities, thus bringing a new generation of interactive connectivity to users. Using industry standard protocols, PeerMe's peer-to-peer voice system provides sound quality almost equal to Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), free and unlimited to any Internet connected PC user worldwide.

Announcing the availability of the Spanish version, Tom Lasater, founder and CEO of PeerMe said “With the availability of the Spanish version of PeerMe, we can now supply three out of four of all world-wide internet users with free PC to PC calling and instant messaging services.” “Similar to the impact of mobile telephones, PeerMe allows computer users to communicate with their network of friends, family and colleagues anywhere, anytime – free.” “PeerMe is committed to enabling online communities and helping to bring people around the world together through the use of our easy-to-use technology. What sets PeerMe apart is our technology, which is aimed at voice enabling the Internet.”
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/12/prweb318850.htm





AT&T

Cingular Rolls Out 3G Service

Dallas is one of 16 areas to get higher-speed wireless network
Terry Maxon

Cingular Wireless LLC formally rolled out its higher-speed wireless network for computers and cellphones Tuesday, with Dallas among the first 16 metro areas to get the service.

Cingular's so-called third-generation network is designed to handle data at much higher speeds and voice calls more efficiently.

The new system is a step up from Cingular's EDGE service, which transmits data at only 70 to 135 kbps, with bursts to 200 kbps.

Cingular BroadbandConnect will let customers download information at 400 to 700 kilobits a second, comparable to Verizon Wireless' high-speed EV-DO network.

However, Cingular says its technology will support bursts of data transmission of up to 3.6 megabits per second, compared with EV-DO's 2.4 mbps burst speeds.

"Make no mistake about it: Wireless users want the speed and services they've come to expect from their wired connections," Cingular president and chief executive Stan Sigman said at an investment conference. "And today Cingular is delivering on its promises to provide both the speed and reliability customers need."

The initial products to use the service are two third-party wireless cards that will go into laptop computers. Users will be able to get on the Internet anywhere that Cingular's third-generation network reaches.

If the higher-speed network isn't available, the card lets users get on WiFi networks or use Cingular's EDGE network.

Unlimited access is $59.99 a month, with lower rates for users who want more limited access starting at $19.99 for downloads of 5 megabits a month.

Although Cingular began selling the wireless cards with the service, it won't introduce any cellphones with it until early 2006.

Those phones are expected to take advantage of the higher speeds to make music, video and entertainment applications more attractive to users.

The network also launched in Austin, Houston, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Seattle, Tacoma, Wash., and Washington, D.C. It will expand.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont....1347efc3.html





The New Shape Of Broadband
Jack Kapica

Rumours have been buzzing among people who connect to the Internet via cable. Service providers, they claim, are once again mucking about with bandwidth, perhaps going as far as blocking file-sharing services in the process.

It turns out this is partly true.

Rogers Cable, like other cable companies, has in fact been implementing something it calls "traffic shaping," a technology that gives priority to certain on-line activities (such as e-mail, browsing, voice communication) and putting the brakes on other less time-sensitive stuff, such as swapping music files.

In fact, the complaints I received have come from people who noticed the difference when they use peer-to-peer technology specifically to swap music files — and lest we forget, that activity is still legal in Canada, unless and until whichever government we elect next month passes a law banning the activity.

One user, Scott Taylor, a Rogers subscriber in St. Thomas, Ont., has been so upset by the poor performance of software called Limewire, used mostly to swap music files, that he confesses he has made a pest of himself on the issue — so much so that Rogers' legal department felt it had to address him on the subject of his attitude.

His case is interesting because he was not getting the correct information from Rogers, with tech-support people twice denying they use any kind of technology against file-swappers before finally admitting that it's been in place since Dec. 2.

And even that was incorrect. According to a Rogers spokeswoman, the practice has actually been deployed over the past year, which doesn't say much for Rogers' internal communications system. Moreover, it applies only to uploads, which doesn't help out those people who are downloading from other Rogers subscribers, who are therefore uploading.

Moreover, all Mr. Taylor was told is that Rogers is "monitoring bandwidth usage" on peer-to-peer clients, not that it was "shaping traffic."

Not surprisingly, bad information makes for unhappy subscribers.

A more specific case involves Allen Murray, of Cambridge, Ont., who was having the same kind of problem, but it was associated with downloading music and podcasts from Apple's iTunes, a legal service for which Mr. Murray is paying.

Beginning on Nov. 7, he wrote to me, he could no longer connect to the store via broadband. His dial-up connection worked fine with iTunes. He reported that five people he knows in Cambridge are also having similar problems with broadband.

Countless calls to Rogers' technical support, he said, always resulted in "It's not a Rogers problem."

Mr. Murray took the conspiracy position, that Rogers had blocked iTunes because it was pushing its own on-line music service, provided by its content partner Yahoo.

Similar complaints have been aired on various bulletin boards, among them Boing Boing, where one poster got it right ("From what I understand, they are not so much filtering/stopping/blocking downloads as much as capping the bandwidth available to certain protocols"), but failed to stop the rumour mill.

And over at the Apple forums, a reader reported that when trying to reach iTunes, she received a message that says, "iTunes could not connect to the music store. The network connection was reset. Make sure your network connection is active and try again."

Her response was to blame Apple, a reaction that is covered by my Law of Erroneous Error Messages, which states that all error messages are themselves erroneous, and that's why so many computer users have been driven nuts by technology.

Rogers has not been keeping its traffic shaping technology a secret, but has not been very up-front about it either, partly because it's been rolled out in fits and starts. And even then it's been a technology in evolution, and applied haphazardly.

The one thing both Rogers (and all the other cable companies using such technology) should be careful about is how it handles press relations. Any effort to slow down multimedia now will clash with what's coming down the pike for the Internet. We expect a massive increase in demand for bandwidth because Americans are adopting high-speed access in increasing numbers, and multimedia content (movies and music downloads) is increasing exponentially.

Moreover, very large companies — Microsoft and Apple among them — are considering moving to peer-to-peer technology to disseminate operating system security patches and podcasts. Redhat/Fedora, Ubuntu Linux and some television shows are moving to the technology too, and independent musicians who actually want to give away their music are turning to a similar technology, BitTorrent, to spread their gospel.

However traffic shaping shakes out, it's only a temporary measure. When traffic eventually explodes, cable companies will need to either shape it drastically, which will not be good for business, or shape its marketing strategies to accommodate it.

Either way, it will be a major change.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ory/Technology





The Dead's Gamble: Free Music for Sale
Jon Pareles

The Dead did a quick turnabout - call it a half-step uptown toodleloo - this week. First, band representatives told the Live Music Archive, at www.archive.org, which includes countless jam-band concerts in its repository of freely downloadable music, to stop making available its trove of live Grateful Dead recordings, which have been free online for years. Grateful Dead Merchandising (www.gdstore.com) now sells downloads of the band's own concert recordings, and didn't want free competition.

Fans were so furious that within days, the band was forced to relent partway. Now recordings made by audience members are back on the archive, available for download. The Dead's pristine soundboard recordings, with minimal crowd noise, are no longer available for quick downloading, but can be played as streams (and recorded in real time). It's not a complete reversal, but all the music is online again. Now, however, the Dead are going to find out how difficult half measures can be.

The Dead's easygoing attitude toward concert recordings had been a bulwark of its legend. At concerts, there was always an authorized "tapers' section" - a mini-forest of high-quality microphones on long poles - and the band never tried to stop fans from trading the recordings, as long as they weren't sold. The traders' network upgraded through the years from cassettes by mail to digital downloads.

Doubtless there were some cottage-industry sellers of Dead concerts. But on the whole, fans respected a simple ethic: Enjoy, don't profiteer. With no restrictions imposed, fans took it upon themselves to do the right thing. The more committed ones went beyond passive listening to active, time-consuming archiving, editing and processing of the music they cherished: making, for instance, so-called matrix recordings that synched the clean soundboard signal with a touch of audience recording for a more realistic ambience. And it all existed, like so much of the Dead's example and legacy, outside the structures of the recording business.

As in so many other ways, the Grateful Dead set an example for jam bands (and other do-it-yourself types), who found that concert recordings were a great way to build word of mouth. Sites like archive.org sprang up; there's also a Napster-like peer-to-peer interface, the Furthur Network (www.furthur.net, named after the destination sign on the Merry Pranksters' bus, which the Dead once rode). It swaps recordings from an approved list of performers, including the Dead, the Dave Matthews Band and Sigur Ros.

For the Grateful Dead, and the many bands that emulated them, there was logic to the whole libertarian enterprise, as well as to the old hippie spirit. Each improvisational concert was different, and thus worth collecting. The best ones would convince new fans that they had to see the next concert, and the next. The band not only was handsomely paid in the first place for shows that routinely sold out arenas, but also kept its own recordings should it ever want to issue them. (It has done so, in 36 volumes of multiple-CD collections called "Dick's Picks.")

There was also something far less tangible and pragmatic, but no less essential: a generous suggestion that once the music was in the air, it belonged as much to listeners as to the band. The concert recordings were like memories, to be shared and savored, rather than products. On his Web site (www.phillesh.net), the Dead's bassist, Phil Lesh, writes about using archive.org to hear old concerts while writing his autobiography. Even if a Deadhead was not downloading dozens of concerts, the boundless opportunity to do so meant something. There was a bond of trust between the band and its fans - one that is now strained.

The Dead are thus the latest victims of the notion that digital copying is qualitatively different from every recording technology since the invention of music notation. Yes, digital copying is fast; it's exact; it's easy. For a recording business that has realized far too late that it is selling music, not discs, digital copying has destroyed the old monopoly on pressing and distribution.

Digital downloads can also provide numbers for accountants to tabulate and for statistics-mongers to misinterpret. (Just because 10,000 people download a concert doesn't mean 10,000 people would pay for it.) Oddly enough, the numbers also seem to encourage visions of wringing every statutory nickel out of every recording ever made. In conformity to copyright law that was designed for sheet music and discs rather than the Web, visions persist of the Internet not as a cornucopia, but as a pay-per-play jukebox. The Deadheads' old trading network had looked back to an earlier model: music as folklore.

Suddenly, after all these amicable and profitable years, Dead representatives are talking about "rights" to those concert recordings. It's lawyer talk, record-business talk, and entirely valid on those terms; the Dead do hold copyrights and are entitled to authorize or withhold permission to copy their work. (So, incidentally, are those who own the copyrights to Dead concert staples like Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away." )

Enforcing that permission on the Internet is another matter. Digital-rights management by technical means is iffy at best: widely circumvented by professional pirates and problematic for consumers trying, for instance, to transfer songs from their CD's to an iPod. Sony BMG Music, trying to limit copying of CD's, included software that created security hazards in its paying customers' computers and is now recalling some four million CD's and facing lawsuits. The next Windows operating system may place anticopying mechanisms beyond users' control.

The Dead's problem is more temporal than technical. Grateful Dead recordings, including soundboard recordings, have been circulating since the inception of the Internet and are not going to disappear by fiat.

The Dead had created an anarchy of trust, going not by statute but by instinct and turning fans into co-conspirators, spreading their music and buying tickets, T-shirts and official CD's to show their loyalty. The new approach, giving fans some but not all of what they had until last week, changes that relationship.

No doubt it will sell some additional concert downloads in the short run. But by imposing restrictions, it will also encourage jam-band fans - a particularly Internet-savvy demographic - to circumvent those restrictions, finding the soundboard recordings through unofficial channels. The change also downgrades fans into the customers they were all along. It removes what could crassly be called brand value from the Dead's legacy by reducing them to one more band with products to sell.

Will the logic of copyright law be more profitable, in the end, than the logic of sharing? That's the Dead's latest improvisational experiment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/03/ar...ic/03pare.html





Judge: Game Over For Illinois Ban

Court rules state's reasoning for video game ban insufficient
AP

A federal judge ruled Friday that Illinois' restrictions on the sale of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors are unconstitutional and barred the state from enforcing the law.

State officials "have come nowhere near" demonstrating that the law passes constitutional muster, said U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kennelly.

Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich and other supporters of the measure argued that children were being harmed by exposure to games in which characters go on killing sprees or sexual escapades.

Opponents declared the law a restriction on free speech and pointed out that similar laws had been struck down in other states.

"It's unfortunate that the state of Illinois spent taxpayer money defending this statute. This is precisely what we told them would happen," said David Vite, president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, one of the groups that sued over the law.

The governor's office did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Other states recently approved similar legislation after hidden sex scenes were discovered in a popular game, "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." California's version, set to go into effect January 1, is among those being challenged in court.

The Illinois law, which also was to go into effect January 1, would have barred stores from selling or renting extremely violent or sexual games to minors, and allowed $1,000 fines for violators.

Kennelly said the law would interfere with the First Amendment and there wasn't a compelling enough reason, such as preventing imminent violence, to allow that.

"In this country, the state lacks the authority to ban protected speech on the ground that it affects the listener's or observer's thoughts and attitudes," the judge wrote.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/fun.gam....ap/index.html

[JackSpratts]

PC World

The 100 Best Products of 2005

1. Mozilla Firefox Web Browser
2. Google Gmail Web Mail
3. Apple Mac OS X Version 10.4 (Tiger) Operating System
4. Belkin Wireless Pre-N Router and Notebook Network Card Wireless Networking
5. Dell Ultrasharp 2405FPW 24-Inch Wide-Screen LCD
6. Alienware Aurora 5500 Performance PC
7. Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Drive Portable Hard Drive
8. Skype VoIP Service
9. Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT Digital SLR Camera
10. PalmOne Treo 650 PDA Phone
11. Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Antivirus Antivirus and Firewall Software
12. Mysoft Technology Maxthon Browser Plug-In
13. Rio Carbon Midcapacity MP3 Player
14. Webroot Window Washer 5.5 Utility
15. Maxtor H01R300 Shared Storage Drive Network Hard Drive
16. Google Search Engine
17. Netgear 54 Mbps Cable/DSL Wireless Travel Router Model WGR101 Travel Router
18. OnlyMyEmail Pro Spam Filter
19. Sony PlayStation Portable Handheld Gaming Device
20. NVidia GeForce 6600 GT Graphics Board
21. APC Back-UPS RS 800VA 120V Uninterruptible Power Supply
22. 2BrightSparks SyncBackSE Utility
23. Moon Software Password Agent Password Manager
24. HP Officejet 7210 All-in-One Multifunction Printer
25. Winternals Software ERD Commander Data Recovery Software
26. Ubuntu Linux 5.04 Linux Distribution
27. Epson PictureMate Photo Printer
28. Mozilla Thunderbird E-Mail Program
29. Cloudmark Anti-Fraud Toolbar Browser Security Plug-In
30. Vonage VoIP Service
31. Cloudmark SafetyBar Spam Filter
32. Adobe Photoshop CS2 Image Editor
33. The New York Times on the Web Web Site
34. Apple ITunes Media Player
35. Seagate USB/FireWire Hard Drive External Hard Drive
36. Canon CanoScan 9950F Scanner
37. IRiver IFP-895 Flash-Based MP3 Player
38. Valve Half-Life 2 PC Game
39. Samsung HL-P5063W Rear-Projection TV
40. Tor Privacy Software
41. LG Flatron L1981Q 19-Inch LCD
42. Dell 3000cn Color Laser Printer
43. BlackBerry 7100t PDA Phone
44. Verbatim Store 'n' Go Pro USB Memory Key
45. Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 SATA NCQ Internal Hard Drive
46. Compaq Presario V2000 All-Purpose Notebook
47. Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 Media Player
48. Canon Pixma IP4000R Inkjet/Photo Printer
49. Best Software Simply Accounting Accounting and Personal Finance
50. Orb Media Streaming Service
51. Flickr.com Photography Site
52. Dell Inspiron 6000 Desktop Replacement Notebook
53. DirecTV HD DVR HR10-250 HD Receiver and DVR
54. ACD Systems ACDSee 7 Photo Organizer
55. Dell UltraSharp 1704FPV 17-Inch LCD
56. Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom Digital Camera
57. Qnext Instant Messenger
58. IBM ThinkCentre A51p All-Purpose PC
59. SightSpeed Video Instant Messenger
60. Wikipedia Online Resource
61. Cerulean Studios Trillian 3.1 Instant Messenger
62. CMS 80GB USB 2.0 ABSplus Notebook Backup System Portable Hard Drive
63. Nikon Coolpix 7900 Digital Camera
64. Contour Design RollerMouse Pro Mouse
65. Adobe InDesign CS2 Desktop Publisher
66. Shuttle Computer XPC i8600b Small PC
67. IBM ThinkPad X41 Ultraportable Notebook
68. Adobe Premiere Elements Video Editor
69. Dell Axim X30 PDA
70. A9.com Search Engine
71. Toshiba RS-TX20 Digital Media Server DVD Recorder
72. Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.5 Burning Software
73. Plextor PX-716UF Rewritable DVD Drive
74. Casio Exilim EX-Z750 Digital Camera
75. Apple Mac Mini Small PC
76. Google Desktop Search Desktop Search Tool
77. Mitsubishi LT-3050 30-Inch LCD TV
78. Apple IPod Photo Large-Capacity MP3 Player
79. Dell 3300MP Projector
80. FileMaker Pro 7 Database
81. Sunbelt Software CounterSpy Anti-Spyware Software
82. Six Apart TypePad Blogging Tool
83. Acronis True Image 8 Backup Software
84. Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
85. Brother HL-5140 Monochrome Laser Printer
86. Apple ITunes Music Store Music Downloads
87. Internet Archive (Archive.org) Web Site
88. Opera 8 Web Browser
89. Copernic Desktop Search Desktop Search Software
90. Motorola Razr V3 Cell Phone
91. Delphi MyFi Satellite Radio
92. PDAapps VeriChat Standard Edition Mobile Instant Messaging
93. Sonos Digital Music System Streaming Media Device
94. EMC Dantz Retrospect Professional 7 Backup Software
95. Garmin StreetPilot C330 GPS Navigation Device
96. Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 2.0 Portable Speakers
97. Logitech Z-5500 Digital PC Speaker System
98. Antec P160 Desktop Case
99. Corel Painter IX Paint Program
100. 100. Citrix Online GoToMyPC Personal Remote Access


http://cache.directorym.com/creative...ource=AB_TAX_B





All links in original article

A Compilation Search Technology Book Reviews
Chris Sherman

Want to hack together your own search engine? Curious to dig deeper into data mining? Here's a compilation of various search-related book reviews published in SearchDay over the past several years.

This is the third installment of a list of all search-related book reviews published in SearchDay. This particular list covers books about search marketing. The first installment covered reviews of books about general web search tactics and techniques, and the second covered reviews of search marketing and search engine optimization.

Miscellaneous Search-Related Books

Use the alphabetically arranged links below to go directly to a review. Scroll down the page for a reverse-chronological listings and a brief description of each book review.

Firefox Hacks, Nigel McFarlane
Lucene in Action, Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher
Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data, Soumen Chakrabarti
Peer-To-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, Andy Oram
Spidering Hacks, Kevin Hemenway and Tara Calishain

Reverse Chronological Listings

Hack Your Own Search Engine Crawler
SearchDay, February 4, 2004
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3307271

Want to build your own customized search tool that can search the web, explore online databases, and mine virtually any other type of internet resource?

