Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 1st, ’06

[JackSpratts]

"MS should swallow real hard, ante up half of what they blew on Longwind, and buy an OS X license from Apple." – Anonymous


"I think it's fair to characterize these people as broadband hogs." – BT rep


"If we even think this parrot is a copyright violator we’re clipping his wings but good." – MPAA


































Gag Me

Another ISP insulted its customers this week with the hoary "bandwidth-hog" moniker. This time it’s British Telecom using the old excuse to wring out more profit without having to invest in their network. Like a cheap slumlord who chops up apartments into smaller and smaller flats in order to squeeze in more and more tenants, BT is shrinking each piece of the bandwidth pie to bring in more subscribers without the bother of increasing system capacity. It’s a shortsighted approach and not without peril as they turn their backs on many of the very people who were the coveted early adopters BT needed to get its new services off the ground in the first place. The new limit is 40 gigabytes per month, even though the paid-for speed allows its customers many times that amount. All this and calling their clients names too.

Choking the customer has been going on for some time, but for many people it started several years ago when broadband users first received the notorious letters telling them they were being throttled or dropped for "wasteful usage" by Cablevision’s Optimum Online unit (OOL), the carrier that was once one of the most coveted because of it’s sheer speed and hands-off approach by executives. The impact was immediately felt on peer-to-peer networks worldwide when reduced upload speeds slowed the transfers of non OOL users. Those speeds had been very fast, in many cases exceeding the download speeds offered by other ISPs. What was once a fast transparent transfer of near 100 percent efficiency became choppy and choked in the world of 15-1 ratios.

OOL has since relaxed the limit as technology improved and competition from more aggressive telcos drained customers, but they haven’t eliminated it entirely, and while "suffering" under a larger gig limit might be suffering a surfeit of riches, it’s still a limit, and not everyone can get that service in any event. Other cable providers have much lower thresholds and stricter controls. Even after a recent raise for instance Canadian provider Rogers limits customers to 100 gigabytes. Regardless, OOL users who may brag about swag amounts miss a larger point. Limits are limits and they don’t work in our favor.

As a rule telcos like SBC (ATT) have no limits but do have slower speeds than what cable offers, BT however is a glaring exception: Slower speeds and limits.

We’re reinventing what it means to produce and distribute our culture in the era of peer-to-peer, and we’re this close to breaking the stranglehold of these massive media empires, and for this to work, for it to realize it's full potential, many bits will be sacrificial, passing through PCs on their way to somewhere else, facilitating the sharing process without ever taking up residence on our drives. Or at least they would be, before bandwidth shaping, two tier Internet protocols and gig limits entered the corporate equation.

Take waste for instance. A brilliant program, targeted, secure and easy on the CPU. By optionally grabbing open bandwidth from generous mesh members it bypasses the restrictive firewalls of others less auspicious, enabling normally locked-out users the full measure of a wonderful trading experience. But there is a cost. Those doing the donating can max out their bandwidth in service to a mesh while never getting a byte for themselves - but Waste releases them when the bandwidth is needed so that cost is actually low - and it’s a big reason why the program works so successfully. Now however we’re seeing the results of ISP throttling on these meshes. Some users with artificial gig limits have had to reduce their participation in larger communities or abandon them entirely. The situation with BitTorrent is worse, even if its size camouflages the extent of the problem. You can’t leave BT running continuously if your important upload ratio results in a shutoff notice from your provider, even though it’s those 1+ ratios that really make that system so effective.

As ISPs continue to suffocate their customers, the burden of keeping these P2P networks operational falls to fewer and fewer users. At some point it just won’t make sense to stay on them any longer and the best users will simply disappear into their own tightly controlled private spaces. With nothing but hit or miss transfers on the global systems or none in places like Australia when providers dial in their so-called "smart monitors" that stop all P2P traffic, our glowing era of alternative grass roots cultural distribution will dim.

Since even large gig limits are hit relatively fast when one is a good P2P netizen, they're contrary to both the function and spirit of peer-to-peer and a free and open Internet, and do little but stunt the net's true potential as the people's voice. It’s a practice that should end.


Family Therapy

I spent a day reading an unprecedented public display of emotional outbursts by Microsoft employees, furious at managerial incompetence and leaders more interested in "Tuscan villas" than creating programs that work.

I know many computer users are angry at MS for their arrogance, rip-offs, DRM, lack of security and monopolistic hegemony, but until this week I had no idea it's this bad in Redmond. No idea.

The raw pain in the thread goes on and on, and as irate as I am with Gates and Ballmer, it's more than a little pathetic for the rank and file. The poor fools were believers...but from the looks of things not anymore.

Like watching a powerful family tear itself to pieces. In this case however not the worst thing in the world. Blog of the year stuff. Totally riveting.


















Enjoy,

Jack






















April 1st, ’06






Two Years In Prison For Downloading Latest Film
Roger Boyes

GERMANS risk two years in prison if they illegally download films and music for private use under a new law agreed yesterday. Anybody who downloads films for commercial use could be jailed for up to five years.

The measures, some of the toughest in Europe, were announced after an aggressive campaign by the film industry in Germany, the largest market in the EU and one of the most computer-literate populations.

According to film industry estimates, Germans download more than 20 million films a year. Many expect the next James Bond film, Casino Royale, to be widely available in Germany weeks before its official release in November.

The law, which comes into effect on January 1, 2007, has infuriated consumer groups. They claim that it will turn consumers into criminals and harm the Government’s efforts to create a knowledge-based economy.

Patrick von Braunmühl, of the Federation of German Consumer Organisations, said: “This sends a completely wrong signal to society. It criminalises consumers and will deeply disturb internet users.

“It can’t be that everyone has to be worried now about the police knocking on the door and impounding the family computer because their 16-year-old son has downloaded a few songs.”

Brigitte Zypries, the Justice Minister, defended the law. “The aim is not now to slap handcuffs on downloaders in the school playground,” she said. But if someone downloaded a film before it reached the cinemas it was obvious that they were responding to an illegal offer and breaking the law, she said. Frau Zypries has ruled that it will still be legal to copy a legitimately bought DVD for limited private use.

Günther Krings, the Christian Democrat legal affairs spokesman, said: “There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download.”

Enforcement will be left to the state prosecutor. Authorities hunting internet pirates will be able to pass on details to film and music producers who can then inform the police.

Many Germans watch the latest Hollywood film at home before it has reached the cinemas; parents’ evenings sometimes end with a showing of an illegally copied film in the school gym.

The German music industry also claims to be suffering from piracy. The recording industry suffered a fall in turnover in 2005 for the seventh year in a row to €1.7 billion (£1.2 billion). Sales have fallen almost 45 per cent since 1998. The German branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimates that the equivalent of 439 million music CDs were copied illegally in Germany last year.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...100973,00.html





145 Targeted In Operation Tracker

File Sharers Exposed in Software Crackdown Following Recent Court Orders
Press Release

Up to 145 of the 150 individuals identified following a recent Court Order for illegally sharing software over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have been targeted by the Federation Against Software Theft.
All have been written to by The Federation demanding that they settle in full and pledge not to undertake this illegal activity again. This is the first such campaign of this nature in the UK and represents a major step forward in enforcement of software copyright infringement.