Spidering Hacks, by Kevin Hemenway and Tara Calishain, offers "100 Industrial Strength Tips and Tools" for creating and running your own spiders. Among these tips and tools, of course, are instructions for creating your own personal web crawler that works much like those used by the major search engines.

How to Build Your Own Search Engine
SearchDay, July 9, 2003
http://searchenginewatch.com/serepor...le.php/2220611

Want a detailed glimpse into the black boxes we call search engines?

Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data is one of the first books that actually describes, in detail, the parts of contemporary search engines and how they function. The author, Soumen Chakrabarti, is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and the book reveals a rare glimpse at the inner workings of our favorite search tools.

Hacking Your Own Search Engine
SearchDay, March 15, 2005
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3489941

Got the itch to go head-to-head with Google, Yahoo and all of the other big search players on the web? A new book provides a detailed blueprint for using and customizing Lucene, open-source search engine software that's freely available online.

Lucene in Action by Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher is a thorough introduction to the inner workings of what's arguably the most popular open source search engine.

Peering at Peer-to-Peer
SearchDay, August 9, 2001
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/2157501

"Just as the early 20th-century advocates of psychoanalysis saw sex everywhere, industry analysts and marketing managers are starting to call everything they like in computers and telecommunications 'peer-to-peer,' writes Andy Oram in the preface to Peer-To-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies published by O'Reilly & Associates.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies may not have the same appeal as sex, but they have seemingly become all the rage in the early years of the 21st century. Though now crippled, Napster is the poster child for P2P, and its "dark twin" Gnutella has also received a lot of press. The Seti@Home project is another highly visible P2P effort. In this book, editor Oram has assembled a collection of articles penned by P2P experts.

Supercharging Firefox
SearchDay, May 18, 2005
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3505756

The Firefox browser comes pre-configured with lots of great search tools, but it's also highly customizable, allowing you to push your online experience to new and fun extremes. I've written that Mozilla Firefox is the searcher's browser. Not only does it come preconfigured to easily search Google, Amazon and other important sites, it's easily extensible. You can snap-in plugins for literally hundreds of specialized search engines with just a few clicks, and just as easily remove them if you don't like what they do.

Adding new search tools to Firefox is just the tip of the iceberg of things you can do to extend and enhance the browser. A new book from O'Reilly, Firefox Hacks, shows you how to supercharge your browsing experience.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3569146





NBC to Sell TV Shows for Viewing on Apple Software
Saul Hansell

NBC Universal said yesterday that it would start to sell downloadable versions of 11 of its current and older television shows through the iTunes Music Store of Apple Computer.

NBC is the second major television network to distribute programming through Apple. In October, Apple started to sell episodes from five current programs on the ABC network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company. Those programs can be watched both on Apple's latest generation of iPod portable players and on Apple and Windows-based personal computers running Apple's iTunes software.

NBC will sell episodes of some current shows, including "Law & Order," "The Office" and "Surface." The arrangement also includes some cable programs, including "Monk" from USA Network and "Battlestar Galactica" from the Sci Fi Channel. And there will be some older shows like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Dragnet" and "Adam-12"; NBC owns the rights to all of them.

In addition to full programs - which will not have commercials - NBC will sell video excerpts from some programs, like the headlines feature of "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."

All of these programs will sell for $1.99, the price for the ABC offerings.

Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, said in an interview that he hoped that his company could create the same market for $1.99 video that it did for 99-cent song downloads. "We are doing the same thing with video we did with music," Mr. Jobs said. "We need to add more shows from more sources." He pointed out that Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs and now has two million.

Striking deals for video has been more complex than for music, however, because of the complex relationships among production companies, networks, affiliate stations, cable networks and various other rights holders.

Mr. Jobs argued that these conflicts will work out because of consumer demand.

"People forget we all work for the viewers," he said. "And consumers are demanding different services and different options."

And indeed, the apparent success of Apple's move with ABC is starting to draw interest. Apple has sold more than three million video downloads in the last two months. In addition to the ABC content, Apple sells music videos and some short films from Pixar, the animation company that Mr. Jobs also runs.

NBC started talking to Apple last spring about distributing programs through iTunes, but it decided to proceed only after seeing the initial result, said Jeff Zucker, president of the NBC Universal Television Group. One important factor is that the Internet distribution does not seem to affect the viewership of the broadcast programs, he said.

Ratings of ABC's "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" have increased since they have been available for sale on iTunes. Similarly, Mr. Zucker said, the audience for "NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams" has grown since the network started making a Webcast of the program available at 10 o'clock Eastern time each night.

Jack Myers, editor of Jack Myers Media Business Reports, an industry newsletter, said that affiliates might complain privately about these deals but that "they are taking a wait-and-see attitude to see if they can get a piece of the action." He added, "There is so much going on right now it's hard for them to make heads or tails of any of it to see if they should get upset."

More broadly, Mr. Zucker said NBC had decided to offer its programming in many new formats rather than trying to protect its existing distribution arrangements. Last month, it announced a deal to let viewers watch episodes of some of its programs on DirecTV the day after broadcast for 99 cents.

"A year from now, you will see us on ever more platforms," Mr. Zucker said. "Whether it is a cellphone or an iPod or a computer, we don't care what screen it is."

While Apple and NBC are looking to profit from old television programs by selling downloads, without commercials, America Online and its corporate cousin Warner Brothers have moved to let people watch older programs from Warner Brothers' library free, supported by advertising. That service, called In2TV, which will start next year, does not allow watching programs on portable devices or even laptop computers that are disconnected from the Internet.

Mr. Jobs said Apple was not interested in offering video downloads supported by advertising.

"Never say never," Mr. Jobs said, "But we are not in the ad business now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/te...y/07apple.html





Apple's Adventures In Video: You Ain't Seen It All Yet
Jonny Evans

US iPod users can look forward to new downloadable videos as media companies make online an integral part of their strategy.

Apple has sold three million videos since the video iPod's debut in October.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs told USA Today the figure: "Far exceeds our initial expectations."

He added that video iPod sales are strong: "It's no secret that we're shipping a lot."

Expect more from NBC

Apple also revealed a new deal with NBC Universal in which many new shows were made available through iTunes earlier this week.

NBC intends making even more video available through the service, company president Jeff Zucker told Variety: "You are going to see a series of announcements in the coming weeks," he said. "Eventually, a goal is to get all of our shows up there."

The Variety report confirms Apple began speaking with NBC in spring. The report also confirms that part of NBC's rationale for the deal was an attempt to provide a legal alternative to illegal TV show downloads. "NBC estimates that there are 430,000 illegal downloads of 'Battlestar Galactica' each week," the report adds.

"It proves there is tremendous interest in it and good people have developed bad habits by illegally downloading it. Now they will have to develop good habits," Zucker said.

It's thought some highlights from 'Bravo' will appear on iTunes in the coming weeks.

More networks will sign-up

Analysts believe Apple is likely to ink similar deals with a plethora of partners. Shaw Wu of American Technology Research said: "We do not believe we are anywhere near the end for content partnership; we foresee future deals potentially from CBS, Fox, and others."

Wu had been expecting new partners for the iTunes service, but observed that the "timing and magnitude" of the NBC deal was faster and broader than he had anticipated.

Wu estimates iTunes will see video sales grow to about 80,000 video downloads per day versus 50,000 per day in the first month.

Fox preps The Family Guy

Many reports have looked at Fox, suggesting that company will also make movies available online. Media Week this week confirms the broadcaster's plans.

Fox will soon make original episodes of cult US series 'The Family Guy' available for Internet distribution. Downloadable shows will be available by early next year on MySpace.com and IGN.com and will cost $1.99 each. It's unlikely Fox will leave market-leader iTunes in the cold, but any iTunes plans have not been confirmed.

Curiously, 'The Family Guy' was one of the most traded shows on peer-to-peer networks.

A subsequent DVD release containing episodes of the show generated huge sales, which some analysts speculate means that the file-sharing activity helped build interest in the show.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index...ge=1&pagePos=2





Looking for the Proceeds in TV-on-Demand
Richard Siklos

For five decades or so, the television industry's main mission has been to come up with hit programs, get them on screens, and hope people will stop and watch. Now, that is just the starting point.

As an era of ordering TV shows at the push of a button gets underway, new challenges are clouding the landscape in the year ahead: What business models are going to work and who is going to get paid what?

These questions loom behind attention-grabbing announcements in recent weeks from some of the biggest TV networks, cable operators, satellite companies, gadget-makers and Internet players, including Apple, Disney, NBC Universal and Comcast, offering what is expected to be the first of many new video-on-demand and downloading services.

"The video segment of the content industry is trying to be out ahead and not have happen to them what happened in the music industry," said Saul Berman, a partner specializing in media with I.B.M. Consulting, referring to the widespread illegal downloading of music in the absence of appealing legal ways to buy online music.

But the road to video convergence is crowded with convoluted business relationships and potential conflicts. Behind the press releases, a major power struggle is unfolding among a wide group of stakeholders - from studios to satellite operators to manufacturers of consumer products - as new ventures are being devised for the digital age.

"We've taken a couple of steps forward, but there really isn't a clear business model yet," said David Zaslav, the president of NBC Universal Cable.

One issue is whether consumers ought to pay for their shows individually or whether on-demand access should be a free component of a subscription to video services provided by cable or satellite operators or newer competitors like Internet or telecom companies. Another is whether the shows will be sold for viewing during a set time period, or will be permanent so that consumers can collect them like DVD's. And, not surprisingly, a big point of contention is how the revenue generated by these new services is shared. As a result, only a handful of the most popular shows on television are available on-demand so far.

Mr. Zaslav and other industry executives and analysts said progress was slow because of the longstanding and often convoluted relationships that exist among the companies that create content, the networks that package and market it, and the distributors who deliver it into households, which can sometimes all be tentacles of the same conglomerate. The News Corporation, for example, owns the Fox TV network and production studio and also controls DirecTV.

Also, the broadcast TV networks that reach the biggest audiences and have relied on advertising as their sole source of revenue have had to run on two parallel and seemingly conflicting tracks.

First, they've had to explore new revenue models as TiVo and similar digital video recorders threaten conventional advertising by allowing viewers to fast-forward through commercials on the shows they record. At the same time, they've had to ensure that marketers and especially the network affiliates that own the majority of the big networks' local stations around the country are not alienated by these new ventures. For example, making a popular show available on demand via cable or the Internet within hours of its airing may lead fewer viewers to tune in during its scheduled time slot. That, in turn, would mean reduced advertising revenue and hamper the ability of the local affiliates to promote other shows in their lineup.

Because of this, CBS, for one, will begin offering reruns in January of hit shows like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" for 99 cents an episode, but only in markets where Comcast offers cable service and CBS owns the local TV affiliate. And, like NBC and ABC, CBS is so far only offering programming that it owns a large piece of and has the right to rebroadcast. Notably, the CBS partnership with Comcast only runs until the end of August 2006, an unusually brief period for such an arrangement.

Until recently, Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, has made free video-on-demand products a cornerstone of its strategy to convert more of its customers to its digital service. CBS was already allowing Comcast to offer programs like its CBS Evening News free on Comcast's video-on-demand service. But Comcast, faced with the prospect of NBC's deal to show selected programs on DirecTV for 99 cents a show, acceded to CBS's insistence that it be paid directly.

"There was no way we were going to do this for free," Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, said in an interview when the deal was announced last month.

Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, a technology and market research company based in Cambridge, Mass., predicts TV shows available by video-on-demand will eventually be free, and that new interactive business models for advertising on demand will help pay the freight. For instance, he believes broadcasters will adopt "click though" pricing models similar to the fast-growing Internet advertising on portals like Google and Yahoo. Under that scenario, the network would be paid each time a viewer clicked on an ad or perhaps an icon super-imposed on the screen that paused the show they were watching and took them to a longer commercial.

Cable operators including Comcast, Cox Communications and Charter Communications have already made long-form advertising such as sponsored musical performances and infomercials part of what they offer on free video-on-demand. TiVo - a service for which subscribers pay a monthly fee to access - offers so-called showcases to advertisers. These showcases encourage customers to check out long-form advertisements and special promotions when they are browsing through a cable company's listing of TV shows, for example.

Mutual accusations of greediness are nothing new among the various players in the television ecosystem, but the newest technologies have intensified those accusations.

Broadcasters like CBS and NBC will continue to push either to be paid directly or to be compensated in some other way for what they see as their part in helping companies like Comcast or DirecTV put their digital boxes in more homes.

"If we're putting our best content on the digital platform - and if that content excites viewers and therefore increases the number of people that want to keep that box in their home - then we should get a piece of that value," Mr. Zaslav said.

Distributors such as cable companies, however, argue that they have invested tens of billions of dollars in the technology to make these services possible and the networks are already being fairly compensated under existing relationships.

Despite the pressure it is under from digital video recorders and the spread of video on the Internet, television supported by advertising is "a successful model that everybody understands," said Jeffrey M. Bewkes, who oversees Time Warner's entertainment businesses, which includes the Turner cable networks, HBO and the Warner Brothers studio.

Mr. Bewkes has been championing StartOver, a service developed by Time Warner Cable as an alternative to video-on-demand and digital video recorders. StartOver was introduced in a small test market in South Carolina several weeks ago.

StartOver offers digital cable subscribers a free restart button if they join a program in progress, with about 60 broadcast and cable networks participating in the venture. While the utility of the service is initially quite limited, Mr. Bewkes and Time Warner hope over time to be able to persuade the networks and their nervous affiliates to continue to extend the window when people could restart programs they have missed by hours and possibly days.

While this may sound exactly like video-on-demand, the difference is that StartOver viewers can pause a show, but not fast-forward past the advertising. It is far from clear that such a service would gain acceptance in households where people with digital video recorders are already zipping through ads. In Time Warner's case, Mr. Bewkes says that because the company has content, networks, the nation's second largest cable company and online heft through its America Online division, it need not pick sides in the shakeout over new digital business models.

However, he is skeptical of a future without TV networks as a platform to introduce programs, build loyalty or direct viewers to affiliate programming like local newscasts. "Nobody's got a crystal ball here," he said. "But I'm not sure we're ready to throw out 30 years of television industry economics."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/bu...a/05media.html





Media Revolutionaries Team With Old Guard
John Borland

Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group, opened her speech with a line probably more optimistically befitting the times than literally true.

"The beauty of our company is that we love chaos," she tells techies, movie and music executives sipping their morning coffee in a posh Century City hotel ballroom. "We embrace change as a part of life."

As the Disney executive associated with bringing small versions of "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" to Apple Computer's video iPod, she speaks of change with some authority. With a recent series of small but consistent steps, the TV and film world has put itself squarely on the often-painful digitalization path traveled by the music industry over the last five years.

Yet at the Digital Entertainment and Media Expo conference, held in the shadow of MGM's tall office tower here this week, it's utterly clear how much has changed. A similar event five years ago would have been peopled primarily by technologists promising to overturn the hegemony of old-media dinosaurs, with record label executives looking like the hunted, if they were in attendance at all.

Today, old-guard media feels far more in control of this particular technological cycle, even if it is one of chaos and change. Sweeney is joined at this conference by executives from other studios, record labels and TV stations. Few claim to have a definite picture of tomorrow's market. But it is clear that the start-ups and technology companies here see their futures as dependent on amicable relationships with those media titans.

Ask Conrad Teran, president of iSeeTV, a start-up that–-like an increasing number of companies in the past six months–-has allowed anyone to distribute video content online. Teran says this kind of alternative channel allows experimentation, amateur programmers into the business, and professionals to test commercial pilots and other shows without network support.

He's also quick to ask clients if they have advertising, sponsors or money. One of his first clients is a Clear Channel radio station that's turning its audio station into video.

The old giants "are still a big part of the game," Teran said. "They will never be irrelevant."

In many ways, the TV and video industries face the same challenges that record labels faced in 2000 and 2001. Consumers have begun experimenting with digitally downloaded versions of industry content, and early adopters' expectations already far outstrip what the content companies are willing to provide.

File swapping of movies and TV shows is widespread. Just as in the early days of the digital music business, the reluctance of TV and movie studios to provide a wide variety of online content has led to less-than-satisfactory official download services such as Movielink and CinemaNow.

Apple's iTunes store has provided a taste of one possible future for authorized downloads, but its available content has been scant and of poor quality compared to a DVD.

In 2000, that was recipe for consumer rebellion, as peer-to-peer shortcuts like Napster allowed pent-up demand for digital content to explode onto the Net, devastating any illusions the music industry had about its own future.

This time around, content companies have accumulated a half-decade of court support. Record labels and movie studios have filed thousands of lawsuits against individual file-swappers. Even if they've failed to stop file-swappers wholly in their tracks, it is now clear to parents and would-be swappers that copyrighted content isn't legal to download without permission.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling has put peer-to-peer networks on the defensive; most are now seeking to make peace with content companies. And technology entrepreneurs remember the scores of now-defunct dot-com companies whose plans to revolutionize media distribution foundered on a lack of support from record labels, movie studios and TV networks.

Not that this makes life easy today for old media.

Just as transformations in the music business have made life difficult for retail music stores such as Tower Records or Sam Goody, the prospect of changes in TV and movie distribution is causing indigestion all the way down Hollywood's food chain.

Advertisers have been worried that Disney's relationship with Apple might lead to a further erosion of their ability to reach viewers. Theater owners, represented at this week's conference by the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), have been fighting bitterly against the prospect of moving DVD releases and on-demand Internet viewing to more closely match theatrical release dates, an idea championed by Disney Chairman Robert Iger.

"At some point, that shrinking (release) window would dramatically affect cinema admissions," said NATO executive director John Fithian. "If the industry were to convert to simultaneous release on DVD, or with downloads, that would have devastating impact on the cinema industry."

There's plenty of chaos and change to go around. But the digitalization of Hollywood and its TV siblings is underway, and already taking a very different path than its musical predecessors.
http://news.com.com/Media+revolution...3-5978648.html





Thinking Outside the Box Office

Director Steven Soderbergh talks about the copyright cops, the remixing underground, and why he'll debut his new movie on DVD, cable, and in theaters all at once.
Xeni Jardin

When Steven Soderbergh releases his next film on January 27, it will have not only the critics squawking, but Hollywood studio execs, too. Bubble, an all-digital thriller, is
set in an Ohio doll factory, and all of the actors are completely unknown. But that's not even the interesting part. The movie goes out to theaters, DVD, and high-definition cable TV - all on the same day. It's an experiment that threatens to uproot the film industry's long-standing "release window" formula, which staggers a picture's release on various platforms to maximize profits. Wired caught up with Soderbergh, director of sex, lies, and videotape, Traffic, and Ocean's Eleven, while he was in Los Angeles shooting The Good German, with George Clooney and Cate Blanchett.

WIRED: Why did you decide to release Bubble in all formats at once?
SODERBERGH: Name any big-title movie that's come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It's called piracy. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, Ocean's Eleven, and Ocean's Twelve - I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We're just trying to gain control over it.

So this is a way to combat piracy?
It can be. Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.

Will people keep going to theaters?
Always. You're going to see attendance plateau a bit, but it's still the number one date destination. That's never going away.

Have you been to the movies recently?
I tried to go to a theater yesterday, but the fire alarm went off. The theater experience isn't always pleasant. Theater owners need to address that. There are often problems with projection; tickets and concessions are expensive; theaters aren't always clean; people talk during the movie. They're making it easy for people to stay home.

What's the reaction in Hollywood to your release experiment?
People are waiting to see what happens. A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit.

What's the biggest impact technology is having on filmmaking?
When the changeover from film to digital happens in theaters in five or 10 years, you're going to see name filmmakers self-distributing. Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film. I often do very radical cuts of my own films just to experiment, shake things up, and see if anything comes of it. I think it would be really interesting to have a movie out in release and then, just a few weeks later say, "Here's version 2.0, recut, rescored." The other version is still out there - people can see either or both. For instance, right now I know I could do two very different versions of The Good German.

Have you ever used BitTorrent or other software to download movies?
No. I know about it, but I haven't even downloaded music. I'm behind the curve.

Should hardware manufacturers be obligated to build copy protection into their devices?
It's a tricky question. I don't think somebody who creates something should have their rights violated. Yet we have a culture in which creating something like [Danger Mouse's] The Grey Album can get you thrown in jail. That's sad. It's an astonishing, amazing piece of work that should be heard.

Have you thought about making a mash-up?
I have ideas like that - video mash-ups. Some of them I've done privately. But there's no way for them to be seen legally. I wish we could come up with a system that allowed someone to do a Grey Album without having to pay millions of dollars for music rights. A system in which rights holders share profits of a new piece of work and people can access it without breaking the law.

Give me one idea for a video mash-up.
I was channel surfing the other night and Gus Van Sant's Psycho was on. It would be fascinating to do a mash-up of Gus' version with Hitchcock's version, because the whole thing with Gus' version was that he duplicated the original shot by shot.

I'd watch that!
Yeah! So right now, I could do that at home and give it to a friend, just as something for them to watch on a Friday night. But we don't live in a world where that can be made commercially available. So it goes underground. And underground is just a sexier word for illegal. It's frustrating.

You shot Bubble with the same kind of high-end digital cinema cameras that George Lucas used for Revenge of the Sith, but the results couldn't be more different. Instead of flashy effects, there's a stripped-down naturalism.
We wanted to do site-specific films. You hear that term used for other art forms, but not for cinema. The writer and I come up with a basic premise, go to a location, and the people fill it up. We interview people, incorporate their stories, try to make it as organic as possible. The cameras make that possible. You can shoot using available light. I sometimes ran two or three cameras at a time. In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides. With Bubble, I wanted to go in the opposite direction and emphasize stillness. Because there isn't film running through the camera, you get an even more pronounced stillness. That's why you don't see much camera movement in the movie, just a lot of cuts.

With all this technology available, do you think the quality of movies is better today than 30 years ago?
I think it will be better. As technology gives filmmakers more freedom, you'll see them producing work that is more unique, less beholden to the mainstream film template. That means rethinking the economics. But I'm always willing to gamble.

How are you gambling with Bubble?
There are risks, and then there are risks. I'm not working in a coal mine. Still, everybody involved did it for scale pay, and everyone owns a piece of the profits.

Sounds like the financial model for a startup.
Exactly. I'd be thrilled if the model works well enough for me to do that all the time.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...oderbergh.html





Movies With a Message and Their Money Trail
Caryn James

Film production companies don't usually have missions beyond the obvious one of making money. But two relatively new companies - Participant Productions, whose recent movies include "Syriana" and "North Country," and Walden Media, a producer of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" - have overt social purposes and activist campaigns attached to their movies. The old Watergate-era dictum "Follow the money" has suddenly become relevant to moviegoers.

Participant's elaborate Web site explains, "Our goal is to deliver compelling entertainment that will inspire audiences to get involved in the issues that affect us all." The "Syriana" part of the site suggests ways to lessen our dependence on oil, and the "North Country" section deals with fighting domestic abuse and sexual harassment.

Walden, which produces family entertainment, has an educational component to go along with its movies. That can be as simple as basing the films on books that will encourage young viewers to read (its next big movie is "Charlotte's Web") or as elaborate as gathering schoolchildren in theaters for an interactive satellite conversation with an author.

It's no coincidence that these companies are backed by billionaires who understand the power of the media: Participant by the eBay tycoon Jeffrey Skoll, a Canadian citizen, and Walden by the Qwest mogul Philip F. Anschutz, a Christian Republican. Each company insists it is apolitical, which is true in the strictest sense; they don't support candidates. But in the broader, everything-is-political sense, the more liberal Participant and the more conservative Walden are pushing and pulling the social fabric and the landscape of filmmaking. This movie production money comes with strings attached, and for the ordinary moviegoer the questions become: Do you know who's controlling the purse strings? Does it matter?

Participant was started less than two years ago, and its involvement with each of its films has varied greatly. So have those films' accomplishments. Participant was involved from the start with "North Country," a preachy flop with Charlize Theron as a mine worker who files a class-action sexual harassment suit.

It has had better luck with "Syriana" and "Good Night, and Good Luck," which were both produced with George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh's company, Section 8 (and other producing partners). "Syriana," Stephen Gaghan's complicated, cynical thriller about the global politics of oil, is one of the most ambitious films in this especially ambitious movie season, and has done extremely well at the box office in limited release. (It opens across the country on Friday.) It may, in fact, be a model of the kind of risky film that viewers can welcome: its overlapping tales of power plays involving a C.I.A. agent (Mr. Clooney), an oil company executive (Matt Damon) and corrupt lawyers and government officials is gripping and thought-provoking. And while its political attitude is unmistakable - that the American need for oil shamefully depends on Middle East chaos - its fleshed-out characters never lecture the audience.

So far, though, the company's Web component (participate.net) is practical and dull. On the "Syriana" portion, visitors will find tips for reducing oil use at home and in their cars, and a form letter that can be e-mailed to their representatives in Congress urging them to reduce the country's reliance on oil. It's hard to imagine that moviegoers will race out of theaters and head to their computers. What's more valuable is that Participant is putting money behind works that the typical Hollywood studios might shy away from as dangerously controversial (that is, driving away part of the mainstream audience).

While there is nothing stealthlike about the politics behind Participant, many more questions have been raised about Walden because it is backed by Mr. Anschutz, whose money has often gone to conservative Republicans but whose views and purposes are little known because he has avoided interviews for decades. His Anschutz Film Group includes both Walden and the smaller Bristol Bay, whose purpose is to produce uplifting films with PG-13 ratings like the Matthew McConaughey thriller "Sahara." (Walden's ratings are PG.)

The founders of Walden, Cary Granat (a former executive at Dimension Films) and Micheal Flaherty, said in a joint telephone interview that their focus is on establishing a trusted family brand. "Phil is a hands-off partner who allows the managers to run the company," Mr. Granat said of the Anschutz connection.

But skepticism about that connection is understandable. Disney, which along with Walden produced "Narnia" (opening Friday), is handling the marketing and is heavily promoting the film to Christian groups. When the State of Florida recently sponsored a reading contest tied to the film, a group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State protested the book's choice, seeing it as proselytizing for Christianity.

A Christian allegory is embedded in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, about four siblings evacuated from wartime London who escape to a fantastic world where an evil white witch persecutes a wise, virtuous lion. You don't have to see the lion as a Christ figure, but moviegoers aware of Lewis's allegory will have no trouble finding it. The film's central message, though, reflects Walden's family-oriented mandate: it concerns the siblings' complete devotion to one another.

Sometimes the line between activism and marketing vanishes. A teachers' guide for "Narnia" on the company's Web site (walden.com) bluntly promotes the movie with behind-the-scenes features. But the guide also includes lessons on history and music (not religion) based on the film. And Walden's other films - like the forthcoming "Hoot," adapted from Carl Hiaasen's young-adult novel - are not religious at all.

Walden isn't proselytizing, but the question is worth raising because money with strings attached can so easily open the door to insidious messages or restrictions that veer toward censorship. When Bristol Bay produced "Ray" (the Walden partners were not involved), the need for a PG-13 rating limited the film's language. It is easy to imagine a grittier, less uplifting, more realistic depiction of Ray Charles's life without that demand from the Anschutz company. Studios create restrictions too, but that's all about what sells.

The dangers of combining money and social philosophy are already apparent in television, where two groups with interchangeably bland names have very different purposes. The Family Friendly Programming Forum is a group of brand-name advertisers (like Johnson & Johnson) that encourages prime-time series on which the companies will feel comfortable buying commercial time. The forum's script development fund gives money at the earliest stage to cross-generational stories that families can watch together - seed money that has helped new series like "Commander in Chief" and "Everybody Hates Chris" - and the group's benign involvement ends there.

But the Parents Television Council is a political pressure group that orchestrates complaints to the F.C.C., like a recent complaint about an episode of the CBS series "NCIS" that dealt with the murder of an online stripper. The trade magazine Mediaweek reported that in 2003, 99 percent of all F.C.C. indecency complaints came from the Parents Television Council.

Any single group's ability to hijack the process that way is worrisome; if Participant's e-mail campaign ever achieves a similar distorting clout, it might be worrisome, too. The best way to prevent movies from sliding into this murky area is for viewers to know who is handing out the money and why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/movies/07jame.html





Peer-to-Peer: The Problem is the Solution

The future of film distribution will take a cue from the pirates of today.
Fast Company Staff

Piracy is the sum of all of Hollywood's digital fears. All it takes is a leaked print of a film from a studio mole, or an advance copy from an Academy Award screener, or a filched workprint, and you have a pirated version ready to download.

So far, only one thing has prevented movie piracy on the scale that has cost the music industry about 25% of its revenues: file size. It may take just a minute to pull down a Kelly Clarkson tune from the Net, but a two-hour movie could take a day, depending on your connection speed. That's already changing. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as BitTorrent and eDonkey, already used by tens of millions of people around the globe, are making it easy to share feature films by breaking up each giant file into tiny pieces. When a P2P user downloads a movie, it comes from thousands, if not millions, of hard drives; the more popular a film is, the more people are able to share it--and the faster the download. By the end of 2004, about 60% of Internet traffic was P2P activity, more than half of it video files, according to CacheLogic, a P2P company based in Cambridge, England.

With the P2P growth curve leaving Hollywood little hope for escape, the industry faces a turning point. Like the music business, it can try to save itself in the courts. But suing your customers isn't the smartest business move. (Besides, when the Motion Picture Association of America shut down some of the bigger BitTorrent servers, users simply migrated to eDonkey.) Or the studios could just accept the inevitability of Internet distribution. "Properly managed and implemented, P2P is the future of Hollywood and television," says Dmitry Shapiro, CEO of Veoh Networks, which lets broadband users create virtual television networks.

The music business does offer one encouraging example here: Steve Jobs. "Apple's success with the iPod and iTunes store shows that people will pay for copy-protected music if it is convenient and priced fairly," says Todd Johnson, chief executive officer of Kontiki, a Sunnyvale, California, company that sells P2P software to deliver video over the Net.

Transfer iTunes' quality and convenience to movie downloads, says Johnson, and the results would transform the industry. "By the middle of next year, consumers will have access to movies, sports, and TV shows through an online, TiVo-like experience," he predicts.

Before that can happen, though, the studios will need to be convinced that they won't face a piratical onslaught. Kontiki's solution is a closed P2P system, one based on membership rather than on an open network such as BitTorrent's. Coupled with Microsoft's Digital Rights Management, Kontiki harnesses P2P networking without giving unauthorized users access to its content. Johnson believes several business models could emerge: Content could be sold by monthly subscriptions or sold outright as iTunes does--or it could support advertisements before or even during a movie.

Clearly he's doing something right. Twenty million people have already used Kontiki software, and the company has signed deals with AOL, Cinequest (an independent film festival), and Open Media Network, which has 15,000 movies, video blogs, audio podcasts, and music files. The BBC began a three- month trial of Kontiki in September, letting 5,000 viewers watch programs online for up to seven days after they were broadcast on TV.

Now Johnson's angling for a deal with the Hollywood studios. So is Bram Cohen, BitTorrent's creator, who raised $8.75 million in venture capital in September. Whether that contest ultimately goes to Johnson, Cohen, or some kid still in high school, the point is that the studios can coexist with--and probably thrive on--the Internet. But they'd better get started. They have no choice.
http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/10...ywood-p2p.html





For File Sharing, It's The Same Old Song
Andrew Kantor

"I think the best policy is to declare victory and leave," said Senator George Aiken (R – Vermont) during the Vietnam war. I think that's a policy the entertainment industry is adopting in its ongoing battle against peer-to-peer file sharing.

Aiken's point, for those of you light on history, is that when the war is unwinnable, you simply redefine "victory" and get the heck out.

This logic would explain why the recording industry keeps saying that illegal file sharing is almost finished, yet the amount of stuff available on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks remains staggering.

Maybe in their collective minds the folks at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have redefined victory. My suggestion would be to celebrate when legal downloads surpass hard-copy CD sales and forget about the pirates, but that's just me.

Just this week came another nail-in-the-coffin announcement: BitTorrent, one of the most popular file-sharing protocols, had struck a deal with Hollywood to go legit.

To an uninformed person — or a person being informed by the wrong people — stories like that might make it seem that peer-to-peer file sharing is being pounded out of existence. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Yours, mine, and ours

P2P has become the bane of the music industry. People buy a CD, "rip" the music into MP3 files, and then use P2P software to make those song files available on file-sharing networks to anyone who wants to download them.

There are a handful of those — the eDonkey network, the FastTrack network, the Gnutella network, and the BitTorrent network; the Ares Galaxy network is a hot new up-and-comer.

Each has several clients (most free), and you can use any or all of them to share the files on your hard drive and get files from other users.

Some of those file-sharing clients are names you might know from the news: Grokster, for example, is used to access the FastTrack network; StreamCast's Morpheus uses the Gnutella network.

I mention those two specifically because they made the news in July. That's when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against them and in favor of the entertainment industry, saying that Grokster and StreamCast had promoted illegal file sharing on their networks and were thus liable for the rampant copyright infringement going on.

Many a news story was written about the 'major defeat' suffered by the file-sharing industry. Many a news story was wrong.

Basically, the Supreme Court's ruling was so narrow that, while it was bad news for Grokster and StreamCast, it was good news for other P2P software makers because it essentially gave a recipe for remaining legally in the clear: Don't encourage copyright infringement.

Grokster didn't survive the ruling; it closed its site on November 7, and plans to re-launch as a legal-download provider, a la Napster.

But what seems so often overlooked by the people writing about the world of P2P is that it doesn't matter what happens to the companies making this software. It's already out there. The creators could disappear into a black hole or a jail cell, and the software would still be there, being used by millions of people.

(This was not true for Napster, in which the company didn't just make a product, it also provided the file- sharing service and servers. No Napster, no files. That's why the next generation of P2P software avoided this model.)

It's all about the spin… and declaring victory.

Reality check

So now we have the latest news: BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen and his deal with Hollywood. No longer would you be able to find pirated content via BitTorrent's site. (It sports a search engine for torrents, which are the 'pointers' to files available for downloading.)

The Associated Press bought the entertainment industry's line that this would have the effect of "effectively frustrating people who search for illegal copies of films."

Um, no.

The story also said that "The agreement with Cohen would not prevent determined Internet users from finding movies or other materials using tools or websites other than Cohen's, but it removes one of the most convenient methods people have used."

Um, no.

If users want to find torrents, pointing to legal content or otherwise, there's a long list of sites they can use.

Once again, what's a drop in a very large bucket is being hailed as a victory against file-sharing. It's not.

Napster is run out of business. Grokster and StreamCast lose in court. BitTorrent goes legit. None of these things matter a whit in terms of piracy because the software and the technology used to make it is still out there … and new products are coming out all the time.

The entertainment industry certainly wants people to think that each bit of news is yet another nail in the coffin of music and movie piracy.

The reality is something else entirely.

On SourceForge, the clearinghouse of open-source software, five of the top 10 downloads — including the top three — are file-sharing programs.

At Torrentspy, one of many BitTorrent-indexing sites, there are 141,651 torrents available. Each represents a song or a movie or an image or a piece of software. And Torrentspy isn't the largest.

At The Pirate Bay, there's a section where you can view the top 100 files downloaded in a host of categories — movies (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), music (Madonna's Confessions On A Dance Floor), software, games, even audio books.

The site even sports a section of legal threats against it from the likes of Apple, Dreamworks, Microsoft, and Warner Brothers — threats it ignored, as its based in Sweden and what it does (index files, not actually keep them) is perfectly legal there.

One response to Electronic Arts read in part, "Unlike certain other countries, such as the one you're in, we have sane copyright laws here. But we also have polar bears roaming the streets and attacking people :-(."

Does that sound like piracy is dying?
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columni...ng-lives_x.htm





Peers And Pals
Chan Chi-Loong

Content companies and carriers can no longer ignore peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Some have even started to partner them.

Tech take: Legal P2P platforms could soon become the content distribution model of choice.
Biz take: P2P is here to stay, and content companies and carriers must learn to work with it.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are alive and well.

Despite all the lawsuits that have been hurled at P2P firms and end-users, P2P networks have evolved and thrived. Despite all the regulations slapped on free P2P voice-over-IP (VoIP) Skype traffic in countries like China and India, P2P VoIP continues to flourish.

In fact, according to CacheLogic, a P2P networks analytics firm, P2P traffic is booming across the globe.

Says Andrew Parker, CacheLogic's CTO: "The single largest traffic type by volume on any ISP network is often P2P traffic." He estimates that on average, at least 50% to 60% of all downstream traffic and 70% of all upstream traffic on an ISP is P2P.

This means that a staggering amount of P2P data is transmitted across global networks. According to research firm TeleGeography, the US consumed about 1,125 Tbps of international bandwidth last year. This translates to about 50 exabytes (50 x 1018 bytes) of P2P data being downloaded in the US every day on average. This is the equivalent of 10 trillion songs, assuming a typical song size of 5MB.

Anecdotal evidence points to P2P proliferation as well. Slyck, a P2P news site, estimates that there are 8 million to 10 million users
on polled P2P networks at any one time. Parker says the actual number could be more than double this, as the poll excludes some P2P networks like the popular BitTorrent.

It goes without saying that such large-scale adoption of P2P worry the producers, distributors and carriers involved in the content supply chain.

Legal troubles

From a distribution standpoint, many content lobby groups and their powerful conglomerate backers view P2P networks as the root of all evil.

Often seen as abettors (or at least enablers) of piracy, P2P networks are continually harangued by the likes of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers (IFPI).

Unfortunately for them, however, P2P networks, like the mythical hydra, never seem to expire. Lop off one head, and two more spring forth to bare their fangs.