In January, 10 Internet Service Providers were ordered by the High Court to hand over customer details following a 12-month investigation into the covert sharing of software by PC users.
Although most file sharers used false names and email addresses, the ten ISPs handed over full personal details, including names, addresses and dates of birth etc. This followed his Honour Judge Raynor's confirmation that there was "an overwhelming case" for ordering such customer details to be released.

Julian Heathcote Hobbins, Senior Legal Counsel at The Federation, commented: "Traditionally most software owners have relied on notice and take-down procedures and have failed to bring civil or criminal proceedings against the infringers. This is the second strand of an ongoing strategy, bringing these actions to a head when we see software being misused."

John Lovelock, director general at The Federation, added: "We are making an example of the perpetrators to stop them from stealing and passing on the intellectual property of our members for good, and to send a very strong message to end users that they can be found at any time during activities of this nature and we will continue to monitor and search for our member products being illegally shared. This is not a one-off-wonder."

Targets were identified by software title by investigators, working covertly for The Federation on a project codenamed Operation Tracker. They are IT forensics experts, who assisted The Federation in cracking down on the suppliers and P2P file sharers of unlicensed software.

Notes to editors:
- The individuals concerned are breaking copyright law by uploading software onto the web for others to illegally share and download.
- Penalties for illegal communication to the public of copyright works, including software, are punishable by up to two years imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.
- The ten ISPs that were the subject of the order included Tiscali, BT, Telewest and NTL.

About The Federation

The Federation Against Software Theft became the world's first software anti- piracy organisation when it was set up in 1984 to lobby Parliament for changes to the copyright law.
Today The Federation's key remit is enforcement. In particular, it tackles software theft using the sanctions of the copyright legislation, extending from under-licensing (buying fewer licences than the number of copies of the software being used at any one time), to the problem of misuse of the internet. It represents any software publisher member whose intellectual property is being abused, regardless of their size. Often, The Federation will consider attempting to resolve these issues without action. However, it is now committed to criminal prosecutions where the misuse is both flagrant and serious.
The Federation's own legal expertise is reinforced by its Legal Advisory Group (FLAG), which consists of 25 law firms engaged in IT/IP and operating in the UK and overseas.
The Federation has 160 members from the software publishing industry (including resellers, distributors, audit software providers and consultants).
http://www.itnews.it/risorse/EuroNews,Zj0xMzU0NjEx





FAST rushes to punish P2P activity

Over 140 File Sharers Fined By Illegal Software Industry Watcher
laura hailstone

Around 145 individuals, identified following a recent Court Order for illegally sharing software over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, have been targeted by the Federation Against Software Theft.

In January, 10 ISPs were ordered by the High Court to hand over customer details following a 12-month investigation into the covert sharing of software by PC users.

Although most file sharers used false names and email addresses, the ten ISPs handed over full personal details, including names, addresses and dates of birth.

Of the 150 identified, 145 have been written to by The Federation demanding that they settle in full and pledge not to undertake this illegal activity again.

This is the first such campaign of this nature in the UK and represents a major step forward in enforcement of software copyright infringement, said The Federation.

Julian Heathcote Hobbins, senior legal counsel at The Federation, said: “Traditionally most software owners have relied on notice and take-down procedures and have failed to bring civil or criminal proceedings against the infringers. This is the second strand of an ongoing strategy, bringing these actions to a head when we see software being misused.”

John Lovelock, director general at The Federation, added: “We are making an example of the perpetrators to stop them from stealing and passing on the intellectual property of our members for good, and to send a very strong message to end users that they can be found at any time during activities of this nature and we will continue to monitor and search for our member products being illegally shared. This is not a one-off-wonder.”
www.itweek.co.uk/2153000





GAPP Punishes 14 Chinese DVD/CD Counterfeiters

China's General Administration of Press and Publication has punished fourteen companies that were involved in illegally duplicating disks.

Of the fourteen, six have had their business licenses revoked and eight have been ordered to cease production of the disks.

The six enterprises who have lost their business licenses include Chongqing Three Gorges Disk Development Co., Ltd; Henan Xianda Disk Co., Ltd; Shandou Nanmei Electronic Industry Co., Ltd; and Anyang Fengjin Multi-media Technology Co., Ltd.

The eight companies who have been told to stop manufacturing the bootleg disks include Guangzhou Huanyu Audio and Video Company and Beijing Dabaike Disk Co., Ltd.

GAPP says it has checked 48 disk manufacturers in 18 provinces and cities of the country since January this year.

A representative from GAPP says that they will continue to keep an eye on the existing problems of the disk reproduction industry and conduct further investigations on the above mentioned enterprises.
http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.p...e=news&id=3741





DReaM spells nightmare for this CD

EMI Releases Brazilian DRM CDs That Totally Hose Their Customers

Brazilian mega-star Marisa Monte's new CDs from EMI ("Infinito Particular" and "Universo ao Meu Redor") come with DRM that can't be uninstalled, and requires you to "agree" to a contract that isn't published in Portuguese. Even if you disagree, the malware is installed. The DRM blocks you from playing the CD on Linux and MacOS, and from loading it onto an iPod. This, just as the Brazilian government has launched a Computers for All initiative to distribute 1,000,000 Linux PCs, seems particularly contemptuous of the Brazilian people. Ronaldo sez,

When you insert the CD in your computer, it automatically opens a window with the "License Agreement" of the CD. This is a very large contract in Portuguese, but it is very difficult to read. The agreement is opened in window programmed in flash, so it is impossible to cut and paste the text into another program. In some computers, when you try to scroll down the contract using the arrows, the text slides completely out of control, making it impossible to read.

After taking some time to read the agreement, the first thing that called my attention is that the text says that a full copy of the contract is available at the address "www.emimusic.info/". That is NOT TRUE. If you go to the "Brazil" link at the page, there is no copy of the agreement whatsoever at the website, contrary to what the agreement itself expressly says.

The text of the agreement says that the CD will install software in your computer in order to make the cd playable. However, it says that the user must acknowledge the fact that "certain files and folders might remain in your computer even after the user removes the digital content, the software and/or the player".

Additionally, it says the following: "This contract has been originally drafted in English. The user waives any and all rights that he or she might have under the laws of his or her own country or province, in regard of this contract drafted in any other language".

Finally, my favorite part. There are two buttons below the agreement. The first reads "Accept the Agreement" the second reads "Reject it". After reading all the above, I decided to reject it, and pressed the "reject" button. Immediately a screen with the word "Initializing" appeared, the proprietary software was installed, and the music started to play in my computer using the proprietary EMI player, as if I had "accepted" the whole thing.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/24...s_brazili.html





DRM Has Deep Flaws

DRM won't protect the music and film industries from illegal file sharing, researcher says.
Jeremy Kirk

Digital rights management (DRM) technology has deep flaws despite the hope of content providers that encrypted files will deter illegal file sharing, a computer security researcher said Monday.

DRM is a catch-all term for a variety of methods used to limit content sharing. Techniques include digital encryption of songs and encoded limits on the number of times content can be accessed. But DRM technologies are far from foolproof, and the ones developed so far have been easily circumvented by adept hackers, said Ian Brown, a senior research manager at the Cambridge-MIT Institute in England.

DRM won't protect the music and film industries, which have spent the last decade lobbying for new laws to protect their content but neglected trying to find better ways to monetize their offerings, he said. Bands such as U2 and the Grateful Dead use their music more as a promotional tool, relying on touring and merchandise for revenue, he said.