For example, when Napster, the first popular P2P file sharing application, was slain by the RIAA in 2001, AudioGalaxy rose to take its place. When AudioGalaxy keeled over in an out-of-court settlement with RIAA in 2002, its users turned to a slew of second-generation P2P networks. These include FastTrack (with file-sharing clients like Kazaa, Grokster and iMesh) and Gnutella (with clients like LimeWire, Morpheus and BearShare). Instead of being based on a centralized search server like Napster or AudioGalaxy, these resilient second-generation networks do not use a centrally indexed server, making them hard to bring down.

Technology, however, cannot shield these networks from a legal hailstorm, as seen in the current prominent cases of Grokster vs. MGM and Kazaa vs. ARIA (Australia Recording Industry Association).

Another interesting trend is that the typical size of objects being shared has grown over time. In 2002, the average P2P object was musical in nature and about 5MB in size. Today, the vast majority of P2P traffic is due to TV programs or movies measuring over 100MB.

The evolution has led to a growth in newer P2P networks better equipped to share big files. BitTorrent and e-Donkey are the most prominent of these networks, and comprise a large proportion of P2P traffic, according to CacheLogic. In Asia, for instance, these two networks account for more than 80% of tracked popular P2P networks (see chart below). Singapore has about 70% BitTorrent and 12% e-Donkey traffic. In contrast, South Korea, with its entrenched Korean e-Donkey client Pruna, uses mostly the e-Donkey P2P network (more than 90%).

Co-opt the enemy

Shunning the approach that a few belligerent lobby groups have adopted -- suing their customers -- some content providers are looking at a smarter way of tackling the problem -- by co-opting P2P networks into their ranks.

This revolution started with music. Apple's iTunes Music Store, which opened in 2003, lets users purchase songs via download, hugely contributing to the iPod's success as a lifestyle device. A raft of imitation sites like MSN music and Soundbuzz quickly followed.

Come next year, video will walk down this route, but with a twist. It will be free, and via legal P2P networks. Companies like BBC and AOL are going to offer free TV via Kontiki's commercial P2P platform. With In2TV (AOL's ad- supported P2P TV) and BBC's iMP slated to roll out by next month, there is little doubt that legal P2P content will soon become a force to be reckoned with.

Developments like these will definitely worry carriers. If content providers start bypassing them, carriers will loose yet another revenue source. P2P VoIP is already hurting their earnings, and being a pure dumb pipe player won't be a prospect most carriers relish.

Daryl Dunbar, director of 21CN from carrier BT, agrees: "Customers buy services, not networks. You don't want everyone else to extract value above you."

To that end, BT is embarking on its ambitious 21CN plan, which will convert its entire network to the IP platform. It is spending about US$7 billion to migrate 30 million copper lines in four years, hoping to roll out compelling triple-play services - voice, video and data - after that.

Not being able to offer services like IP-TV will spell doom for many telcos -- besides battling cable companies, they will soon have to fend off competition from P2P TV.

Bandwidth, monitoring problems

Revenue losses from content providers aside, P2P poses bandwidth challenges for carriers. P2P traffic gobbles up bandwidth, potentially causing quality of service (QoS) problems and incurring peering costs.

"If your traffic crosses peering links -- and our research shows that 92% of P2P traffic does so -- it can cost quite a bit if you have to pay for expensive transit bandwidth," says CacheLogic's Parker. However, not all carriers experience this problem or will state outright that they monitor P2P.

Singapore cable operator StarHub, for instance, says that P2P is "not high priority for their business" when queried on this issue. A spokesperson says the operator cannot open up the traffic and do deep packet inspection because this will "violate privacy issues" with consumers.

Other carriers like PCCW Global, which offers enterprise services, do state that they track P2P traffic.

Says Dan Lovatt, CEO of PCCW Global, who was in Singapore for VoIP Asia last month: "P2P does have an impact on the bottom line, and it needs to be managed and kept balanced between peering networks."
http://www.cmpnetasia.com/oct3_nw_vi...ion=Fe atures





Blogs Reflect Power Of The Pen

The continuing growth of blogging has changed the way journalists think about their work, argues technology analyst Bill Thompson. And it is for the better.
Bill Thompson

The students in my online journalism class at City University are all building weblogs this week.

Some have them already, of course, since they've realised that engaging with the new media is a sensible option for any journalist. But the others are taking their first tentative steps into posting entries, commenting on what other people say and trying to attract an audience, however modest.

They don't have to write personal journals or reveal anything about their private lives: they've been asked to blog interesting stories in the area of online journalism and new media, which may be a bit self-referential but is at least relevant to the course.

So it's more like John Naughton's Memex 1.1 than Belle de Jour's confessions.

The idea is to give them a better understanding of how the technology works, and show them just how easy it is to publish online even if you have no idea how the web works or what HTML is.

Engage, interact

There are many good reasons for any journalist to have a weblog - or two - although I don't believe that they'll need blogs when all the mainstream media sites go out of business.

I think that professional journalism will endure, even if it has to change.

It's useful for my students to understand how things get online, since most online publications these days insulate the content creators - whether journalists or not - from the detail of website creation by offering content management systems of more or less sophistication.

The BBC News website isn't built by hordes of dedicated coders who carefully hand-craft each page but uses such a system to let editors place text into standardised page layouts.

It's also important for any journalist or would-be journalist to have an online presence to supplement their CV and portfolio, since more and more people looking for jobs are going to find their online activities scrutinised as part of the application process.

And of course having to write a blog entry as part of their coursework forces students to read the papers, look around websites and generally take an interest in what is happening with new media, something I want to encourage.

But the real point of getting a journalist blogging at this early stage in his or her career is that the bloggers, in all their variety, with all their different skills and abilities and interests and biases, are reshaping the world in which professional journalists operate just as much as the telephone shook up the profession in the first half of the 20th Century.

Fact checking

On some stories, like the provenance of the letters claiming to be from George W Bush's commander in the National Guard, or the use of white phosphorus as a chemical weapon by US troops in Iraq, careful digging by bloggers has done a job the mainstream press failed to tackle.

Elsewhere every journalist now knows to expect comment and criticism from the blogosphere, and those who might once have cut corners by not checking facts or cutting and pasting phrases from other people's work should now find their lives less comfortable.

A few years ago readers of the Cluetrain Manifesto were exhorted to see the market as a conversation where customers engaged with sellers. This was presented as a break with the one-way advertising and marketing model that used to hold sway, made possible by the internet.

The blogosphere is doing the same sort of thing for journalism, whether in print or broadcast. It's no longer enough to write or say something and consign any responses to the letters page or occasional "have your say" programme.

My students have to get used to this. They have to engage with their readers in a way that respects the shared values of the online world.

They have to get used to being harshly criticised and dissected by those who disagree with them, and they have to accept that sometimes the people reading their work will know more about the subject than they do and may have a valuable contribution to make to their thinking.

At a later stage, they'll need to come to terms with Flickr and the other photo-sharing sites, and the way that any event attended by large numbers of people effortlessly generates its own online community, with hundreds of photos linked by common tags.

I noticed it vividly last month at WSIS, the World Summit on the Information Society, but it is just as true for a White Stripes gig or a major sporting event.

And of course, it's true for newsworthy events, no matter how tragic.

Figuring out the relationship between the press and those who see the news happening and post their photographs of it is the next major challenge.

But we can't expect to adapt to this changed world unless we engage with it now, and understand it from the inside as well as observing it from our editorial offices.

The growth of internet use and the emergence of easy-to-use publishing tools could well be the best thing that has happened to journalism since radio and then television offered new ways to reach people, but that requires a certain degree of modesty and a great willingness to learn on the part of a profession that is not noted for either attribute.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4492150.stm





IBM To Support Opendocument Early Next Year
Martin LaMonica

IBM plans to support early next year the OpenDocument standard in its desktop software, a product the company intends to market aggressively in developing countries.

At a press conference in Delhi, India, IBM executives plan to announce Monday that the company's Workplace Managed Client will be able to read, write and save documents in the OpenDocument format. OpenDocument, or ODF, is a standard set of document formats for desktop productivity applications.

IBM has already publicly endorsed OpenDocument, which the company views as a way to loosen Microsoft's dominance over desktop software. But the forthcoming Workplace products will be the first to support OpenDocument, a standard ratified in May of this year.

In a high-profile case, the state of Massachusetts in September decided to standardize desktop applications on OpenDocument.

That decision, however, is being contested by other branches of the state government. The governor's office this week said it is "optimistic" that Microsoft's Office formats, once standardized, will meet the state guidelines for "open formats."

Rather than create an analog to Microsoft Office, IBM is offering editors for creating documents, spreadsheets or presentations within a Web browser. Documents are delivered via a Web portal and stored in shared directories. Access control and document management tools allow people to share and edit documents with others.

Until now, Workplace supported the formats from open-source product OpenOffice, from which the OpenDocument was derived. Workplace Managed Client software also can read, write and edit documents created with Microsoft Office.

Arthur Fontaine, the marketing manager for Workplace Managed Client, believes IBM's support for industry standards and the server-centric design of Workplace will appeal to customers in developing countries, particularly governments.

"The governments of India, China and other emerging markets are very interested in this," Fontaine said. "They don't have the legacy of having everything saved in Microsoft Office to transition from...This is an opportunity to start out right."

In response to requests from government customers, Microsoft last month said it will submit the file formats for Office 12 to standards bodies ECMA International and ISO.

A representative for India's National Informatics Center (NIC) said in a statement that the country is pursuing a technology policy of "open standards and open source."

"The NIC has received a mandate from the Central Department of Information Technology to work in the areas of standards to facilitate implementation of the National e-Governance Program in the country," said M. Moni, deputy director general of India's NIC. "The choice, flexibility and reliability inherent in open standards like ODF are critical in our efforts to drive the eGovernance momentum in the country."

IBM has been testing the Workplace Managed Client software for the past year. With the release next year, the product will be generally available, Fontaine said.
http://news.com.com/IBM+to+support+O...3-5979150.html





Microsoft Move Eases Criticism That Led To Open-Document Campaign
AP

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney appears to be having second thoughts about abandoning Microsoft software on state computers in favor of a rival open-source format.

Microsoft Corp. has pledged to standardize the document format for its Office software, undercutting much of the criticism that fueled Romney's closely watched plan to begin embracing a rival open-source format in 2007.

A spokesman for the Republican governor said Wednesday that Microsoft's attempt to win approval of its format as an international standard reduces the possibility that Massachusetts may eventually remove Office software from tens of thousands of government computers.

``If Microsoft follows through with their commitments, this will represent a seismic shift in their business model,'' said Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom.

Some rivals and industry analysts say they will continue to cast a wary eye on a company known for closely guarding its proprietary technology.

Fehrnstrom agreed on the need for scrutiny of Microsoft's announcement last week that it would ask a Geneva-based technical group to declare the format behind a new version of Office an international standard, which could aid outside developers who write supporting applications.

Concerns about licensing restrictions and compatibility problems with Office software led to the development of a rival standard called OpenDocument format, which is compatible with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice software and free products such as OpenOffice.

Romney had directed state executive offices to begin storing new records in OpenDocument format by Jan. 1, 2007, to ensure records can easily be read, exchanged and modified decades into the future.

That made Massachusetts the first state to directly challenge the market-dominating Office software. Microsoft hopes to stem the rebellion's spread to other governments and the private sector.

Frank Gilbane, of Bluebill Advisors Inc., a Cambridge-based computer industry consulting firm, said Microsoft's announcement last week ``basically answers what all the technical people were complaining about.''

Microsoft said in June that Office 12, the next-generation version due next year, would use a new format called Office Open XML that would make it easier for outside programs to read documents created in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

But it wasn't until last week that the Redmond, Wash.-based company announced it would submit the format to the standards body Ecma International -- a move critics had said was needed to lend credibility to Microsoft's statements that its new product would use publicly available software code that can be customized by outsiders.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...y/13302650.htm





RealNetworks to Offer Rhapsody Service
AP

RealNetworks Inc. to launch a Web-based version of its Rhapsody subscription music service, becoming the latest company hoping to capitalize on growing consumer interest in software and services that can be accessed anywhere via the Internet.

The Web-based Rhapsody service will let users listen to the songs from its catalog over the Internet without downloading the desktop application that is currently required.

That will open Seattle-based RealNetworks' service up to people using Apple Computer Inc. or Linux-based systems.

The system, which is launching Monday in test form, also makes it easier for people who already have the service to use it even when they aren't at their own computers.

However, the Web-based Rhapsody will only let people stream the music. Anyone wishing to download and buy a song will still need to have the Rhapsody application on a personal computer.

Rhapsody lets people listen to up to 25 songs per month for free, or an unlimited number if they buy one of its paid programs.

RealNetworks Chief Executive Rob Glaser said the company won't be disappointed if most people using the Web-based service choose only to listen to their free allotment of songs, rather than buying a subscription.

''If it turns out the vast majority decide they want to listen for free that's great because the Internet advertising market is doing pretty well, too,'' he said.

Along with its new Web offering, RealNetworks also unveiled the first step toward longer term plans to get other companies to use the Rhapsody service on their sites. For example, a Web site devoted to the songwriter Elliott Smith might eventually be able to offer users the chance to listen to Smith's songs on their site, via Rhapsody.

For now, however, Glaser said the service will only be able to offer a link from another site to the Rhapsody service, and users will have to log in with a Rhapsody account to hear the songs.

Glaser said company is hoping to have the more sophisticated offering in the first half of next year.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





Local News

Mary Travers Beat Cancer To Sing A Melody Of Life
Robert Miller

When she's not on the road, she lives in Redding. She and her husband, Ethan Robbins have been together 25 years. When she speaks, she is frank, open, and very down to earth.

"If you're going to stay sane, you don't want to live in a town run by the industry you belong to. You want to live with a variety of people,'' she said. "Here, we're part of the community. My mother ran the public relations at Danbury Hospital for 25 years."

But this year, as she lay in a bed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York struggling against leukemia, the fame Travers has for so long tried to keep at bay actually helped her survive.

"There were about 10,000 e-mails to me on our Web site,'' she said. "That's not counting all the notes, all the presents, and cards I got, from places I've never been. It's as if I've tried all these years to just be myself . Then this came back to me, and I thought 'Really?'Ÿ"

Travers 69, is now back at home. After a year of severe illness and slow recuperation, she's regaining her strength and spirits. On Friday, she and "the boys'' — as she calls Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey — will perform a Christmas and Hanukkah concert at New York's Carnegie Hall, complete with an orchestra and chorus.

"I'm 100 percent clean — no leukemia,'' Travers said.

"Just before we started rehearsing," she said, "Noel called and left a message on our voice machine that said, very gently, 'I've missed singing with you and I'm looking forward to it.'ŸI liked that a lot."

Said Yarrow: "By now, we have a sense of communication between us that lets us say as we sing, we are feeling joy, we are feeling sorrow. And that's been magnified'' by Travers' illness and recovery.

After a year's rest, Travers' voice is fresh — she's even gained a couple of notes she had lost at the top of her alto range. Because of the medical treatment, she's lost 70 pounds. "I'm back to my 1970s body again,'' she said. "I needed a whole new wardrobe.''

And, because of chemotherapy, her trademark long, straight blond hair is anything but long, blond or straight. "I think I'll keep it this way,'' she said of her ultra-short, light brown cut.

"She's not only back, she's gorgeous,'' Yarrow said. "I think she's going to set a standard for women who are nearly 70.''

Peter, Paul & Mary began singing together in 1961, mixing their lilting harmonies and simple guitar accompaniments with a strong sense of social values. They appeared at the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, D.C., and in the decades afterward they appeared all over the world.

While almost all other folk acts of their generation have faded or passed on, Peter, Paul and Mary endure. Some of their renditions of songs — "If I Had a Hammer,'' "Blowin' in the Wind,'' "Lemon Tree,'' or "Leaving on a Jet Plane'' — are the versions that come to mind when those songs get mentioned.

Over the years, the group has won five Grammies. And their presence in the world continues — when young children learn the anti- war song, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone,'' it is probably from Peter, Paul and Mary records.

Mary Travers' travails began around Thanksgiving 2004. She hadn't been feeling well for a few days. Then, while making Thanksgiving dinner, she nearly collapsed.

"It was if I had to lie down every 20 minutes,'' she said. "I thought, 'This isn't right.' I've never felt as exhausted as that.''

At Danbury Hospital, she and Robbins learned she had acute myeloid leukemia. "I felt so bad because I had no red blood cells to take oxygen to my lungs,'' Travers said.

Her oncologist, Dr. Robert Cooper, said that different forms of leukemia manifest themselves in very different ways.

"You can have chronic leukemia that progresses very slowly and has very mild symptoms. You can live with that for years,'' he said. "Mary presented with very abrupt symptoms.''

Those symptoms included lungs gummed up with fluid. Robbins said his wife's first crisis was simply surviving until the chemotherapy started working.

"I can remember feeling despair for two seconds, two minutes,'' Robbins said. "Then I immediately focused on moving moment to moment, on doing everything I had to do to help her.''

Robbins and Travers have nothing but praise for Cooper and the staff of the Praxair Cancer Center at Danbury Hospital. "Danbury Hospital literally saved my life,'' Travers said.

Within three days, Travers began to feel much better. But after a few weeks of treatment there, the couple faced a second crisis — though her lungs were clear of fluid and her energy levels were high, Travers' leukemia was not going into remission.

"That was the one time I thought, 'I'm not going to make this,'?'' Travers said. "Then I said to myself, 'It's not over yet.'?''

So Travers and Robbins turned to Plan B. That took them to Sloan-Kettering and Dr. Stephen Nimer. The course of treatment they chose was a bone marrow transplant.

Under the procedure, the patient gets very high dosages of chemotherapy — enough to kill the cancer, but also enough to destroy the bone marrow, the material that makes blood cells. A donor provides new bone marrow, which takes up roots in the patient's bones and begins making blood cells anew.

None of Travers relatives were a close enough match to make the transplant work. But through a national registry of bone marrow donors, doctors found someone whose marrow matched Travers' marrow in nine out of 10 markers — ''close enough for folk music,'' Travers said.

In April. Travers underwent the transplant. She does not know who donated the marrow. "Whoever she was, she did a good job,'' Travers said.

Cooper, of Danbury Hospital, said that even five years ago, Travers might not have been considered a candidate for a bone marrow transplant because of her age. But because of dramatic improvements in patient care and in the delivery of the marrow, age is much less of a factor today.

"Along with chronological age, you look as things like general health and will and enthusiasm,'' Cooper said. "But the techniques have improved tremendously.''

Travers also received intensive chemotherapy, treatment that leaves many patients drained and nauseous. But Travers — who wore a "Chemo Sabe" T-shirt at Sloan-Kettering — said the treatments didn't bother her much.

"I have good innards,'' Travers said. "That made a big difference.''

The chemicals, she said, "were like mother's milk to me."

But because the transplant destroyed her immune system, Trevor had to stay in isolation at Sloan- Kettering for five weeks so she wouldn't develop an infection. Her husband slept in a bed in her hospital room for all five weeks, providing round-the-clock attentive care.

"He's been magnificent,'' Travers said. "He's been what you would want someone to be in this situation. He just gave and gave and gave.''

And all their friends rallied around them, taking care of all the essentials — feeding the cats and dog, house-sitting and performing many other small chores that need to be done to keep the outside world running.

"I heard Kurt Vonnegut say that you don't get through life just with your family,'' Travers said. "You need a gang.''

One of the best gifts Travers got in the hospital, she said, was a video montage of her home — all its rooms, all its windows. "I just missed things like hearing the birds sing,'' she said.

Once home, she began to slowly recover. Because she had spent so much time in bed, her leg muscles were weak. She's spending time on an exercise machine to strengthen them.

But her leukemia is gone, her blood counts back to normal. Her husband is learning now that he doesn't have to do the laundry or the cooking all the time — that his wife is healthy again.

"I have to keep telling Ethan now that I'm not sick, that he needs to be a bit more selfish,'' Travers said. "Being a caregiver is exhausting. And I don't want him sick.''

The lessons of the past year haven't fully made themselves clear.

"I think I've learned patience,'' Travers said. "I'm not a patient person. My basic instinct is to say 'You can't tell me what to do.' But if you have to wait in a doctor's office for two hours, you can sit around biting your lip and getting upset. Or you can read a book.''

Most of all, Travers and her husband have gained a sense of gratitude. "Every day we have is a day we hoped and prayed for, and we are so grateful for,'' Robbins said.

And Peter, Paul and Mary will be back on the road in 2006. She acknowledges the group's career has been an extraordinary one.

"When we first started singing together, we knew we had something,'' she said. "But we were thinking it was maybe something we could earn a living with. I don't think we knew it would be as big as it got.''

And in the past year, that bigness — the thousands of concerts over four decades, the millions of listeners — brought her returns she never thought she'd get. Or need.

"Music travels much farther than you travel, and it touches people you never met,'' Travers said. "Whatever comfort you gave people, they offer that comfort back. And it works. It's good medicine.''
http://news.newstimes.com/story.php?...=Entertainment

[JackSpratts]

Surveillance

Report Finds Cover-Up in an F.B.I. Terror Case
Eric Lichtblau

Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation mishandled a Florida terror investigation, falsified documents in the case in an effort to cover repeated missteps and retaliated against an agent who first complained about the problems, Justice Department investigators have concluded.

In one instance, someone altered dates on three F.B.I. forms using correction fluid to conceal an apparent violation of federal wiretap law, according to a draft report of an investigation by the Justice Department inspector general's office obtained by The New York Times. But investigators were unable to determine who altered the documents.

The agent who first alerted the F.B.I. to problems in the case, a veteran undercover operative named Mike German, was "retaliated against" by his boss, who was angered by the agent's complaints and stopped using him for prestigious assignments in training new undercover agents, the draft report concluded.

Mr. German's case first became public last year, as he emerged as the latest in a string of whistle-blowers at the bureau who said they had been punished and effectively silenced for voicing concerns about the handling of terror investigations and other matters since Sept. 11, 2001.

The inspector general's draft report, dated Nov. 15 and awaiting final review, validated most of Mr. German's central accusations in the case. But the former agent, who left the bureau last year after he said his career had been derailed by the Florida episode, said he felt more disappointment than vindication.

"More than anything else, I'm saddened by all this," Mr. German said in an interview. "I still love the F.B.I., and I know that there are good, honest, hard-working agents out there trying to do the right thing, and this hurts all of them."

Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., has emphasized repeatedly, both publicly and in private messages to his staff, that employees are encouraged to come forward with reports of wrongdoing and that he will not tolerate retaliation against whistle-blowers.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has been a frequent critic of the bureau, said of Mr. German: "Unfortunately, this is just another case in a long line of F.B.I. whistle-blowers who have had their careers derailed because the F.B.I. couldn't tolerate criticism."

Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, said the bureau had not been briefed on the findings. But Mr. Kortan said that when the F.B.I. received the report, "if either misconduct or other wrongdoing is found, we will take appropriate action."

Ann Beeson, associate legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the inspector general's findings, coming just days after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from an earlier F.B.I. whistle-blower, pointed to the need for tougher measures to protect those who report abuse. "With courts reluctant to protect whistle- blowers, it is crucial that Congress pass additional protections," Ms. Beeson said.

Mr. German's case dates to 2002, when the F.B.I. division in Tampa opened a terror investigation into a lead that laundered proceeds, possibly connected to a drug outfit, might be used to finance terrorists overseas. The F.B.I. was considering initiating an undercover operation to follow the lead, and Mr. German, who had extensive experience infiltrating militias, skinheads and other groups, was asked to take part.

But in the coming months, Mr. German would alert F.B.I. officials that the Orlando agent handling the case had "so seriously mishandled" the investigation that a prime opportunity to expose a terrorist financing plot had been wasted. He said agents had not adequately pursued leads, had failed to document important meetings with informants, and had tolerated violations of rules and federal law on the handling of wiretaps.

The report, in one of its few dissents from Mr. German's accusations, said it could not confirm that the F.B.I. had missed an important chance to expose terrorism. Rather, it cited two findings by the bureau that the prime informant had misled agents about the terrorism angle in the case and that "there was no viable terrorism case."

Nonetheless, the inspector general found that the F.B.I. had "mishandled and mismanaged" the investigation, partly through the failure to document important developments for months at a time. The report also found that supervisors were aware of problems in the case but did not take prompt action to correct them.

Moreover, after Mr. German raised concerns about the lack of documentation, an unnamed agent in Orlando "improperly added inaccurate dates to the investigative reports in order to make it appear as though the reports were prepared earlier," the inspector general found.

In addition, someone used correction fluid to backdate by two months a set of forms that the main informant had signed as part of a bugging operation, in which he agreed that he had to be present for all undercover taping.

The backdating was significant, the inspector general said, because the informant had taped a 2002 meeting with several suspects but had left the recording device unattended while he went to use the restroom - a violation of federal law.

Mr. German became increasingly vocal within the F.B.I. about what he saw as the bureau's failure to correct missteps, taking his concerns directly to Mr. Mueller in a 2003 e-mail message. His complaints, the inspector general found, led agents in Florida, Washington and Oregon to distance themselves from him.

In the most serious instance, the head of the F.B.I. undercover unit, Jorge Martinez, froze Mr. German out of teaching assignments in undercover training and told one agent that Mr. German would "never work another undercover case," the report said.

Mr. Martinez told investigators that he did not remember making the statements but that if he had, it was a "knee-jerk reaction but did not mean to indicate I was retaliating against him," the report said.

The inspector general disagreed. It said in the report that Mr. Martinez's treatment of Mr. German amounted to improper retaliation and "discrimination that could have a chilling effect on whistle-blowing."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/po...l?pagewanted=2





White House and McCain Are Near Deal on Torture Bill
Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger

The White House has all but abandoned its effort to persuade Senator John McCain to exempt Central Intelligence Agency employees from legislation barring inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody. But a top presidential aide continued to negotiate a deal on Tuesday that would offer covert officers some protection from prosecution, administration and Senate officials said.

The talks between Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, and Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, took place by telephone Tuesday because Mr. McCain was on a book tour in Maine, said Eileen McMenamin, the senator's spokeswoman. The two men met at the White House last Thursday night.

White House officials and Ms. McMenamin refused to discuss the negotiations, saying they were private conversations. But administration officials concede that Mr. McCain's provision, which would also require a uniform standard on how to interrogate detainees, stands a strong chance of becoming law, despite a White House threat to veto any legislation containing it. The measure has already passed the Senate, 90 to 9, and senior House Republican staff members say it would probably pass by a large margin in the House.

Faced with that reality, administration officials said, Mr. Hadley has now retreated to seeking narrower language that could make it harder to prosecute intelligence officers charged with violating torture standards.

Mr. Bush, speaking to reporters Tuesday morning, repeated his statement that "we do not torture." He added that the administration would do all it could, within the law, to protect its citizens from terrorists. His spokesman, Scott McClellan, refused Tuesday to discuss how Mr. Bush defines torture, or to say how the United States ensures that prisoners it turns over to foreign nations are not tortured.

"I'm not going to get into talking about these issues because it could compromise things in an ongoing war on terrorism," Mr. McClellan said. Later, he called the question of how the United States monitors the treatment of prisoners an "intelligence matter" that he could not discuss.

Mr. McCain is balking at agreeing to any kind of exemption for intelligence officials, members of his staff say. Instead, he has offered to include some language, modeled after military standards, under which soldiers can provide a defense if a "reasonable" person could have concluded that he or she was following a lawful order about how to treat prisoners. The senator's offer was first reported Saturday by The Wall Street Journal.

The negotiations between Mr. Hadley and Mr. McCain appear to be coming to a head. Four top House and Senate negotiators, meeting Tuesday to hammer out a military budget bill in conference committee, discussed Mr. McCain's measure and a handful of other contentious issues. But one of the negotiators, Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who heads the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters earlier in the day, "We think we're going to have a good outcome for all parties."

As the House returned to work after a two-week recess, a bitter partisan fight continues to rage over the war in Iraq. Republicans held a news conference to praise American progress in Iraq, while Democrats took credit for changing the public debate and lambasted President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for failing to outline a specific proposal for victory.

In the House, Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip, complained to reporters that Mr. Cheney "apparently wants to continue the option of torture as a national policy, and therefore the defense bill hasn't moved."

Mr. Hoyer said Democrats would stand behind Senator McCain. "He ought to stick to his guns - he's right," Mr. Hoyer said, adding, "We ought to make it clear that the policy of the United States is, we're going to follow not only international law but we're going to pursue our own values, and torture is not one of our values."

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/po...rtner=homepage





Evidence Obtained by Torture Can't Be Used, British Court Rules

The British government can't use evidence against terror suspects that may have been obtained by torture, the country's highest court ruled.

The House of Lords today overturned a 2004 appeal court decision that permitted authorities to use evidence in some kinds of terrorism cases even if the information may have been extracted by torture outside Britain. The appeal was brought by a group of men who were previously held without charge at London's high- security Belmarsh prison.

``The duty not to countenance the use of torture by admission of evidence so obtained in judicial proceedings must be regarded as paramount and that to allow its admission would shock the conscience, abuse or degrade the proceedings and involve the state in moral defilement,'' Lord Carswell said today.

Both the U.K. and U.S. governments are facing pressure over the treatment of terror suspects at home and abroad. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and London-based Liberty have accused them of condoning torture by failing to abide by a United Nations convention, ratified by both countries, which prohibits cruel, degrading or inhumane acts against detainees.

The Algerian and other North African nationals involved in today's case last year won a House of Lords ruling that detaining them indefinitely without charge breached European human rights laws.

Guantanamo Bay

Lawyers for the men claim they were being held on evidence that may have been obtained by the torture of other persons in foreign countries, including at the U.S. military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in Afghanistan.

The U.K. Court of Appeal ruled in August 2004 that such material was admissible in deportation hearings before an immigrations tribunal, as long as the British government hadn't procured or participated in the torture. That tribunal, the Special Immigrations Appeals Commission, isn't bound by the same evidence rules as other U.K. courts, where evidence obtained by torture wouldn't be admissible, according to the 2004 ruling.

Human rights activists claim admitting such material in any proceeding would jeopardize the integrity of the judicial process and introduce unreliable evidence.

Today's judgment also comes amid increasing European concern over the U.S. government's ``rendition'' policy, where suspected terrorists are apprehended and sent to other countries for questioning. Human rights groups claim the practice encourages torture and violates international law.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended rendition on Dec. 5 before leaving for a tour of European nations, saying that it had been used ``for decades'' to bring terror suspects to justice.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...op_world_news#





Not Guilty Verdicts in Florida Terror Trial Are Setback for U.S.
Eric Lichtblau

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 - In a major defeat for law enforcement officials, a jury in Florida failed to return guilty verdicts Tuesday on any of 51 criminal counts against a former Florida professor and three co-defendants accused of operating a North American front for Palestinian terrorists.

The former professor, Sami al-Arian, a fiery advocate for Palestinian causes who became a lightning rod for criticism nationwide over his vocal anti-Israeli stances, was found not guilty on eight criminal counts related to terrorist support, perjury and immigration violations.

The jury deadlocked on the remaining nine counts against him after deliberating for 13 days, and it did not return any guilty verdicts against the three other defendants in the case.

"This was a political prosecution from the start, and I think the jury realized that," Linda Moreno, one of Mr. Arian's defense lawyers, said in a telephone interview. "They looked over at Sami al-Arian; they saw a man who had taken unpopular positions on issues thousands of miles away, but they realized he wasn't a terrorist. The truth is a powerful thing."

Federal officials in Washington expressed surprise at the verdict in a case they had pursued for years.

The trial, lasting more than five months, hinged on the question of whether Mr. Arian's years of work in the Tampa area in support of Palestinian independence crossed the threshold from protected free speech and political advocacy to illegal support for terrorists.

Prosecutors, who had been building a case against Mr. Arian for 10 years, relied on some 20,000 hours of taped conversations culled from wiretaps on Mr. Arian and his associates. Officials said he had helped finance and direct terrorist attacks in Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while using his faculty position teaching computer engineering at the University of South Florida as a cover for his terrorist activities.

But ultimately, the jury in Tampa that heard the case found him not guilty of the charge of conspiring to kill people overseas, and it deadlocked on three of the other most serious terrorism charges.

Justice Department officials said they were considering whether to re-try Mr. Arian on the counts on which the jury did not reach verdicts.

While expressing disappointment in the verdicts, the officials said the department had a strong track record of success in prosecuting terrorists, including the separate convictions last week of a Northern Virginia student and a Pakistani immigrant in New York on charges of supporting Al Qaeda.

"We remain focused on the important task at hand, which is to protect our country through our ongoing vigorous prosecution of terrorism cases," said Tasia Scolinos, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department. "While we respect the jury's verdict, we stand by the evidence we presented in court against Sami al-Arian and his co-defendants."

In bringing the case against Mr. Arian in 2003, the department relied on the easing of legal restrictions under the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act to present years of wiretaps on the defendants in a criminal context.

In the conversations cited by prosecutors, Mr. Arian was heard raising money for Palestinian causes, hailing recently completed attacks against Israel with associates overseas, calling suicide bombers "martyrs" and referring to Jews as "monkeys and swine" who would be "damned" by Allah.

But much of the conversation and activity used by prosecutors predated the 1995 designation by the United States of Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a terrorist group, a designation that prohibited Americans from supporting it. Several legal analysts and law professors said Tuesday that the government appeared to have overreached in its case.

"I think the government's case was somewhat stale because a lot of these events dated back 10 years, and the case was so complex that it was all over the board," said Peter Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island who has studied terrorism prosecutions.

For the prosecutors, Professor Margulies said, "this is clearly embarrassing, and they were clearly outmaneuvered by some very good defense attorneys."

David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University who represented Mr. Arian's brother-in-law in an earlier deportation case that also gained wide exposure, said the verdict amounted to a rejection of the government's "sweeping guilt by association theory."

In the mid-1990's, news coverage of Mr. Arian drew attention to his opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and led some critics to label the University of South Florida as "Jihad U."

Many Muslims in Florida continued to support him, however, and, as an influential Muslim activist, he continued to have access to the most senior Democratic and Republican officials, meeting with Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and others.

Criticism accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks, particularly in light of Mr. Arian's appearance on a program on the Fox News Channel just weeks later, in which the host, Bill O'Reilly, confronted him with his past statements calling for "death to Israel."

Mr. Arian's indictment in 2003 led to his firing by the university, a move that had been debated for years. And the disclosure of his close dealings with Palestinian militants as cited in the indictment prompted even some university backers to rethink their support for him.

Family members of Mr. Arian and the other three defendants - Sameeh T. Hammoudeh, Ghassan Ballut and Hatim Fariz - wept in court on Tuesday as the verdicts were read, and Muslims in the Tampa area planned a prayer service and celebration on Tuesday night at the local mosque Mr. Arian helped found.

Mr. Arian "loves America, and he believes in the system, and thank God the system did not fail him," his wife, Nahla al-Arian, said outside the federal courthouse as throngs of family members, supporters and lawyers celebrated the results.

"Not a single guilty verdict," said Ms. Moreno, one of Mr. Arian's two defense lawyers. "I have to say, that was more 'not guilty' verdicts in those 20 minutes than I've heard in my 25 years as a defense attorney."

Mr. Arian is to remain in jail on an immigration matter, but Ms. Moreno said the defense would probably file a motion next week asking to have him released on bond.

For the local Muslim community, the verdicts are "a huge relief, and people are just jubilant," said Ahmed Bedier, director of the Tampa chapter of the Council on American- Islamic Relations.

Mr. Bedier, who attended much of the trial, said he had doubted whether Mr. Arian could receive a fair trial in Tampa, especially in light of the publicity his case had generated, but "the jury proved us wrong," he said in a telephone interview.

"This was a very important case for us in that it tested both the Patriot Act and the right to political activity," Mr. Bedier said. "The jury is sending a statement that even in post-9/11 America, the justice system works, the burden of proof is on the prosecution, and political association - while it may be unpopular to associate oneself with controversial views - is still not illegal in this country."

Lynn Waddell contributed reporting from Tampa, Fla.,for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/na...rtner=homepage





EU Trade-Off On Phone Records

EUROPEAN justice ministers have sealed a compromise deal on controversial anti-terror measures that increase police access to phone and internet records.

The deal, clinched by Britain as EU president, lays out the kinds of data that can be retained, for how long, under what conditions and the types of crime that would allow Europe's authorities to access it.

"I am very pleased indeed that we achieved an agreement today," British Home Secretary Charles Clarke said after the deal was secured at a two-day meeting of EU justice and interior ministers in Brussels.

"We've agreed on a system that gives flexibility to EU member states that want to go further, and we've agreed a review procedure to keep raising the amount of material we're able to collect," he said.

Despite the difficult and complex nature of the talks, only Ireland, Slovakia and Slovenia were opposed.

The deal keeps Britain on target to fast-track the measures through the European Parliament, the EU executive commission and the council of member states before its presidency ends on December 31, Mr Clarke said.

"The impact of that will be very significant, as it will make a very clear statement that all the institutions of the European Union - the council, commission and parliament - stand firm in the fight against terrorism," he said.

Britain tried to build on the momentum from the Europe-wide outpouring of sympathy for the London public transport attacks on July 7, which killed 56 people, to get the new anti-terror measures passed.

Under the deal, they would oblige businesses in the telecommunications field to keep details about callers, such as the number they called where and when, for six months to two years. The rules would apply to land telephone lines and mobile phones, and internet data such as email, but police would not have access to the conversation or messages itself.

The measures have raised deep concern about privacy rights and who will pay for the costs such action will impose on businesses.

Indeed the plans still have to be accepted by the parliament, which has so far only agreed to allow less flexible laws, by the middle of next week and then pass in a vote in a full plenary session in Strasbourg in mid-December.

"I hope the parliament at the Strasbourg plenary will agree, but I haven't got any assurance of that, because there can't be any such assurance until there is a vote," Mr Clarke, said.