"It's the business models that need changing, not the technology," said Brown, whose doctoral thesis in part covered DRM technologies. He spoke at the Changing Media Summit in London.

DRM technology is simple but making it work is difficult, Brown said. The data has to be decrypted to be used, and the "analog hole" remains--the ability for determined bootleggers to use a microphone or regular video camera to record content for posting on file-sharing networks.

So-called "watermarks"--instructions regulating the usage of the file that are invisible to the users--can be removed by a determined programmer, allowing them to post a file to a P-to-P (peer to peer) network, Brown said. The algorithms used for watermarks are still "primitive," Brown said.

DRM technologies may be most effective for time-based events where encryption would only have to hold for a short period, such as the broadcast of a live sports event, Brown said.

Closely Watched

The progression of DRM technology is closely watched. Music and film industry officials argue that DRM is crucial to preserving revenue in the face of piracy. Consumer advocates say DRM technologies can be too restrictive for consumers who legitimately paid for content and want to share it on several devices.

"Fundamentally, it's an anti-user technology," Brown said. "It's a technology that allows content owners to provide data to their customers with restrictions on how they can use it that aren't justified by copyright law.

Microsoft is incorporating features into its next-generation OS, Windows Vista, to take advantage of DRM capabilities of TPM (trusted platform module) chipsets. TPM chip sets have the capability to store the keys, passwords, or certificates attached to DRM-enabled files and only allow decoding by authorized users.

France is debating legislation that would require companies developing DRM technologies to provide enough information so other companies can make interoperable systems. Apple Computer has lashed out at the measure, saying it will encourage music piracy.
http://pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,125227,00.asp




The DRM _Has_ To Go.
Anonymous

I consult to a number of Fortune 500 companies on security issues. I've advised them that purchasing and deploying an OS with embedded DRM is an ironclad guarantee of insecurity -- since DRM is designed as a deliberate back door in the OS.

So the fact that it's been delayed really doesn't affect them: they're not going to buy it anyway, because they don't want to compromise the security of their operations in order to deal with OS features they don't need, don't want, and which are being rammed into Vista to appease the MPAA/RIAA/etc.

So while those features may help turn Vista into an entertainment platform, they will also lose you corporate seats. By the thousands. Because those people have been paying attention to things like the Sony DRM debacle and they now understand, very clearly, that DRM is a threat.

Over at ZDNet, Microsoft employee John Carroll makes the case that his company’s monopolistic tactics over the past decade have in fact benefited our industry, and cites Internet Explorer as an example. Without preinstalling Internet Explorer, he says, how would anyone download Firefox? How would open-source markets grow?

So let me stop here and say, on behalf of Firefox users everywhere: thank you.

I also have a note here from the pop-up ad industry. They would like to thank Microsoft for allowing their market to boom while the IE team sunbathed in Maui for the past four years.

Sarcasm aside, the truth is that many people, I among them, never really took issue with the idea of preinstalling a browser on Windows. It would be pretty silly to buy a computer today that couldn’t access the Internet. We take issue with how Microsoft flagrantly strong-armed OEMs to leave out or marginalize competing browsers, such as Netscape. As far as I know, Netscape also allowed people to…download things.

John’s argument falls flat in other places, too. He points to AOL Instant Messenger’s lead over MSN/Windows Messenger as further evidence that preinstallation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But of course, the value in that space isn’t in the software; it’s in the network. AIM inherited much of its network from AOL. And how did AOL build such a massive network in the first place? Well, the fact that it negotiated prime placement on the desktop for years certainly didn’t hurt. People don’t seek out AIM because it’s a better client.

John concludes that “the mere notion that such consumers are somehow so skewed by the mere inclusion of a software default that competitors can’t gain traction is RIDICULOUS…”, but capitalizing a word does not an argument make. I can see how that notion might seem ridiculous to someone with John’s level of technical literacy. How about the tens of millions of people out there who have never downloaded and installed a piece of software in their lives, even in our broadband world? Believe me, they’re out there. We’re pursuing them every day, one at a time, with SpreadFirefox.

One of the most fundamental problems we’ve encountered in evangelizing Firefox is that many people don’t even know what a browser is. If they know the term at all, they think it’s a search engine, which is understandable; the concept of the independent “browser” in a Web world is just a bit too meta for many. So you can imagine convincing someone to download an “alternative” to a product he didn’t know he used, in a genre of software he never knew existed. John’s blithe dismissal of the difficulty suggests to me that he’s never had to do that before. And that’s fine, except his entire argument is predicated on that perspective.

I think the main problem here is that John, like many techies I know, sees everything in bits and bytes: people couldn’t easily download software in the past; now the bandwidth constraints are gone; therefore, the competitive barrier to entry is gone. It reminds me of some of the things coming out of the Linux camps: Linux is technically superior to Windows; therefore, people will switch to it. These kinds of arguments ignore an entire spectrum of barriers facing “regular people” that we developers never contend with, and I think our industry would do well to empathize with them.

Though I disagree with John’s understanding of the past and present, I agree with him that eventually there will be no distinction—for any audience—between software that happens to be on your computer already and software you procure manually. But we’re not there yet.
http://blakeross.com/2006/03/28/gratitude/





Global Gaming Crackdown

How governments from Beijing to the Beltway could shackle your freedom.
Chris Suellentrop

Last fall, a group of World of Warcraft players in China committed mass suicide. They wanted to draw attention to the latest restriction on their liberty: The same government agency that censors newspapers and bans books had just mandated a system of disincentives to limit the number of hours per day they spent playing online games. Hardcore Warcrafters decided they would rather pull the plug than, er, pull the plug.

But Fox News and CNN weren't on hand to cover the protest because it took place in the game. The players' digital representations martyred themselves; their fleshy masters kept breathing. These were virtual suicides in response to a crackdown in a virtual universe.

Still, virtual isn't the same as unreal. If the Chinese government can monitor World of Warcraft players, then Azeroth (where the game takes place) is in some sense a little bit totalitarian, too. And it wasn't the first time Beijing intervened in a massively multiplayer game: A few years earlier, a Chinese court ordered a game company to restore virtual biochemical weapons someone had pilfered from a player.

Other governments are taking an interest in MMORPGs as well. Players in South Korea have been prosecuted for stealing virtual property. More than half of the 40,000 computer crimes investigated by South Korea's National Police Agency in 2003 involved online games.

American gamers aren't likely to face dictatorial decrees to limit their play time, but within the next few years the courts will begin to examine how laws relating to taxes, copyright, and speech will apply in virtual worlds. In the near future, the IRS could require game developers to keep records of all the transactions that take place in virtual economies and tax players on their gains before any game currency is converted into dollars. "It's utterly implausible that it won't happen," says Dan Hunter, who has coauthored law review articles like "The Laws of the Virtual Worlds." A trickier issue is whether an avatar can be defamed: Will we see potion merchants suing for in-game slander, much like eBay sellers have litigated over negative feedback?

In the United States, virtual worlds could eventually have the same legal status as another lucrative recreation industry: pro sports. The NHL isn't exempt from federal legislation like labor, antitrust, and drug laws. But inside the "magic circle," on the field of play, sports leagues are given great latitude to make judgments, even though jobs, endorsement contracts, and the value of team franchises hang in the balance.

For example, the government lets referees police behavior in a hockey rink that would normally be the purview of local prosecutors. (Try high-sticking your mail carrier to experience the difference.) But the government still reserves the right to get involved. It should be the same in games. If your thief character picks the pocket of a nearby avatar, the local district attorney won't prosecute. But if you hack into the player's account to loot his virtual goods, you end up in the slammer.

But don't surrender your in-game civil rights without protest. In January, in the aftermath of the public outcry (and virtual die-ins), the Chinese government announced that adults could play MMORPGs for as long as they like. If the IRS doesn't let US players off so easy, will they respond with a virtual Boston Tea Party?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/law_pr.html





TorrentSpy Says MPAA Can't Reinterpret The Supreme Court On File Sharing
from the try,-try-again dept

When the Supreme Court ruled in the Grokster case, they laid down a very specific case for when a service provider might be liable for the actions of its users. That was only if the service provider took "affirmative steps" to induce copyright violations. This seemed odd and likely to cause trouble pretty quickly. It basically suggested that a new company that came along and did exactly what Grokster had done, but avoided proactively encouraging people to download unauthorized material, would be perfectly fine. However, the entertainment industry immediately tried to expand what the decision meant and eventually just pretended the Supreme Court said that file sharing and things like torrent tracking sites were illegal -- when it actually said nothing of the sort.

The MPAA recently went after a bunch of BitTorrent search engines -- which seemed to stretch the Supreme Court ruling again. After all, these are just search engines, and there are tons of legitimate uses for them. At least one is now fighting back. TorrentSpy has filed a motion to dismiss the case, noting that they don't promote any kind of infringement and they don't host or link directly to any files copyrighted by the MPAA. In other words, they're making a case that all they are is a search engine for torrents, and if the industry is worried about people putting up torrents that infringe on copyrights, it should go after those actually responsible, rather than the search engines.

Services like TorrentSpy were exactly what it looked like the Supreme Court was trying to carve out as being legitimate -- so it's good to see them standing up for themselves, rather than just giving in to another entertainment industry lawsuit. If they win and get the case dismissed, it could set up some of the boundaries as to just how far the entertainment industry can go.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060327/1717242.shtml





Thai Paper Shuts Down Over Alleged Insult
Rungrawee C. Pinyorat

A Thai newspaper said Thursday it was shutting down for five days, after it was forced to apologize over an alleged insult to the country's revered king.

The move came as nearly 2,000 demonstrators gathered outside the headquarters of a Thai media group and blocked the building's entrances, demanding to meet with the writer who allegedly insulted King Bhumibol Adulyadej. They dispersed after being told of the plan for suspending publication.

Kom Chad Luek newspaper had earlier acknowledged that it failed to print in full a reference to the king made by anti-government protest leader Sondhi Limthongkul, thus leaving his remarks in a form that might upset the monarch.

The newspaper would punish itself by temporarily suspending publication, said Thepchai Yong, a senior editor of The Nation Group, the newspaper's publisher. "The chief editor has already resigned," he added.

The newspaper originally agreed to stop publishing for three days, but agreed to two more days, April 8-9, after further pressure from the protesters.

It would not stop immediately because it has a responsibility to publish the results of the general election to be held Sunday, Thepchai said.

The demonstrators are backers of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who have rallied to his support in the face of demonstrations demanding he step down for alleged corruption and abuse of power. But their complaint did not directly relate to that dispute. Members of the anti- and pro-Thaksin camps both pledge their devotion to the 78-year-old monarch.

Thepchai said, however, that the protests against the newspaper were political in nature. The Nation Group's newspapers have been strongly critical of Thaksin.

"Some groups have tried to politicize the problems by bringing in the monarchy," Thepchai said. "This issue has to stop before some people or groups use this issue to incite further chaos."

Protesters against Kom Chad Luek have been demonstrating outside the newspaper's headquarters for several days, and about 200 police on Thursday set up barricades near the entrance to The Nation Group building on Bangkok's outskirts, said police Col. Satchaphong Woranantakun.

In an attempt to quell the protest, the newspaper on Thursday submitted a formal letter of apology to the king through the office of his private secretary.

Daily demonstrations for and against Thaksin have been held in the Thai capital in the past few weeks, with the anti-Thaksin groups calling for the king to intervene by appointing an interim prime minister.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...03-30-09-00-51





Iran Cracks Down on Bloggers
AP

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- On his last visit to Iran, Canadian-based blogger Hossein Derakhshan was detained and interrogated, then forced to sign a letter of apology for his blog writings before being allowed to leave the country. Compared to others, Derakhshan is lucky.

Dozens of Iranian bloggers have faced harassment by the government, been arrested for voicing opposing views, and fled the country in fear of prosecution over the past two years.

In the conservative Islamic Republic, where the government has vast control over newspapers and the airwaves, weblogs are one of the last bastions of free expression, where people can speak openly about everything from sex to the nuclear controversy. But increasingly, they are coming under threat of censorship.

The Iranian blogging community, known as Weblogistan, is relatively new. It sprang to life in 2001 after hard-liners -- fighting back against a reformist president -- shut down more than 100 newspapers and magazines, and detained writers. At the time, Derakhshan posted instructions on the internet in Farsi on how to set up a weblog.

Since then, the community has grown dramatically. Although exact figures are not known, experts estimate there are between 70,000 and 100,000 active weblogs in Iran. The vast majority are in Farsi but a few are in English.

Overall, the percentage of Iranians now blogging is "gigantic," said Curt Hopkins, director of an online group called the Committee to Protect Bloggers, who lives in Seattle.

"They are a talking people, very intellectual, social, and have a lot to say. And they are up against a small group (in the government) that are trying to shut everyone up," said Hopkins.

To bolster its campaign, the Iranian government has one of the most extensive and sophisticated operations to censor and filter internet content of any country in the world -- second only to China, Hopkins said.

It also is one of a growing number of Middle Eastern countries that rely on U.S. commercial software to do the filtering, according to a 2004 study by a group called the OpenNet Initiative. The software that Iran uses blocks both internationally hosted sites in English and local sites in Farsi, the study found.

The filtering process is backed by laws that force individuals who subscribe to internet service providers to sign a promise not to access non-Islamic sites. The same laws also force the providers to install filtering mechanisms.

The filtering "is systematically getting worse," said Derakhshan, who was detained and questioned during a visit to Iran last spring, just before the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But is the government threatened because the tens of thousands of Iranian blogs are all throwing insults at it, or calling for revolution? Not quite.

The debates on Iranian weblogs are rarely political. The most common issues are cultural, social and sexual. Blogs also are a good place to chat in a society where young men and women cannot openly date. There are blogs that discuss women's issues, and ones that deal with art and photography.

But in Iran, activists say all debates are equally perceived as a threat by the authorities. Bloggers living in Iran understand that better than anyone else.

"I am very careful. Every blogger in Iran who writes in his/her name must be careful. I know the red lines and I never go beyond them," said Parastoo Dokouhaki, 25, who runs one of Iran's most popular blogs. "And these days, the red lines are getting tighter."

Dokouhaki doesn't directly write about politics. She sticks mostly to social issues, but in Iran, that is also a taboo subject.

"I write about the social consequences of government decisions and they don't like it, because they can't control it," said Dokouhaki.

Outright political bloggers have an even tougher time.

Hanif Mazroui was arrested in 1994 and charged with acting against the Islamic system through his writings. He was jailed for 66 days and then acquitted.