"I know there is a very strong desire in the leadership of the parliament as a whole."

EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini has committed to arguing strenuously in favour of the member states' package before the commission, Mr Clarke said.

The deal took some by surprise, especially given the vehemence of opposition among critics of the British proposals.

According to one diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, Ireland's main contribution to debate had been to say this was the wrong legal basis and Ireland would sue if it is adopted.

Such legal action remains a possibility.

Another diplomat summed up the compromise thus: "It falls short of expectations but it allows member states more flexibility" to apply their own rules, he said.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html




Italian Anti-Terror Law Forces Cybercafe Owners To Take Names
AP

In a heavily immigrant neighborhood near the main railway station, Ahmed Sohel points dejectedly to the empty computer terminals at the modest storefront where he sells Internet and telephone service.

``Before, I was full of Internet clients, now I have no one left,'' said Sohel, a gentle, middle-aged immigrant from Bangladesh.

A new Italian law requires businesses that offer Internet access to the public, like Sohel's, to ask clients for identification and log the owner's name and the document type.

Cybercafes also must make and keep a photocopy of the ID and be registered with their local police station, dictates the law, part of an anti-terror package approved after the July terrorist bombings in London.

Many cybercafe owners say the law has increased their work load and decreased their profits.

``We're selling the store, and in part this is the reason,'' said Dolores Cabrera, who owns Kokonet, an Internet storefront across town near the Vatican. About half Cabrera's prospective clients either don't have their passport with them or aren't willing to show it, she said.

Enforcement is spotty at many cafes, however, and besides cybercafe owners and civil libertarians, the law appears to bother only people who fear scrutiny by the authorities, such as illegal immigrants.

Angela De Angelis, a 21-year-old Italian student using a cybercafe near the Vatican, was dubious about the new law's worth.

``I think it's all right if it serves to protect us, though sincerely, I can't see how it's useful,'' she said.

Italy is the only European Union country to require Internet cafes to record ID information on clients, said Richard Nash, secretary general of EuroISPA, which represents Internet providers in Europe.

Non-member Switzerland, however, does requires people who go online at cybercafes to show IDs, according to Robin Gross, of the U.S. civil liberties group IP Justice.

Several Asian countries and cities, most prominently China and including the Indian technology hub of Bangalore, require registration at cybercafes.

But the leaders of some of those nations tend to be thinking at least as much about inhibiting speech as preventing terror attacks in making the requirement. In Vietnam, Internet cafes also are required to block access to Web sites deemed subversive and pornographic.

The Internet's potential as a terrorist tool was highlighted by the 2002 kidnapping and murder in Pakistan of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose abductors used e-mail to issue demands and send photos. However, those messages were traced to a computer in a private residence, not an Internet cafe. Pakistan does not require cybercafe users to register.

Daniele Capezzone, a leader of Italy's Radical Party that often campaigns on human and civil rights issues, opposes the new law and explains why he thinks it has stirred little debate.

``Two reasons: one, the political class isn't talking about it, and two, the media hasn't shined a light on it,'' he said.

Cybercafe owners who rely in large part on a clientele that may not be in the country legally are often opting to turn a blind eye.

``Fifty percent of the people who come for Internet don't want to show their document,'' Sohel said, opening his registry book and pointing to where a few clients among those who used the computers left their names but not their passport numbers. As for successfully photocopying IDs, he said customer compliance is rare.

Giuseppe Italia, whose office at Rome's central police station oversees the application of the new law in the province of Rome, acknowledges that cybercafes that cater to immigrants might not be complying consistently.

Sabino Acquaviva, a sociologist at the University of Padua who specializes in terrorism, says compliance is indeed haphazard.

``People either won't register their documents, and others will show fake ones,'' he said. ``I think this law is useless.''

An added problem is that police cannot sanction violators -- license suspension or revocation are among the stipulated penalties -- unless they have approved a cybercafe owner's license, Italia said.

As of mid-November, only about 130 cybercafe operators in the province of Rome had been approved and one rejected by police with more than 950 still pending.

Italia did not return a call seeking updated information this week, but the Internet magazine Punto Informatico reported on its Web site that seven Internet parlors in Florence were temporarily closed last month for not complying with the law and at least one was shuttered indefinitely for not recording clients' names and failing to register with police.

Some cybercafe owners bemoan another requirement of the new law: They must be able, if necessary, to track the sites visited by their clients. And some bellyache about the added expense. Contents of people's e-mail is, however, supposed to remain private and can only be made available to law enforcement through a court order.

Italy also obliges telecommunications companies to keep traffic data and European ministers agreed last week to require the carriers to retain records of calls and e-mails for a maximum of two years. The European Parliament's two largest groups endorsed the data retention initiative on Wednesday despite complaints from privacy advocates and telecoms, and the full body is expected to adopt a bill next week.

Back at the cybercafes, there isn't much confidence among workers that such measures could help prevent a terror attack.

``These people caused the Twin Towers to collapse,'' said Edoardo Righi, a computer tech at a store near the tourist-rich neighborhood of Campo dei Fiori. ``They're not going to stop because they can't send an e-mail.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...y/13350888.htm





Patriot Act May Be Renewed Without Reforms
Declan McCullagh

A frenzy of last-minute negotiations over the Patriot Act, conducted behind closed doors as a Dec. 31 expiration date nears, has yielded a four-year renewal of the law and no substantial reforms.

Sen. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who has been a point person during this year's debate over the fate of the complex and controversial law, said Wednesday that he and his counterparts in the House of Representatives have agreed to a deal that could pave the way for reauthorization of the Patriot Act by next week.

After reaching an impasse with House Republicans who held out for a longer seven- year renewal, Specter said he asked President Bush to intervene. "The vice president helped out a little yesterday and after a lot of haggling, I signed the conference report at 9:00 p.m.," Specter said in a statement sent to CNET News.com. "They brought it to my house."

But a band of six Democratic and Republican senators--who lodged strong objections to the draft conference report prepared last month--is likely to block a vote unless their concerns about privacy and overly broad surveillance are addressed. Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and member of the group, said through a spokesman on Wednesday that he had not reviewed the final text.

Patriot Act's e- surveillance

Only 16 sections of the massive law, enacted in October 2001, are set to expire on Dec. 31. Five deal with electronic surveillance and computer crime:

Sec. 202: Computer hacking is a "predicate offense" permitting police to seek certain types of wiretaps.

Sec. 203: Federal police can share information gleaned from a wiretap or Carnivore- like surveillance device with spy agencies. Previously, there was no explicit authorization for such data sharing.

Sec. 212: Internet providers and other communications providers can divulge information to police more readily. Specifically, customer records and other data may be legally handed over to police in an emergency.

Sec. 215: Secret court orders can be used to obtain records or "tangible items" from any person or business if the FBI claims a link to terrorism. The unlucky recipient of the secret order is gagged; disclosing its existence is punishable by a prison term.

Sec. 217: Computer service providers may eavesdrop on electronic trespassers legally. Police can be authorized to "listen in" on what's happening on the provider's network.
Of the 16 portions of the massive law that are set to expire, five deal with electronic surveillance and computer crime. Those permit secret court orders that the FBI can use to obtain business records; authorize more information sharing between Internet providers and police; and list computer hacking as an offense granting increased eavesdropping authority.

One important but unanswered question is how much support the group of six senators can muster among their colleagues. At a press conference last month, the group called for reforming portions of the Patriot Act that deal with library and other business record acquisitions, secret "National Security Letters" that have been used against Internet service providers, and delayed search warrants that permit police to secretly enter a home and notify the person weeks or months later.

Specter's office did not make the text of the final bill available. But according to interviews with staffers and lobbyists, not one of those three changes has been made.

Tim Edgar, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Specter's announcement was "designed to put a lot of pressure on the Senate to go along with an extremely flawed conference report. We'll see if they bite."

The group of six includes Democrats Richard Durbin of Illinois and Kenneth Salazar of Colorado; and Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska; Larry Craig of Idaho; and John Sununu of New Hampshire. They backed a Patriot Act reform plan, called the Safe Act, that is still stuck in committee.

One person who likely will wield strong influence over whether Democratic senators side with the Bush administration or the group of six is Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, who spent Wednesday conferring with members of his party. "I'm anxiously awaiting an answer," Specter said. (Leahy's office said late in the day that no decision had been made.)

Bush has repeatedly called for a full renewal of the Patriot Act, regularly lacing speeches with phrases like: "Our law enforcement needs this vital legislation to protect our citizens." The White House is expected to increase the pressure on Republican senators not to defect to the group of six.

As a way to twist arms, House Republicans are expected to schedule a vote before Christmas, which would let them and the Bush administration characterize the Senate as obstructionist. A spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee said a floor vote had been anticipated for Thursday but has been delayed: "It won't be on the floor tomorrow. That was our hope earlier today, but it's not going to happen."

History of controversy
From the time a preliminary version was introduced in the Senate days after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Patriot Act has been dogged by controversy.

When the final vote was held the following month, members of Congress were required to vote on the bill without a lot of time to read it. The measure "has been debated in the most undemocratic way possible, and it is not worthy of this institution," Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said at the time. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, added later: "Almost all significant legislation since 9/11 has been rushed through in a tone of urgency with reference to the tragedy."

Even though the Patriot Act was approved by overwhelming majorities in both chambers of Congress, some legislators voted for it with the understanding that key portions would be revisited in 2005. Early this year, the Senate and the House of Representatives began a series of hearings on the law. One portion that has drawn scrutiny is section 215, which permits secret court orders to be used to obtain records or "tangible items" from any person or organization if the FBI claims a link to terrorism. The recipient of the secret order is gagged, and disclosing its existence is punished by a prison term. Section 215 is set to expire on Dec. 31.

Another is the portion of the Patriot Act that requires Internet service providers and any other type of communication provider--including telephone companies--to comply with secret "National Security Letters" from the FBI. Those letters can ask for information about subscribers--including home addresses, what telephone calls were made, e-mail subject lines and logs of what Web sites were visited.

Such letters are not new: Before the Patriot Act was enacted, they could be used in investigations of suspected terrorists and spies. But after the change to the law, the FBI needed only to say that a letter may be "relevant" to a terrorist-related investigation. No court approval is required.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on Nov. 2 about the constitutionality of National Security Letters--which, under current law, don't even permit the recipient to consult an attorney. That portion of the Patriot Act is not scheduled to expire.

Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the current debate over the Patriot Act is important but ultimately limited because even the proposed modifications are modest. "To some extent it feels like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic," Bankston said. "At the end, it's still going to be the Patriot Act. It's going to be a broad enhancement of police power, of law enforcement and investigative powers."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5986379.html





Patients Fear Safety Risk From Electronic Notes
Press Association

Health campaigners fear that the switch from paper to electronic patient records will put patient confidentiality at risk, researchers said today.

Concern that medical records will fall into the wrong hands is greatest among groups representing people with disabilities, HIV or mental health problems, who already face stigmatisation. They fear that if confidential information is intercepted electronically that their members could face greater discrimination.

The findings come in a poll of more than 200 organisations worldwide, including almost 50 in England, by Health and Social Campaigners News International (HSCNI) - a global network of patient groups.

The HSCNI found that despite general enthusiasm about the electronic medical records technology, but 64% of the groups in England said they were worried that patients would suffer a loss of confidentiality and privacy.

The groups, including the mental health charity Mind and others representing patients with autistic spectrum disorders, said people believed electronic records could mean medical details leaking out to a wider audience. A Mind spokesman said: "Everyone is strongly opposed and worried."

A third of the groups in England said they believed the technology was not yet good enough to develop a comprehensive electronic medical records system.

Just six of the 47 groups surveyed in England thought the technology was capable of improving doctor-patient relationships, or would help patients manage their own care. And 62% of groups believed patients should be able to decide who can access their own electronic record.

There were also concerns about the cost of the records system, which forms part of a £6.2bn NHS IT programme.

A respondent from a cancer patient organisation said: "In the 1980s, the NHS in the Hampshire area lost millions of pounds trying, and failing, to install a comprehensive, linked, and interactive computer system. Will another foray into this subject mean more money and administrative tasks, and less nursing care?"

Earlier this year the British Medical Association conference heard fears over the confidentiality of the system and ways in which the government and computer hackers could abuse it. A poll of almost 2,000 patients by the association also found that 75% had concerns about the security of information on the care records system.

A Department of Health spokeswoman said it had published a care records guarantee, which made clear that only NHS staff involved in treating a particular patient would have access to that person's electronic medical record.

She added: "The guarantee also ensures patients keep control over who has access to their electronic health record. Very soon, we shall be undertaking an England-wide public information campaign that explains how security and confidentiality measures are built into the electronic health record."
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/new...654157,00.html





Report Warns Against Merging Federal Information, Privacy Ombudsmen
Jim Bronskill

Merging the offices of the information and privacy watchdogs would take some of the bite out of their roles, warns a federally commissioned report.

Former Supreme Court justice Gerard La Forest urges Ottawa to focus instead on making information and privacy laws work better for the public.

The information commissioner is an ombudsman for Canadians who request files under the federal access law, while the privacy commissioner handles complaints about abuses of personal information.

A full merger, or the appointment of a single commissioner to both offices, "would likely have a detrimental impact" on the policy aims of the access and privacy laws, La Forest's report says.

He concludes combining the functions would not save much money and could leave one commissioner with too much work.

La Forest calls on Ottawa to "do much more" to foster compliance with information and privacy obligations. Concerning access to records, he says the government should:

-Make it clear to officials that information should be provided to requesters unless there is a clear and compelling reason not to do so.

-Develop better information management systems.

-Provide incentives for complying with the law.

With respect to privacy, La Forest says the government should pay greater attention to the implications of programs involving the sharing, matching and outsourcing to private companies of personal information about Canadians.

He also urges better training for access and privacy officials who process inquiries from the public.

"Merging the offices, or appointing one commissioner to preside over both, would do little to respond to these challenges," his report says.

The combined budgets of the two offices for 2004-2005 were $15 million, representing less than 50 cents a Canadian.

In light of "the modest costs" associated with the two commissioners, as well as the challenges in achieving efficiencies through a merger, it seems unlikely any potential savings could be justified, the report adds.

The Conservatives and New Democrats have made access-to-information reform a key plank of their proposed ethics packages.

A spokesman for Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, the minister responsible for access and privacy policy, had no immediate comment on La Forest's report.

The government appointed the former judge earlier this year to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the current model of separate commissioners.

The provincial information and privacy commissioners and many of the experts he consulted generally agreed the single-commission model works well in the provinces.

"It does not necessarily follow, however, that it would be wise to switch to this model at the federal level," the report says.

A spokeswoman for Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said Wednesday that La Forest's report was "a wise and thoughtful study that does justice to the many complex issues that would arise with a merger of the two offices."

Her office had earlier concluded that "fusing the two offices is not an appropriate measure at present," citing more pressing priorities - namely a review of the "woefully deficient" and outdated Privacy Act.

Information Commissioner John Reid once supported the idea of combining the functions, but said recently he is convinced the dual-commissioner model is far less open to abuse.

Lately Reid has pressed the government to focus on reforming the Access to Information Act.
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/ne...tent=n113057A#





ACLU Joins Fight Against Internet Surveillance
Caron Carlson

The American Civil Liberties Union today joined an expanding group of organizations filing lawsuits against a new rule that increases the FBI's power to conduct surveillance on the Internet.

The rule being challenged is one the Federal Communications Commission adopted in September, granting an FBI request to expand wiretapping authority to online communications.

The commission ruled that the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act applies to voice-over-IP providers whose services can connect with the public switched telephone network.

The ACLU charged in a petition to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the ruling goes beyond the authority of CALEA, which specifically exempted information services.

"The ACLU seeks review of the CALEA order on the grounds that it exceeds the FCC's statutory authority and is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, unsupported by substantial evidence, or otherwise contrary to law," the organization charged in its petition.

Bolstering the challengers' position, the FCC decided last year that Internet communications like those offered by Pulver.com fall under the regulatory classification of "information services" and therefore are not subject to traditional telephone mandates.

In October, Sun Microsystems Inc., the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Pulver.com, Comptel, and the American Libraries Association filed a petition with the same court.

Read more here about protests from Sun and other groups challenging the FCC's stance on VOIP surveillance.

The coalition maintains that FCC rules will stifle innovation, require the re-engineering of private IP networks at a huge expense and weaken the security of the Internet.

The diverse organizations also warned that the expanded eavesdropping rules represent only the beginning of what will become a broader effort to regulate the Internet.

Separately, The American Council on Education filed a court challenge arguing that compliance with the rules would require colleges and universities to spend $7 billion in upgrading switches and routers.

Some lawmakers have already joined their voices with the opposition. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., cautioned that the mandates could give the government the authority to dictate software designs, drive innovators offshore and threaten security as well as privacy.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1895253,00.asp





Gone Spear-Phishin'
Timothy L. O'Brien

ABOUT a year and a half ago, Amnon Jackont, an Israeli mystery novelist and Tel Aviv University history professor, became ensnared in a mystery of his very own: friends and students were receiving e-mail messages from him that he had never written. A few months later, unpublished paragraphs and chapters from a book he was writing were plucked from his computer and began appearing on Israeli Web sites.

Mr. Jackont took his computer to the Israeli police last fall and was told to reformat it. But his problems persisted. So the police examined his computer more closely and discovered that a malicious program known as a Trojan horse lay hidden deep inside and had hijacked the machine from a remote location.

"When they followed the link they found a lot of goodies, but they wouldn't tell me anything," Mr. Jackont said. "All they told me was that they found something big, something that was bigger than just me being harassed."

In May, Israeli investigators opened their bag of goodies, disclosing that the Trojan horse on Mr. Jackont's computer had also galloped onto the networks of about 60 other Israeli companies, unleashing the biggest corporate espionage scandal in Israeli history. Prosecutors indicted members of three of the country's largest private investigation firms on criminal fraud charges in July. And some of Israel's most prestigious corporations are now under investigation for possibly stealing information from companies in such assorted fields as military contracting, telephony, cable television, finance, automobile and cigarette importing, journalism and high technology.

While the Israeli victims were diverse, they shared one thing in common: the Trojan horses that penetrated their computers came packaged inside a compact disc or an e-mail message that appeared to be from an institution or a person that the victims thought they knew very well. Once the program was installed, it whirred along surreptitiously, logging keystrokes or collecting sensitive documents and passwords before transmitting the information elsewhere.

"It's like the Yom Kippur War or Pearl Harbor in the Israeli business market because of the great surprise the victims had when the problem was exposed," said Haim Wismonsky, a senior prosecutor in the Tel Aviv district attorney's office who is overseeing the investigation. "It's O.K. to get information about competitors from the Internet or from former employees, but using Trojan horses is an entirely other matter."