"It's normal for authorities to summon and threaten bloggers," said Mazroui. The government continued to harass him and three months ago, he was summoned once again by the authorities and told never to write about the nuclear issue. Soon after his release, he shut down his weblog.

"They kept pressuring me," he said.

Arash Sigarchi, an Iranian journalist and blogger, was arrested and charged with insulting the country's leader, collaborating with the enemy, writing propaganda against the Islamic state and encouraging people to jeopardize national security.

He had been in jail for 60 days when he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He appealed, and was released on bail. Although his sentence has been reduced to three years, he still faces charges of insulting the leader and writing propaganda.

Another, Mojtaba Saminejad, has been in prison since February 2005. He was first arrested in November 2004 for speaking out against the arrest of three colleagues. According to the Committee to Protect Bloggers, Saminejad's website was hacked into by people linked to the Iranian Hezbollah movement.

After his release, he launched his blog at a new address, which led to his second arrest in February 2005. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and then given an extra 10 months for inciting "immorality."

Despite the crackdown, most Iranian bloggers say the government is not interested in eliminating blogging. Instead, they believe authorities want to use blogging to further their own goals.

Farid Pouya, a Belgian-based Iranian blogger, notes the government has just launched a competition for the best four blogs. The subjects: the Islamic revolution and the Quran.

"The government has observed carefully and learned that blogs are important ... and they want to capitalize on that," she said. "They want to lead the movement, they want to control it."
Tools Iran Uses to Block the Net

OpenNet Initiative's 2004 study delivered these findings about Iran's efforts to block internet material the government deems inappropriate:

Iran used U.S. commercial software to block both English-language sites hosted overseas and Farsi-language sites originating inside Iran.

A total of 499 sites were blocked out of 1,477 tested in November 2004, and 623 sites were filtered out of a total of 2,025 tested in December 2004.

Many kinds of sites were blocked, including pornographic sites, women's rights sites and sites with homosexual material. Also blocked were "anonymizer" tools that allow users to surf the internet anonymously, along with many weblogs.

Iran has laws that provide a back-up system to the filtration process. Individual subscribers to internet service providers must sign a document promising not to access non-Islamic sites. All providers must install filtering mechanisms for websites and e-mail.
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservic...l?tw=rss.index





Beats the Sneaker Set

New Data Transmission Record - 60 DVDs Per Second

As the world’s internet traffic grows relentlessly, faster data transmission will logically become crucial. To enable telecommunications networks to cope with the phenomenal surge in data traffic as the internet population moves past a billion users, researchers are focusing on new systems to increase data transmission rates and it’s not surprising that the world data transmission record is continually under threat. Unlike records where human physical capabilities limit new records to incremental growth, when human ingenuity is the deciding factor, extraordinary gains are possible. German and Japanese scientists recently collaborated to achieve just such a quantum leap in obliterating the world record for data transmission. By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower.
http://www.gizmag.com/go/5396/





Agency Exempts Most of Internet From Campaign Spending Laws
Adam Nagourney

The Federal Election Commission ruled unanimously Monday that political communication on the Internet, including Web logs, setting up Web sites and e-mail, was not regulated by campaign finance laws.

The commission, in a 6-to-0 decision, also ruled that paid political advertisements placed on Web sites were covered by the 2002 campaign finance law, which includes restrictions on spending and contributions and bars corporations and unions from using their treasuries to purchase Web advertisements.

The decision marked a significant step in the rapid evolution of the Internet — and, in particular, Web logs — as a force in American politics. It is the latest chapter in the conflict between First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression and efforts by Congress to regulate campaign spending.

The commission ruling came two years after it had decided that all Internet activity was exempt from the campaign finance laws. That ruling was challenged by Congressional sponsors of the law, and a federal judge upheld that suit, ordering the commission to write rules to apply the 2002 law to the Internet.

The commission ruled that the law applied to paid political advertisements, but offered a broad exemption for all other Internet political activity, conducted by individuals or groups, even in direct coordination with a candidate.

"The commission established a categorical exemption for individuals who engage in online politics," Michael E. Toner, the chairman of the commission, said in an interview. "The agency has taken an important step in protecting grass roots and online politics."

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos, the largest political Web log in the country, heralded the decision. "It looks like we got everything we wanted," Mr. Moulitsas said. "It's fantastic that the F.E.C. was as responsive as it was."

The original court ruling sparked fear by bloggers — many of whom are explicit in rallying their readers to contribute, work for and vote for specific candidates — that their work would be counted as contributions to the candidates, and thus fall under the contribution limits. The law limits individual contributions to $2,000 and includes a ban on any union or corporate donations.

The commission's ruling was broad and categorical. It said that activity on the Internet was exempt, whether done by an individual or by a group. As part of the ruling, the commission ruled that bloggers would be eligible for the same exemption from the campaign finance law that is now given to newspapers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/politics/28fec.html





Oklahoma City Threatens To Call FBI Over 'Renegade' Linux Maker

Our mistake is YOUR problem
Ashlee Vance

New year, new job? Click here for thousands of tech vacancies.

The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server.

This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle's city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city's web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town's IT infrastructure.

"Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???," Taylor wrote to CentOS. "Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma."

Few people would initiate a tech support query like this, but these are dangerous times, and Taylor suspected the worst. (Er, but only the world's most boring hacker would break into a site and then throw up a boilerplate about how to fix the hack.)

CentOS developer Johnny Hughes jumped on the case and tried to explain the situation to Taylor.

"I feel sorry for your city," he replied in an e-mail. "CentOS is an operating system. It is probably installed on the computer that runs your website. . . . Please contact someone who does IT for you and show them the page so that they can configure your apache webserver correctly."

That response didn't go over so well.

"Get this web site off my home page!!!!! It is blocking access to my website!!!!~!," Taylor responded, clearly excited about the situation and sensing that Bin Laden was near.

Again, CentOS jumped in to try and explain some of the technical details behind the problem. It pointed Taylor to this page, saying it was the standard page for a web server and noted that it provides instructions on how to fix the problem. The CentOS staffer suggested that Taylor contact his service provider or have an administrator look into the issue.

That response didn't go over so well.

"Unless this software is removed I will file a complaint with the FBI," Taylor replied.

Later he added,

"I have four computers located at City Hall. All of these computers display the same CentOS page when attempting to bring up Tuttle-ok.gov. Now if your software is not causing this problem, how does it happen??? No one outside this building has complained about this problem. This is a block of public access to a city's website. Remove your software within the next 12 hours or an official complaint to the FBI is being filed!"

And later,

"I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'"

After a few more exciting exchanges, CentOS managed to track down the problem for Taylor. It turns out that hosting provider Vidia Communications is running CentOS on some of its servers and had not configured the Tuttle web site properly. CentOS informed Taylor of the situation, and, a day later, Taylor had calmed down.

"The problem has been resolved by VIDIA who used to host the City website," he wrote. "They still provide cable service but do not host the website. The explanation was that they had a crash and during the rebuild they reinstalled the software that affected our website."

"I am sorry that we had to go through the process and accusations to get the problem resolved. It could have been resolved a lot quicker if the initial correspondence with you provided the helpful information that was transmitted in the last messages. My initial contact with VIDIA disallowed any knowledge of creating the problem."

Er, so despite the fact that CentOS went out of its way to figure out the problem for Tuttle, Taylor still places the blame on CentOS for not fixing the problem - that it didn't create - sooner. In addition, Taylor didn't really start off the whole process on the best foot despite Tuttle being a town "Where People Grow - Friendly!" Grow friendly, threaten to bring in the FBI at the drop of a hat - what's the difference?

As of this writing, one Tuttle web site still had not been fixed, although you can find the charming Tuttle man Taylor over here.

Taylor has yet to respond to our request for comment.

It seems that Tuttle has quite the hacking epidemic on its hands. The Tuttle Times newspaper's web site, for example, has had its Forum section cracked. Click at your own risk to see it or have a peek at our screen grab.

To see the full transcript of the web server war, travel over here. It's classic reading.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/



Letters

Oklahoma Man Asks Reg To Turn Off The Internet

Make these Linux meanies stop!

Jerry Taylor, the now famous city manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma, who last week threatened to call the FBI to stop Linux maker CentOS from helping him configure a web server has presented The Register with a massive request. Taylor wants us to shut down the internet.

For those of you who are not up to speed with this popular story, here's a brief recap.

Taylor went to Tuttle city's web site, hoping to make some changes. Upon arriving at the site, he discovered the boilerplate Apache web server configuration page and mistook this for a possible hack attempt on Tuttle. Instead of contacting a server administrator about the problem, Taylor initiated a tirade with a CentOS support staffer in which he repeatedly threatened to have the FBI investigate the Linux maker for attacking Tuttle's municipal web site.

Eventually, CentOS showed Taylor that it had nothing to do with the web site other than providing the operating system software for the web server. The fury of Tuttle's e-mails made plenty of you laugh as our story was picked up by Slashdot, Digg and others.

It would seem that we made too many of you laugh.

Taylor - who once proclaimed to the CentOS staff, "I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity" - has asked us to put a halt to the publicity.

Taylor declined to respond to this reporter's request for comment but did write to a member of El Reg's marketing team.

“I do not follow instructions that show up when a website that I am not familiar with appears on my computer and I do not think anyone with experience would do so either. Once the Centos site appeared on four computers at one site I contacted our web service provider. The web service provider did not know what could cause the problem and had never heard of "CentOS". I then contacted the internet provider's local office and was told that they did nothing to cause the problem. I checked the building's server and found nothing relating to CentOS on the server. I was then left with only the web page email address to contact. I asked for the strange website to be removed because it blocked my City web site and I could not post public information. I only got help after threatening to contact the FBI.

Now I am being flooded with emails from CentOS users that after knowing the answer say the problem was simple. I think this is unjustified and would like for this to stop. Your website should provide useful information and be a credit to the IT world. I do not believe it should be used to incite the users. Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.”

So stop, now. Please.

It should be noted that Taylor failed to thank many of you for improving Tuttle's web site.

About 100 of you noticed the spelling error in Taylor's bio page where he wrote, "I am please [sic] to serve the citizens of the City of Tuttle." That line now reads "I am pleased to serve the citizens of the City of Tuttle." The site, however, continues to misspell Heisman - or Hiesman according to Tuttle - despite being the home of Heisman Trophy winning football star Jason White. Plenty of you noticed this mistake, and we guess Taylor will fix the problem soon.

The fact that Taylor cannot handle the abuse of Linux fan boys may be surprising given that he has faced off against a tiger in tong-to-fence combat - a story captured by The Tuttle Times - note the granddad's pride and joy sweater. (In an unrelated item, you can find a Tuttle police officer preparing for a party here.)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/27/tuttle_email/




Debit Cards Go RFID

Citizens Bank has a new contactless debit card. It’s called the PayPass. There's no swipe, no signature and no PIN number for transactions under $25.

"The new technology allows you to get through the checkout faster, which we think is a big benefit," said Lisa Stanton, Citizens vice president. "It also allows you to avoid making a trip to the ATM to get cash." Citizens is targeting low-cost transactions like picking up a few things at the drug store.

"If you go to CVS and charge $75, then you will have to sign," Stanton said. In addition to CVS, the merchants that accept PayPass include McDonald's, 7-Eleven and Regal Cinemas. The cards have a tiny transmitter and antenna inside. The mag stripe's still there, so you can still use them the old-fashioned way.

But what about identity theft?

PayPass comes with fraud protection and if it's stolen, you’re not responsible for the unauthorized charges. "The thieves don't know how to create this chip and antenna right now, so the counterfeiting is much less likely to occur," Stanton said. So far, Citizens is the only bank in Southern New England offering the new card, but Bank of America is testing the technology. All Citizens Bank debit cards issued after February first have the new technology. Other customers will be getting the new cards in mail.
http://www.turnto10.com/consumerunit...05/detail.html





Federal Agency Putting War Documents Online

Iraqi memos made public after months of arguing with intelligence officials
AP

The federal government is making public a huge trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq, posting them on the Internet in a step that is at once a nod to the Web’s power and an admission that U.S. intelligence resources are overloaded.

Republican leaders in Congress pushed for the release, which was first proposed by conservative commentators and bloggers hoping to find evidence about the fate of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, or possible links to terror groups.

Web surfers have begun posting translations and comments, digging through the documents with gusto. The idea of the government’s turning over a massive database to volunteers is revolutionary — and not only to them.

“Let’s unleash the power of the Internet on these documents,” said House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich. “I don’t know if there’s a smoking gun on WMD or not. But it will give us a better understanding of what was going on in Iraq before the war.”

The documents’ value is uncertain — intelligence officials say that they are giving each one a quick review to remove anything sensitive. Skeptics of the war, suspicious of the Bush administration, believe that means the postings are either useless or cherry-picked to bolster arguments for the war.

The documents — Iraqi memos, training guides, reports, transcripts of conversations, audiotapes and videotapes — have spurred a flurry of news reports. The Associated Press, for instance, reported on memos from Saddam Hussein in 1987 ordering plans for a chemical attack on Kurds and comments from Saddam and his aides in the 1990s, searching for ways to prove they didn’t have weapons.

No information about insurgency
Hoekstra said it took months of arguing with intelligence officials before he and John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, agreed to make the documents public. None contains current information about the Iraqi insurgency, and U.S. intelligence officials say they are focusing their limited resources on learning about what’s happening on the ground now.

There are up to 55,000 boxes, with possibly millions of pages. The documents are being posted a few at a time — so far, about 600 — on a Pentagon Web site, often in Arabic with an English summary.

Regardless of what they reveal, open-government advocates like the decision to make them available.

It’s a “radical notion,” said Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists government secrecy project, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. That “members of the public could contribute to the intelligence analysis process. ... That is a bold innovation.”

Cheers from bloggers
Champions of the Internet as a “citizen’s media” embraced the step, too.

“The secret of the 21st century is attract a lot of smart people to focus on problems that you think are important,” said Glenn Reynolds, the conservative blogger at Instapundit.com and author of “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths.”

“It’s kind of like a swarm. It’s a lot of individual minds looking at it from different angles. The stuff that’s most interesting tends to bubble to the top,” he said.

A self-described Iraqi blogger translated one of the documents for the American blog pajamasmedia.com — a Sept. 15, 2001, memo from the Iraqi intelligence service that reported about an Afghan source who had been told that a group from Osama bin Laden and the Taliban had visited Iraq.

Select information publicized?
Some remain doubtful, suspecting that the administration only releases information that puts President Bush and his arguments for war in a good light. The Iraq Survey Group found no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction after the war, and the Sept. 11 commission reported it found no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaida.