PEOPLE in many other countries, including the United States, have reason to feel queasy as well, say Internet security specialists and government agencies that monitor cyberfraud. Over the last few years, enticing offers wearing the friendly guise of e-mail solicitations have been at the center of well-publicized frauds known as "phishing," in which con artists troll online for valuable personal and financial information. In September, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a coalition of corporate and law enforcement groups that track identity theft and other online crimes, said it had received more than 13,000 unique reports of phishing schemes in that month alone, up from nearly 7,000 in the month of October last year.

More recently, however, a hybrid form of phishing, dubbed "spear-phishing," has emerged and raised alarms among the digital world's watchdogs. Spear-phishing is a distilled and potentially more potent version of phishing. That's because those behind the schemes bait their hooks for specific victims instead of casting a broad, ill-defined net across cyberspace hoping to catch throngs of unknown victims.

Spear-phishing, say security specialists, is much harder to detect than phishing. Bogus e-mail messages and Web sites not only look like near perfect replicas of communiqués from e-commerce companies like eBay or its PayPal service, banks or even a victim's employer, but are also targeted at people known to have an established relationship with the sender being mimicked.

And spear-phishing is usually not the plaything of random hackers; it is more likely, analysts say, to be linked to sophisticated groups out for financial gain, trade secrets or military information. While hard data about spear-phishing incidents is hard to come by and some security vendors may have a vested interest in hyping potential threats, veteran security analysts describe spear-phishing as one of the more insidious cybercrimes they have encountered and one that has been underpublicized because victims are hesitant to come forward.

"The real challenge of spear-phishing is that it's embarrassing, like head lice," said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute, a group that trains and certifies computer security professionals. "Nobody wants to talk about it and say, 'Look, we're being hurt.' There's never been a better attack method than spear-phishing."

Last spring, staff, faculty and students at the University of Kentucky opened e-mail messages purporting to be from the university's credit union and requesting confidential information to access their accounts (something no financial institution in the country ever seeks via e-mail). University officials snuffed out the scheme, which made use of a computer server based in South Korea, after some recipients realized they had been duped and called the university to complain.

In June, the National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre, a government agency that monitors computer security in the United Kingdom, took the unusual step of publicly warning about a spear-phishing campaign of "targeted Trojan e-mail attacks" aimed at industrial and government computer networks. The warning noted that the e- mail messages appeared to come from a trusted sender, that antivirus software and firewalls didn't protect recipients, and that, in fact, there was no way to completely protect any computer connected to the Internet from the Trojan attacks once recipients opened a bogus e-mail message.

"Files used by the attackers are often publicly available on the Web or have been sent to distribution lists," the warning said. "The attackers are able to receive, trojanise and resend a document within 120 minutes of its release, indicating a high level of sophistication."

About two weeks ago, a more traditional phishing scam infected about 30,000 individual computers worldwide, according to CipherTrust, a computer security firm. Consisting of what CipherTrust said was about 50 million e-mail messages that a German hacker deployed simultaneously, the communiqués purported to come from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and a German intelligence agency and tried to convince recipients to provide personal information and open a file containing a virus. The F.B.I. issued a warning about the scheme and a spokeswoman said that thousands of people swamped the agency with phone calls inquiring about it. The F.B.I. is investigating the matter and declined further comment; a CipherTrust analyst said the phisher's motive remained unclear.

Analysts caution that, despite stepped-up attacks, there is no indication that phishers of any stripe are siphoning torrents of cash out of bank accounts or foraging willy-nilly in any hard drive they choose. But they do note that at the very least the attacks show the vulnerability of sensitive data stored on computer networks, undermine consumer confidence in Web-based transactions, and uproot faith in e-mail, a backbone of electronic commerce and digital communication.

"The problem is not a loss of money or credit, it's a loss of trust," said David Perry, director of global education at Trend Micro Inc., an Internet security firm. "If you open up e-mails and 8 out of 10 of them are from people selling prescription drugs or Nigerian banking scams, then you lose trust and e-mails become the criminals."

At least one veteran fraud investigator in Israel said he wasn't shocked by revelations of widespread spear-phishing and the corporate espionage scandal last spring. "This case is not unconventional," said Boaz Guttman, a lawyer and former head of the cybercrimes unit for the Israeli national police. "Most of the crimes are not reported. The police here and in the United States only know about 5 percent of the cases. Hackers don't take a break, not one minute.

"Everybody is spying against everybody in Israel," added Mr. Guttman, who said he was representing one of the suspects in the Trojan horse investigation but was not authorized to reveal his client's identity. "You cannot be surprised by this because this is the way of life for companies today."

Others, however, had a less subdued reaction to the realities of the investigation when its scale and sprawl first became clear in the spring. "There it was," Mr. Jackont recalled, "we were all in the middle of a hurricane."

The hurricane that enveloped Mr. Jackont probably began spinning, Israeli investigators told him, when an e-mail message arrived that appeared to come from a student asking him to review an essay, or from another e-mail address that looked familiar. (Because Mr. Jackont had his computer swept clean in his unsuccessful early effort to oust the digital hijacker, all records of the initial intrusion disappeared.)

By November of last year, as investigators scrutinized Mr. Jackont's computer woes more closely, his stepdaughter, Natalya Wieseltier, stepped forward with a key bit of evidence. According to records of the Israeli investigation, Ms. Wieseltier told authorities that she received a Trojan-infested e-mail message bearing the address of gur_r@zahav.net.il, which she believed came from a friend.

But her friend's e-mail was actually gur-r@zahav.net.il. As Israeli investigators traced the origin of the bogus account they discovered that the person who had opened it lived in London and had charged the cost of the account to his American Express card. The name on the card was Michael Haephrati - Ms. Wieseltier's former husband.

Israeli authorities then deployed their own computer snoop, which analyzed packets of information as the Trojan filched them from Ms. Wieseltier's computer. The files ended up on a computer server in the United States and the server's contents startled investigators, according to records of the investigation. Among the personal documents and screenshots of Ms. Wieseltier's family were hundreds of records from Israeli companies as well as classified military documents. Investigators soon uncovered four more servers, two in America and two in Israel, that also housed stolen information.

As the trail became clearer, authorities learned that at least 15 senior members of three of Israel's largest private investigative agencies were involved in a scheme in which dozens of companies received a compact disc or an e-mail message offering a business opportunity. The offer required them to respond to INFO@targetdata.biz, a site registered to Mr. Haephrati. Responding to them would unleash the Trojan, which, according to records of the investigation, was impervious to antivirus and anti-Trojan software.

Investigators say Mr. Haephrati designed and transmitted the Trojan responsible for pickpocketing Mr. Jackont and Ms. Wieseltier's computers. And while his methods were modern, Mr. Jackont said, his motive was ancient: his divorce from Ms. Wieseltier was messy, and he resented the family. Mr. Haephrati's reason for working with private investigators, said Mr. Wismonsky, the Israeli prosecutor, was pecuniary; private eyes paid him about $3,500 for each installation of his spyware and about $900 a month per Trojan after that to monitor information the spyware collected.

Israeli investigators have unearthed e-mail messages indicating that Mr. Haephrati interacted with a number of companies and governments in countries besides Israel; Mr. Wismonsky said e-mail messages suggest that Mr. Haephrati once apparently tried to sell his spyware to the Norwegian government.

BRITISH authorities arrested Mr. Haephrati, 41, and his new wife, Ruth, 28, last summer on computer fraud charges, but the authorities there did not respond to interview requests. The Haephratis, currently detained in separate British prisons, were unavailable for comment and Israeli prosecutors are awaiting the couple's transfer to Israel. Mr. Wismonsky said corporate victims ranged from HOT, a major Israeli cable television concern, to I.M.C., an Israeli high-tech company that supplies the military.

Among the Israeli corporations on the receiving end of stolen information, said Mr. Wismonsky, were two telecommunications affiliates of Bezeq, the country's largest telephone company. The Israeli government held a controlling interest in Bezeq until it sold most of its stake to private investors, including Los Angeles media mogul Haim Saban, shortly before the Trojan horse scandal became public. A lawyer representing Bezeq and the two affiliates, YES and Pele-Phone, declined to comment on the investigation; Mr. Wismonsky said that Bezeq itself appeared to have been a victim, not a recipient, of stolen information.

Mr. Wismonsky's office has indicted members of the three detective agencies involved in the scandal on computer fraud charges. The firms - Modi'in Ezrahi, Zvi Krochmal Investigations and Pilosoph-Baleli - or their lawyers declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests. As of yet, said Mr. Wismonsky, no Israeli corporations have been indicted for receiving information because no evidence has surfaced indicating that the companies had knowledge that the data was stolen.

"The main problem we have is to match the firms that ordered computer espionage with the companies that were victims," Mr. Wismonsky said. "We have to see if the private investigators have records in their offices that show who ordered the spying."

While reputable firms and businesspeople worldwide rarely admit to enlisting the services of private investigators, it is a routine fact of life in some business quarters.

"The thinking in Israel is that if a company gets away with stealing information, they're heroes, and if they get caught, they're stupid," said Ben Gilad, an Israeli-born business consultant who works in the United States. "You can always hire someone from outside the company to get the information for you, and if they get caught you can deny any knowledge."

For his part, Mr. Wismonsky said that so far he had encountered many denials. "The president of every company said they didn't know at all that they were receiving stolen information," he said. "These are people whose jobs are to know what is going on in the market."

Elsewhere in the world, authorities advise a dose of common sense for individuals who want to protect themselves from spear-phishers, plain vanilla phishers and other online predators. "We have yet to meet a bank or any financial institution that contacts their customers via e-mail to alert them to problems with their credit cards or accounts," said Thomas X. Grasso, a special agent with the F.B.I. who specializes in investigating cybercrimes. "Armed with that knowledge, consumers should look on any e-mails like that suspiciously."

Some computer security specialists suggest at least one basic approach that might allow e-mail recipients to learn right away that a communiqué appearing to come from a company like Amazon.com actually originated somewhere in the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Russia or any of the other places that law enforcement officials say are hot spots for phishing scams. "It strikes me that this is just a failure of most e-mail systems to reveal the history of an e-mail," said Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer in computer cryptography who is the chief security officer of Sun Microsystems. "You could post a warning flag indicating that the 'from' address doesn't seem consistent with the path history."

Still, spear-phishers and other cyberstalkers have well-earned reputations for their ability to morph, molt and develop new modes of attack. Analysts say that attackers have moved on from trying to infiltrate computer operating systems and now appear to favor piggybacking spyware on external applications and network routers. The low cost of doing business is also attractive to spear-phishers.

According to CipherTrust, a spear-phisher can rent a server for about $300 month after paying a $100 setup fee; install spam-sending software on the server for about $1,200 a month; and get spam-sending proxies, a database of e-mail addresses, and other necessary add-ons for another $1,900 a month. How much phishers make depends on how many victims they hook, but the relatively small expense means the work can be lucrative. According to a research report issued in June by Gartner Inc., a consulting firm, about 2.4 million Americans reported losing about $929 million to phishing schemes during the previous year.

The Gartner report noted that although some analysts thought that phishing attacks were a fad that peaked in 2004, reports of such schemes have continued to grow at double-digit rates. According to the report, for the year ending in May about 73 million American adults who use the Internet believed that they received an average of more than 50 phishing e-mails during the prior 12 months. And that, of course, is just what Internet users actually know might be happening.

"Phishing is really transforming into more desktop-based attacks that are not visible to users, and there are so many different varieties that I'm not sure there's anything the average user can do to stop them," said Avivah Litan, a Gartner research director who wrote the June report. "Having said that, I don't think there's a crisis in our country in terms of money being drained out of bank accounts. It's all sporadic."

Sporadic or not, information theft has skyrocketed, Ms. Litan said, and banks have been under siege by hackers. Phishers prize checking-account numbers as well as credit card and A.T.M. card numbers, which they can copy onto bogus cards.

Ms. Litan said many banks had had security gaps in the software used to analyze magnetic stripe coding on the back of A.T.M. cards, and these gaps had allowed card hijackers to use bogus copies. American regulators, concerned about online vulnerabilities at the country's banks, have sharply tightened security requirements at financial institutions.

Meanwhile, spear-phishers remain on the prowl, pinpointing victims in a way that phishers never did. "Widespread phishing and spear-phishing are going to merge so that company logos can be snatched from Web sites to build customized databases of corporate logos," said Johannes B. Ullrich, who monitors and responds to emerging digital attacks at the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center. "The main goal of all hacking attacks is automation, basically trying to have the biggest effect with the least amount of work. So I think it will go that way and it will be harder and harder for people to detect."

All of this provides cold comfort to victims like the mystery writer, Mr. Jackont, who said he was still reeling from his encounter with a Trojan horse in Israel.

"I must tell you that I still have a reflex of uneasiness when I get onto the Internet - I feel a trauma," he said. "People don't like it when I say this, but it's like being raped. It's like my underwear was spread all over the streets. It was a severe breach of privacy."
http://news.com.com/Online+scammers+...l?tag=nefd.top





Airport Codes Leaked Onto Internet

TOKYO: Passwords for restricted areas in 17 airports have been leaked onto the Internet from a Japan Airlines co-pilot's personal computer, the airline said Friday.

Japan's Transport Ministry notified the airline after it noticed Wednesday that passwords for 16 Japanese airports -- including the two serving Tokyo -- as well as for Guam International Airport had been posted on Internet bulletin boards, the Mainichi Shimbun reported Friday.

Moreover, the ministry confirmed that the Boeing 767 instruction manual had been leaked. JAL has asked the operators of the 17 airports to change their code numbers and tighten security.

The information was leaked from a computer that a 29-year-old Boeing 767 co-pilot kept at his home after it was infected with a computer virus. The co-pilot used the peer-to-peer file-sharing program Winny at home.

Three- to five-digit code numbers are used to unlock doors to restricted areas within the airports. However, ministry officials said there is not a route through which outsiders can go straight to aircraft without going through immigration.

JAL prohibits ground staff members from taking work-related information out of their offices, while setting guidelines for ways that crew members manage and take out such information.
http://www.newkerala.com/news.php?ac...lnews&id=64183





Scientists Work On Peer-To-Peer Security

Israeli scientists are working on a new method of distributing antivirus patches so that they reach computers before the virus does.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University are examining ways of creating a network of shortcuts hidden in the Internet and only accessible to antivirus applications.

The system would rely on 'honeypot' computers that lie in wait for viruses, worms, trojans and other malicious code. When a new infection is detected these computers would instantly notify other computers and equip them with the necessary information to block it.

The proposed shortcuts would ensure that this information arrives before the malicious code. The researchers' simulation shows that 800,000 honeypots among the 200 million computers in the US could restrict a new virus to just 2,000 machines.

'The software companies just regard the Internet as a sophisticated FedEx service,' explained the research team's Eran Shir. 'Our focus is to immunise the whole network, not to clean individual computers or fix what is already broken.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/81046/sc...-security.html





Radio Industry Forms Alliance To Roll Out Digital Broadcasts

The radio industry, in a move to take on growing competition from satellite radio, iPods and the Internet, has formed an alliance to step up the rollout of digital radio.

The group's goal is to offer new and compelling content using ``high-definition'' digital radio technology, which produces CD-quality sound and eliminates the static, hiss and fades associated with analog signals, top radio executives said Tuesday at a press briefing unveiling the alliance.

So far, about 600 out of more than 10,000 radio stations across the United States have started digital broadcasts. HD radio is free, but consumers need to purchase pricey digital radio receivers to listen to broadcasts.

The alliance -- which has at least seven radio companies on board including giants Clear Channel Communications Inc. and Viacom Inc.'s Infinity -- hopes its efforts will drive down the cost of digital receivers as they catch on with more consumers.

The group, called HD Digital Radio Alliance, will coordinate the rollout of HD digital radio, including who will get to air what on new ``multicast'' channels. Through multicasting, which involves the split of radio frequencies into niche channels, a radio station can use the extra space for alternate programming.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...y/13342891.htm





Clear Channel Eyes Net Distribution Deals

Clear Channel Communications could possibly ink distribution deals with Yahoo or Apple Computer's iTunes music service by next year, a senior executive said on Wednesday.

The U.S. radio conglomerate, which is seeking as many distribution outlets as possible for its programs, has been in talks with Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft during the past year, according to John Hogan, chief executive of Clear Channel's radio division.

"They have yielded more discussions," Hogan said at the Reuters Media and Advertising Summit in New York. "They (the companies) are interested in content."

He said it was possible that a deal could be reached in 2006. Hogan declined to give details about what might be included in any such deal.

This month, Clear Channel said it planned to offer 60-second video clips of radio personality Rush Limbaugh's show that could be played on Apple's iPod digital music and video player.

Based in San Antonio, Texas, Clear Channel operates more than 1,200 radio stations across the United States. The company faces competition from satellite radio services and Apple's iPod digital music player.
http://news.com.com/Clear+Channel+ey...3-5978525.html





Satellite Radio Receiver Raises Ire Of Recording Industry
ILN News Letter
Michael Geist

The recording industry is expressing concern about new satellite-radio receivers that mimic iPods in their ability to store and organize hundreds of songs. The satellite companies say there's nothing wrong with the additional functions they are offering customers. They point to a 1992 federal law that permits consumers to make personal recordings from the radio and argue that the storage capability is a legal time-shifting device, similar to a digital-video recorder such as TiVo.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113401703445217173.html





Hack early and often

California May Impose Hacker Test On All Electronic Vote Machines
AP

Companies wanting to sell electronic voting machines in California may be forced to prove their systems can withstand an attack from a computer hacker, the state's top elections official said Monday.

Secretary of State Bruce McPherson said his office is planning a hacker test on a machine built by Diebold Election Systems, one of the nation's largest manufacturers of electronic voting systems. McPherson said he might seek to expand such testing to all systems seeking certification for use in California's 58 counties.

``It's all about giving the voters trust in the system,'' McPherson told reporters after giving opening remarks at a conference focused on testing and certification of electronic voting machines.

Several media outlets had reported that the Diebold hacker test was scheduled for Wednesday, but McPherson said the details of the arrangement are still being worked out. He said he expected the Diebold test to be performed sometime before the end of the year.

Diebold has been criticized by some activist groups as being vulnerable to outside hackers seeking to manipulate election results.

The secretary of state's office has asked Finnish security expert Harri Hursti to come to California and conduct the Diebold hacker test, said Nghia Nguyen Demovic, a spokeswoman for McPherson.

``He's been invited and we're in talks with him,'' Demovic said.

She said the contact was made by David Jefferson, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who chairs a committee for McPherson that is investigating the electronic voting machines.

The tests will use a randomly selected voting machine from one of the 17 counties that currently use a Diebold system.

Diebold spokesman David Bear said company officials are confident their machines are not vulnerable to hackers.

``These are unfounded allegations that are just false,'' he said. ``We will absolutely pass the test.''

Bev Harris, a spokeswoman for the advocacy group Black Box Voting, said her nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog group has been pushing California officials since June to hire Hursti for just this kind of test. Black Box wants him to recreate a test he performed in Florida in May.

``The exploits we were able to demonstrate in Florida call into question the testing that has gone on at the federal testing lab,'' Harris said.

If the Diebold machine could be manipulated from the outside, there's a good chance others will be, too, she said.