“I would bet that the materials that they chose to post were the ones that were suggestive of a threat,” said John Prados, author of the book, “Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War.”

Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute, dismissed the documents: “The collection is good material for somebody who wants to do a biography of Saddam Hussein, but in terms of saying one thing or the other about weapons of mass destruction, it’s not there.”

One of several conservative blogs devoting attention to the release, Powerline.com, set up a separate page to catalog its findings and news reports on what the documents reveal.

“These documents are going to shed a lot of light on a regime that was quite successful in maintaining secrecy,” said John Hinderaker, one of three men who run the site. “Before the first Gulf War, Saddam was perilously close to getting nuclear weapons and people didn’t know it. The evils of the regime will be reflected.”

But he also cautioned the optimistic. “When you’re dealing with millions of pages of documents,” he said, “it’s a big mistake to think you can pull out one page or sentence out of a document and say ’Eureka, this is it.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12042529/





Oversight? What Oversight?

Homeland Security Group To Meet Away From Public Eye
Anne Broache

A new advisory committee in the Homeland Security Department is free to disregard a law designed to keep meetings open and proceedings public, according to a departmental notice.

The newly created Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council is charged with sharing information aimed at protecting the nation's infrastructure, cybercomponents included. Michael Chertoff, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary, cited security reasons when he signed off on exempting the council from the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA.

The decision, which many private-sector players had strongly recommended, was released in a departmental notice published Friday.

The council, which plans to meet at least quarterly, will bring together various federal agency employees and private-sector representatives to discuss the Department of Homeland Security's infrastructure protection plan, which remains in draft form. The fields represented range from agriculture and energy to information technology and telecommunications. Participants include the U.S. Telecom Association, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association and Internet infrastructure services provider VeriSign.

If those participants are required to comply with FACA, it could leave them seriously hindered in sharing "sensitive homeland security information," the department said.

The 1972 law generally requires such groups to meet in open sessions, make written meeting materials publicly available, and deliver a 15-day notice of any decision to close a meeting to the public. The last is a particular point of concern for Homeland Security officials, who anticipate that private emergency meetings may need to be scheduled on short notice.

The private sector, fearing that sensitive data will get to the wrong hands, has continued to resist sharing important information with the feds, the Department of Homeland Security said, citing government auditors' findings from late 2003.

Making the meetings public would amount to "giving our nation's enemies information they could use to most effectively attack a particular infrastructure and cause cascading consequences across multiple infrastructures," another departmental advisory council warned in August.

One privacy advocate said he didn't buy the excuses. "The public has an extremely strong interest in knowing whether DHS and the relevant industries are doing enough to protect facilities, and whether there might be company negligence that contributes to any possible security vulnerabilities," David Sobel, a general counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, wrote in an e- mail interview.

Michael Aisenberg, government relations director for VeriSign, dismissed such worries, saying he predicted only a limited number of the council's meetings would actually be closed to the public.

"But there are families of data and information that are much more appropriately handled in confidence, at least in the early phases of an exploit or event," he said, praising the exemption as highly valuable and long overdue. "There were no tools in place to allow DHS or any other agency to have meetings with collective groups of government and industry that would not be covered by the FACA."

Homeland Security said in Friday's notice that it recognized "the important principle of transparency as a foundation for public confidence in government" and planned to make the council's meetings public whenever "feasibly consistent with security objectives." It said it also planned to issue public notices of all meetings, closed and open alike, "unless exigent circumstances arise" and that it would maintain a publicly available Web site with meeting agendas and periodic reports.
http://news.com.com/Homeland+securit...3-6053795.html





Lucent Talks Raise Issue of Security
Vikas Bajaj and Andrew Ross Sorkin

As merger talks between Lucent and Alcatel continue to advance, attention is turning to the role Lucent's fast-growing work for military and intelligence agencies may play in securing government approval for the trans-Atlantic deal.

With a long history of contributing to military efforts like ballistic missile technology and submarine sonar, the famed Bell Labs unit of Lucent is widely expected to become a focal point when the deal is presented to regulators in Washington for approval.

Though the companies have said that they are discussing a "merger of equals," experts say the deal will probably be treated as an acquisition of an American company by a foreign entity because Alcatel of France is one and a half times the size of Lucent and the combined company will probably be based in Paris.

An Alcatel spokesman said yesterday that the company's board would meet on Thursday, but declined to comment further. People close to the negotiations said the deal could be finished as early as this week, though they said a formal announcement might be pushed into the weekend.

National security concerns related to Bell Labs are among the unresolved issues being discussed by executives, these people said. Options said to be considered include completely spinning off the division, which has about 9,000 employees, or separating a unit that does classified work, using a corporate structure frequently employed in the military industry. But they said the companies hoped that none of those remedies would be necessary.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, overseen by the Treasury Department, reviews deals that give foreigners control over operations involving classified matters, export-controlled information, American infrastructure regarded as vital or a sole-source supplier to the Defense Department.

The committee starts with a 30-day formal review, which can be expanded into a 45-day investigation, and if the matter is still unresolved, the deal could be forwarded to the White House for a presidential decision.

Bell Labs was created by American Telephone and Telegraph in 1925 as a wide-ranging research and development center for new technologies in conjunction with its equipment subsidiary, Western Electric, which evolved into Lucent, based in Murray Hill, N.J.

The unit, whose researchers helped develop groundbreaking technologies like the transistor and the Unix computer system, was called upon by successive administrations to aid the military during World War II and the cold war.

"It was the equivalent of the national laboratories," said Narain Gehani, a 23-year Bell Labs veteran who wrote "Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel" (2003, Silicon Press).

After the 1984 breakup of A.T.&T., Bell Labs' involvement in military work started tapering off and fell off more sharply when it became part of an independent Lucent in 1996. A year later, Lucent sold one of its last military businesses, a unit that made submarine surveillance systems based in Greensboro, N.C., to General Dynamics for $284 million.

In recent years, however, Lucent has given new emphasis to government business, largely as a source of lucrative and stable military and intelligence communications contracts, after many of its commercial customers went bankrupt or severely scaled back spending on equipment.

At a November meeting with Wall Street analysts, for instance, Lucent executives said its business running communications networks for governments had grown 50 percent in 2005 and 100 percent in 2004. It highlighted a $100 million contract to rebuild and modernize Iraq's communications system and a $242 million contract to modernize a United States Army network.

But when asked to quantify the company's business with the government, a spokesman said yesterday that Lucent did not break that information out.

Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., said, "Compared with the cold war, Lucent's activity today has much less of a military cast."

But he also noted that the Bush administration's drive to modernize the military into a more agile and responsive force was greatly benefiting Lucent and other communications vendors. "The technologies which Lucent is engaged in are at the cutting edge of military innovation," Mr. Thompson said.

Some of the work has a decidedly futuristic focus, like an $11.5 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop high-speed wireless networks that can be quickly assembled to allow troops to communicate with one another on battlefields.

Several former Lucent and Bell Labs officials said that over the years a small Bell Labs team based in Whippany, N.J., had been dedicated to classified projects and that even senior executives were not fully aware of the group's work because they lacked the requisite security clearances.

Former Bell Labs researchers say the government is financing an increasing share of the basic research done at the labs, because scarce corporate dollars are reserved for commercial product development.