``We're very interested to see what else has been missed,'' she said.

State and local officials face a Jan. 1 federal deadline for upgrading voting machine systems to comply with new federal guidelines aimed at making systems safer and more accessible.

Meeting that deadline might be difficult for California, McPherson said.

``But the Department of Justice and others have said that you are moving in the right direction and making an earnest effort, and we're seeing good results from this already,'' he said. ``We think we are going to be right on target.''

Earlier this fall, McPherson issued 10 requirements that voting machines must meet to be used in California elections starting next year.

Those requirements include gaining approval by an independent testing unit certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and providing state officials with information about how the machines operate. It also requires companies to test their machines under Election Day conditions.

California law also requires electronic voting machines to provide paper receipts to assure voters that their votes were recorded accurately.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/13284156.htm





SunnComm MediaMax Security Vulnerability FAQ

What is the SunnComm MediaMax Security Vulnerability?
Is there a solution?
What is a privilege escalation attack?
Can you explain this with an analogy?
What are access controls?
What are some details of the MediaMax vulnerability?
How could this harm consumers' computer?
Who discovered the MediaMax security vulnerability?
Who is iSEC Partners?
Are there any more security issues with SunnComm's MediaMax software?
How many CDs are affected?
What are some of the artists with SunnComm MediaMax CDs?"
Does the patch resolve all the issues with CDs with SunnComm MediaMax software?
Does SunnComm MediaMax appear on CDs other than Sony BMG?
Is EFF Suing Sony BMG?
What more does EFF want Sony BMG to do?

What is the SunnComm MediaMax Security Vulnerability?

Certain audio compact discs distributed by Sony BMG contain a version of the SunnComm MediaMax software, which creates a serious risk of a "privilege escalation attack." This new security vulnerability -- different than the one reported in early November regarding Sony BMG CDs sold with software called XCP -- affects all Sony BMG CDs that contain version 5 of SunnComm MediaMax software. According to Sony BMG, about six million CDs have this software.

Sony BMG's list of affected CDs

Is there a solution?

On Tuesday December 6, Sony BMG and SunnComm made available a patch that was designed to resolve this
security vulnerability. We're pleased that Sony BMG responded quickly and responsibly when we drew their attention to this serious security problem.

However, the day after the patch was released, Professor Ed Felten and Alex Halderman identified a new problem. We take any security problems identified by these security researched very seriously. They "recommend for now that if you have a Windows PC, you

do not use the MediaMax patch
do not use the previously released MediaMax uninstaller, and
do not insert a MediaMax-bearing CD into your PC."

What is a privilege escalation attack?

A privilege escalation attack is the act of exploiting a security weakness in an application to gain access to resources that normally would have been protected from an application or user. This means that low-rights users can add files to a directory and overwrite the binaries installed therein, which will be then be unknowingly executed by a later user with higher level of rights. In other words, a guest user or a malicious program can effectively make changes to a computer that would normally be reserved to an administrator.

Can you explain this with an analogy?

Consider an office worker who has keys to her office and to the front door of the building, but not to other offices or to the supply closet. There are many ways to gain additional access: Sometimes those locks can be picked, sometimes the locks are left unlocked, and sometimes an attacker can steal the building manager's keys. This vulnerability is yet another way to gain increased access, similar to leaving the manager's keys out. By stealing the manager's keys, the office worker can escalate her privileges, i.e. get into offices and other room where she is not authorized.

What are access controls?

On a computer system, information resources are protected with access controls analogous to door locks. A common implementation of such access controls is called an access control list (ACL). An ACL is simply a table listing principals (e.g. user accounts) and the privileges each principal has with an object.

An ACL might stipulate, for example, that user account Bob can read the spreadsheet file accounts-2005.xls, while user account Jane can both read and write it. In this example, the Bob and Jane accounts are principals, the accounts-2005.xls file is the object, and "read" and "write" are privileges.

What are some details of the MediaMax vulnerability?

MediaMax version 5 leaves a crucial folder "unlocked," that is to say with an ACL that allows all principals to have all privileges. The reason this is a problem is that the folder contains an executable program (MMX.EXE, the MediaMax program) that must be run by a user account with high privileges. An attacker can overwrite MMX.EXE with code of her choice, and the next time a MediaMax disc is played, her attack code will be executed.

Specifically, the directory that the SunnComm MediaMax software creates, located in "c:\Program Files\Common Files\SunnComm Shared\," overrides the default Access Control List (also known as the file system permissions). The SunnComm Shared directory uses an ACL that doesn't protect against low rights users (i.e., "Everyone" in Windows parlance) overwriting the contents including the installed binaries.

Returning to our example of Bob and Jane, it mean that Bob can now rewrite the spreadsheet, or more worrisome, replace it with a malicious program.

How could this harm consumers' computer?

The SunnComm MediaMax version 5 software distributed by Sony BMG could expose the computers of millions of users to attacks by malicious hacker and virus writers. They undermine significant security protections otherwise present on computers running Windows, which are designed to prevent users (either people or programs) from gaining control of your computer.

Who discovered the MediaMax security vulnerability?

iSEC Partners discovered the security vulnerability after EFF requested an examination of the software, and EFF and iSEC promptly communicated it to Sony BMG. In accordance with standard information security practices, EFF and iSEC delayed public disclosure of the details of the exploit to give Sony BMG the opportunity to develop a patch.

iSEC Partners' report [PDF, 237K]

Who is iSEC Partners?

iSEC Partners is a proven full-service security consulting firm that provides penetration testing, secure systems development, security education and software design verification. iSEC Partners' security assessments leverage their extensive knowledge of current security vulnerabilities, penetration techniques and software development best practices to enable their customers to secure their applications against ever-present threats on the Internet. Primary emphasis is placed upon helping software developers build safe, reliable code.

Areas of research interest include application attack and defense, web services, operating system security, privacy, storage network security and malicious application analysis.

For more information: http://www.isecpartners.com.

Are there any more security issues with SunnComm's MediaMax software?

We don't know. We have identified one security issue, but there may be others. Even before this vulnerability came to light, security researcher Ed Felten noted "the MediaMax software will still erode security, for reasons stemming from the basic design of the software." See Freedom to Tinker for more. We urge Sony BMG to undertake rigorous security testing on all of its software, and we will continue to look into this issue.

How many CDs are affected?

There are over 20 million Sony BMG CDs with some version of the SunnComm MediaMax software. Sony BMG says that about six million have the MediaMax version 5 that is subject to this vulnerability, and has provided a list of affected titles. In addition EFF has prepared a Spotter's Guide to help you identify MediaMax CDs in the wild.

Sony BMG's list of affected CDs
EFF's Spotter's Guide

What are some of the artists with SunnComm MediaMax CDs?

MediaMax can be found on a wide variety of popular artists' music, such as Britney Spears "Hitme (Remix)" , David Gray's "Life In Slow Motion," My Morning Jacket's "Z," Santana's "All That I Am," and Sarah McLachlan's "Bloom (Remix Album)."

Sony BMG's list of affected CDs
EFF's list of CDs affected and possibly affected by MediaMax.

Does the patch resolve all the issues with CDs with SunnComm MediaMax software?

No. There are other severe problems with MediaMax discs, including: undisclosed communications with servers Sony controls whenever a consumer plays a MediaMax CD; undisclosed installation of over 18 MB of software regardless of whether the user agrees to the End User License Agreement; and failure to include an uninstaller with the CD. EFF will continue to raise these issues with Sony BMG.

Does SunnComm MediaMax appear on CDs other than those released by Sony BMG?

Yes. According to SunnComm, its "MediaMax technology has appeared on over 140 commercially released CD titles across more than 30 record labels." Earlier this year, SunnComm forecast "that its MediaMax CD Copy Management Technology will be Applied to More than 145,000,000 Audio CDs this Year." Currently our focus is on the Sony BMG CDs, but we are investigating whether the vulnerability exists on other labels, and urge every label that has used the MediaMax technology to check with security experts immediately.

SunnComm press release: SunnComm Ups Security Another Notch
SunnComm press release: SunnComm Forecasts for MediaMax

Is EFF Suing Sony BMG?

Yes. On November 21, EFF, along with the law firms of Green Welling, LLP, and Lerach, Coughlin, Stoia, Geller, Rudman and Robbins, LLP, filed a California class action lawsuit in Los Angeles against Sony BMG including claims arising from both XCP and SunnComm CDs. We also filed a national class action on December 2 in New York and are joined in that action by the Law Offices of Lawrence E. Feldman and Associates.

Sony BMG litigation information

What more does EFF want Sony BMG to do?

EFF would like Sony BMG and all record labels to stop using DRM on their CDs and stop requiring its customers to agree to a EULA as a condition of playing CDs on their computers. See: The Customer is Always Wrong, DRM Skeptics View, and New York Times Op-Ed: Buy, Play, Trade, Repeat.

Barring that, we would like Sony BMG to ensure, before a CD is released to the public, that it contains no security vulnerabilities, can be fully uninstalled by end users, properly protects consumer privacy including allowing consumers to opt-out of any reporting back to the company done by the CD, and is provided on terms that are fair, reasonable and fully disclosed. To the extent that they fail to do so, they need to remove such products from the market immediately, engage in a robust notice campaign and compensate consumers who have purchased them, including those harmed by XCP and MediaMax software already.
http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/Sony-BMG/mediamaxfaq.php#2





Buy, Play, Trade, Repeat
Damian Kulash Jr.

Los Angeles

THE record company Sony BMG recently got in trouble after attempting to stem piracy by encoding its CD's with software meant to limit how many copies can be made of the discs. It turned out that the copy-protection software exposed consumers' computers to Internet viruses, forcing Sony BMG to recall the CD's.

This technological disaster aside, though, Sony BMG and the other major labels need to face reality: copy-protection software is bad for everyone, consumers, musicians and labels alike. It's much better to have copies of albums on lots of iPods, even if only half of them have been paid for, than to have a few CD's sitting on a shelf and not being played.

The Sony BMG debacle revealed the privacy issues and security risks tied to the spyware that many copy-protection programs install on users' computers. But even if these problems are solved, copy protection is guaranteed to fail because it's a house of cards. No matter how sophisticated the software, it takes only one person to break it, once, and the music is free to roam and multiply on the peer-to-peer file-trading networks.

Meanwhile, music lovers get pushed away. Tech-savvy fans won't go to the trouble of buying a strings-attached record when they can get a better version free. Less Net- knowledgeable fans (those who don't know the simple tricks to get around the copy-protection software or don't use peer-to-peer networks) are punished by discs that often won't load onto their MP3 players (the copy-protection programs are incompatible with Apple's iPods, for example) and sometimes won't even play in their computers.

Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it's the right thing to do, just get insulted. They've made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product hampered by software that's at best a nuisance, and at worst a security threat.

As for musicians, we are left to wonder how many more people could be listening to our music if it weren't such a hassle, and how many more iPods might have our albums on them if our labels hadn't sabotaged our releases with cumbersome software.

The truth is that the more a record gets listened to, the more successful it is. This is not just our megalomania, it's Marketing 101: the more times a song gets played, the more of a chance it has to catch the ear of someone new. It doesn't do us much good if people buy our records and promptly shelve them; we need them to fall in love with our songs and listen to them over and over. A record that you can't transfer to your iPod is a record you're less likely to listen to, less likely to get obsessed with and less likely to tell your friends about.

Luckily, my band's recently released album, "Oh No," escaped copy control, but only narrowly. When our album came out, our label's parent company, EMI, was testing protective software and thought we were a good candidate for it. Record company executives reasoned that because we appeal to college students who have the high- bandwidth connections necessary for getting access to peer-to-peer networks, we're the kind of band that gets traded instead of bought.

That may be true, but we are also the sort of band that hasn't yet gotten the full attention of MTV and major commercial radio stations, so those college students are our only window onto the world. They are our best chance for success, and we desperately need them to be listening to us, talking about us, coming to our shows and yes, trading us.

To be clear, I certainly don't encourage people to pirate our music. I have poured my life into my band, and after two major label records, our accountants can tell you that we're not real rock stars yet. But before a million people can buy our record, a million people have to hear our music and like it enough to go looking for it. That won't happen without a lot of people playing us for their friends, which, in turn, won't happen without a fair amount of file sharing.

As it happened, for a variety of reasons, our label didn't put copy-protection software on our album. What a shame, though, that so many bands aren't as fortunate.

Damian Kulash Jr. is the lead singer for OK Go.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/opinion/06kulash.html





Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese
David Barboza

One of China's newest factories operates here in the basement of an old warehouse. Posters of World of Warcraft and Magic Land hang above a corps of young people glued to their computer screens, pounding away at their keyboards in the latest hustle for money.

The people working at this clandestine locale are "gold farmers." Every day, in 12-hour shifts, they "play" computer games by killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods as rewards that, as it turns out, can be transformed into real cash.

That is because, from Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them.

"For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. "I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day."

He and his comrades have created yet another new business out of cheap Chinese labor. They are tapping into the fast-growing world of "massively multiplayer online games," which involve role playing and often revolve around fantasy or warfare in medieval kingdoms or distant galaxies.

With more than 100 million people worldwide logging on every month to play interactive computer games, game companies are already generating revenues of $3.6 billion a year from subscriptions, according to DFC Intelligence, which tracks the computer gaming market.

For the Chinese in game-playing factories like these, though, it is not all fun and games. These workers have strict quotas and are supervised by bosses who equip them with computers, software and Internet connections to thrash online trolls, gnomes and ogres.

As they grind through the games, they accumulate virtual currency that is valuable to game players around the world. The games allow players to trade currency to other players, who can then use it to buy better armor, amulets, magic spells and other accoutrements to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

The Internet is now filled with classified advertisements from small companies - many of them here in China - auctioning for real money their powerful figures, called avatars. These ventures join individual gamers who started marketing such virtual weapons and wares a few years ago to help support their hobby.

"I'm selling an account with a level-60 Shaman," says one ad from a player code-named Silver Fire, who uses QQ, the popular Chinese instant messaging service here in China. "If you want to know more details, let's chat on QQ."

This virtual economy is blurring the line between fantasy and reality. A few years ago, online subscribers started competing with other players from around the world. And before long, many casual gamers started asking other people to baby-sit for their accounts, or play while they were away.

That has spawned the creation of hundreds - perhaps thousands - of online gaming factories here in China. By some estimates, there are well over 100,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers, toiling away in dark Internet cafes, abandoned warehouses, small offices and private homes.

Most of the players here actually make less than a quarter an hour, but they often get room, board and free computer game play in these "virtual sweatshops."

"It's unimaginable how big this is," says Chen Yu, 27, who employs 20 full-time gamers here in Fuzhou. "They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers."

For many online gamers, the point is no longer simply to play. Instead they hunt for the fanciest sword or the most potent charm, or seek a shortcut to the thrill of sparring at the highest level. And all of that is available - for a price.

"What we're seeing here is the emergence of virtual currencies and virtual economies," says Peter Ludlow, a longtime gamer and a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "People are making real money here, so these games are becoming like real economies."

The Chinese government estimates that there are 24 million online gamers in China, meaning that nearly one in four Internet users here play online games.

And many online gaming factories have come to resemble the thousands of textile mills and toy factories that have moved here from Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of the world to take advantage of China's vast pool of cheap labor.

"They're exploiting the wage difference between the U.S. and China for unskilled labor," says Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and the author of "Synthetic Worlds," a study of the economy of online games. "The cost of someone's time is much bigger in America than in China."

But gold farming is controversial. Many hard-core gamers say the factories are distorting the games. What is more, the big gaming companies say the factories are violating the terms of use of the games, which forbid players to sell their virtual goods for real money. They have vowed to crack down on those suspected of being small businesses rather than individual gamers.

"We know that such business exists, and we are against it," says Guolong Jin, a spokesman for N-Sina, a Chinese joint venture with NC Soft, the Korean creator of Lineage, one of the most popular online games. "Playing games should be fun and entertaining. It's not a way to trade and make money."

Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Vivendi Universal and the creator of World of Warcraft, one of the world's most popular games with more than 4.5 million online subscribers, has also called the trading illegal.

But little has been done to halt the mushrooming black market in virtual goods, many available for sale on eBay, Yahoo and other online sites.

On eBay, for example, 100 grams of World of Warcraft gold is available for $9.99 or two über characters from EverQuest for $35.50. It costs $269 to be transported to Level 60 in Warcraft, and it typically takes 15 days to get the account back at the higher level.

In fact, the trading of virtual property is so lucrative that some big online gaming companies have jumped into the business, creating their own online marketplaces.

Sony Online Entertainment, the creator of EverQuest, a popular medieval war and fantasy game, recently created Station Exchange. Sony calls the site an alternative to "crooked sellers in unsanctioned auctions."

Other start-up companies are also rushing in, acting as international brokers to match buyers and sellers in different countries, and contracting out business to Chinese gold- farming factories.

"We're like a stock exchange. You can buy and sell with us," says Alan Qiu, a founder of the Shanghai-based Ucdao.com. "We farm out the different jobs. Some people say, 'I want to get from Level 1 to 60,' so we find someone to do that."

Now there are factories all over China. In central Henan Province, one factory has 300 computers. At another factory in western Gansu Province, the workers log up to 18 hours a day.

The operators are mostly young men like Luo Gang, a 28-year-old college graduate who borrowed $25,000 from his father to start an Internet cafe that morphed into a gold farm on the outskirts of Chongqing in central China.

Mr. Luo has 23 workers, who each earn about $75 a month.

"If they didn't work here they'd probably be working as waiters in hot pot restaurants," he said, "or go back to help their parents farm the land - or more likely, hang out on the streets with no job at all."

Here in coastal Fujian Province, several gold farm operators offered access to their underground facilities recently, on the condition that their names not be disclosed because the legal and tax status of some of the operations is in question.

One huge site here in Fuzhou has over 100 computers in a series of large, dark rooms. About 70 players could be seen playing quietly one weekday afternoon, while some players slept by the keyboard.

"We recruit through newspaper ads," said the 30-something owner, whose workers range from 18 to 25 years old. "They all know how to play online games, but they're not willing to do hard labor."

Another operation here has about 40 computers lined up in the basement of an old dilapidated building, all playing the same game. Upstairs were unkempt, closet-size dormitory rooms where several gamers slept on bunk beds; the floors were strewn with hot pots.

The owners concede that the risks are enormous. The global gaming companies regularly shut accounts they suspect are engaged in farming. And the government here is cracking down on Internet addiction now, monitoring more closely how much time each player spends online.

To survive, the factories employ sophisticated gaming strategies. They hide their identities online, hire hackers to seek out new strategies, and create automatic keys to bolster winnings.

But at some point, says Mr. Yu, the Fuzhou factory operator who started out selling computer supplies and now has an army of gamers outside his office here, he knows he will have to move on.

"My ultimate goal is to do Internet-based foreign trade," he says, sitting in a bare office with a solid steel safe under his desk. "Online games are just my first step into the business."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/te.../09gaming.html
















Until next week,

- js.

















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

December 3rd, November 26th, November 19th, November 12th, November 5th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black