"Unlike the rest of the company, in research, the major funding comes from the government," said Robert W. Lucky, who worked at Bell Labs for three decades before leaving in 1992. He sits on the Defense Science Board, which advises the Pentagon.

Mr. Lucky and other experts said that they expected that Bell Labs' close ties to the government would mean extra scrutiny especially from an increasingly protectionist Congress, but that the merger would ultimately be approved.

So far, the Alcatel-Lucent talks have not given rise to the kind of concerns voiced after the Bush administration approved a deal for a company owned by the government of Dubai to manage some terminal operations at six American ports.

A spokesman for Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, said yesterday that the two deals were not comparable, because Alcatel was not a government-owned entity. (The French government owns 4.8 percent of Alcatel's shares.)

Charles Walston, the spokesman, said Mr. Lautenberg was looking to see whether the deal was truly a merger of equals, "and whether Lucent has a lot of control and if it is structured such that Bell Labs would be autonomous."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who took a leading role in opposing the ports deal, issued a brief statement that said, "The Bell Labs are some of the premier research institutions in the country, and we should watch this proposed merger carefully."

Harry L. Clark, a lawyer at Dewey Ballantine who specializes in getting federal approval for foreign transactions, said the "political dimension" could play a role. "For a century, Bell Labs has been a crown jewel of American research," he said.

Scott Shane and John Markoff contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/te...gy/28labs.html





Breakthrough In Split Second 3D Face Imaging

Face recognition technology that could revolutionise security systems worldwide has been developed by computer scientists at Sheffield Hallam University. The new specialist software can produce an exact 3D image of a face within 40 milliseconds.

Similar systems that have been trialled have proved unworkable because of the time it takes to construct a picture and an inaccurate result.

The ground-breaking invention, by experts in the University’s Materials and

Engineering Research Institute (MERI) was tested by Home Secretary Charles Clarke on a recent visit to Sheffield. It could be used for tighter security in airports, banks, and government buildings and ID cards.

The breakthrough comes days after MPs backed the compromise plans for identity cards, meaning from 2008 people applying for a new passport will also get an identity card, with their biometric details stored on a central register.

The new technology works by projecting a pattern of light onto the face, creating a

2D image, from which 3D data is generated. Biometric features are extracted by a ‘parameterisation’ process, giving a digital mapping of a face that would form part of a fool-proof security system. MERI’s Professor Marcos Rodrigues said:

“This technology could be used anywhere there is a need for heightened security.

It is well suited to a range of applications including person identification from national databases, access control to public and private locations, matching 3D poses to 2D photographs in criminal cases, and 3D facial biometric data for smart cards such as ID and bank cards. We have developed a viable, working system at the cutting edge of 3D technology.”
http://www.shu.ac.uk/cgi-bin/news_fu...um=PR958&db=06





New Vote Machines Ignite Feud In Emery

Software flaw? County clerk threatens to resign over issue
Glen Warchol

After 23 years as Emery County clerk, Bruce Funk will decide this morning whether he will resign because he cannot endorse an election on Utah's new voting machines.

"In no way could I feel comfortable with these machines," Funk said Monday. "I don't want to be part of something that put into question the results that come out of Emery County."

Earlier Monday, state Elections Director Michael Cragun and other state officials and engineers from Diebold Elections Systems met behind closed doors with the Emery County Commission. Their goal was to address Funk's concerns about some of the machines' computer memory that made him suspect they were not new or that something already had been loaded into their memories.

Funk invited in representatives of Black Box Voting, a Washington state-based nonprofit voter rights group, to inspect the machines earlier this month. Black Box has yet to issue a final report on the machines that are slated to replace Utah's punch card system of voting at a cost of $27 million.

By the end of the Monday meeting, Diebold engineers convinced the county commissioners the discrepancies in the machines' memory are the result of testing and of additional printing fonts.

But Diebold told the commissioners that allowing unauthorized people access to the machines had violated their integrity.

It could cost upwards of $40,000 to fly in technicians to retest them.

Joe Demma, chief of staff for Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert, the state's chief elections officer, was plainly incensed with Funk for allowing Black Box to probe the machines.

"The problem is that instead of asking us or Diebold, Bruce Funk allowed a third party to put the warranty in jeopardy," Demma said in a telephone interview from Emery County. "If I sound frustrated, it's because I am frustrated. We don't know what they did to the machines. If Bruce would have just asked, we could have saved this forty grand."

Diebold's $40,000 estimate is exaggerated to frighten other clerks from questioning the machines' integrity, Funk said. "What they are really saying is, 'We don't want anyone else to think of doing this.' "

Commissioner Ira Hatch said Emery County will go forward with the Diebold machines.

"We've decided we are going have Diebold come and go through these machines and see if they are compromised," he said, adding the company may be able to work with them on reducing the cost.

As for Funk, Hatch said, "We are going to give him the option to get back on board and get on with the elections. He's not too prone to do that. He's talking about resigning."
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_3646075u





Can you say ''hysterical''?

Massive Credit Card Fraud Via Various Illegal MP3 Download Sites
Side-Line

It seems that going for the cheapest illegal way is not always the smartest thing to do.

Over the past few weeks Side-Line has been inundated by e-mails from readers from all over the world including the USA, UK, Belgium, France, Holland etc telling they have been the victim of fraudulous use of their credit cards after having entered their credit card to buy illegal download albums for just one dollar, the so-called 'MP3-1dollardeals', from illegal MP3 websites. These sites, mostly based in Russia, are acting online as being from the UK, USA, Germany etc under over 40 domain names (including the popular MP3sugar, Audio Store, Allmp3, ...).

It appears that they have now started picking victims amongst their clients (believed to be several millions) at random to use their cards for other means. As the Russian authorities are not active in fighting piracy it is to be believed that these sites will continue exercising their business. Several label owners have in the meantime confirmed to Side-Line that those sites are 100% illegal and stealing music from the smallest indie band to the biggest major act. Through MP3 websites such as MP3sugar and Audio Store the Albanian and Russian mob have found another quick mean to get rich apart from selling drugs and prosituting youngsters. Rumour has it that a blacklist is circulating among the CC companies holding domainnames from illegal sites where customers will not be covered in case of fraud. The sums taken from the cards go from just a 'lousy' 1000 US$ to over 3000 US$.

So far the 'MP3-1dollardeals'. If you have been purchasing illegal downloads, be sure blocking your card right now, your credit card company will most probably NOT cover the costs after fraud as the news about the abuse is spreading quickly now.
http://www.side-line.com/news_commen...=13066_0_2_0_C





Red-faced in Redmond

Vista 2007. Fire The Leadership Now!
Who da'Punk

2007.

It certainly sounded like Microsoft leadership committed to us, our customers, our partners, and our shareholders that Vista would be out in 2006.

Slip!

We should have asked for more details around the "or else" part of that commitment.

I was upset at missing the back-to-school market. Now we're missing the holiday sales market. All of those laptops and PCs are going to have XP on it. What percentage will upgrade to Vista? Well, I guess that's the little dream that I need to give up on. Vista's deployment is going to come from people buying CPUs with the OS pre-installed, not dancing down the CompUSA aisle as they clutch that boxed version of Vista to their loving chest. So not only did we miss last year's opportunity, we're missing this year's opportunity, too. With the convergence of high-tech media, this holiday season would have been an explosive nodal point to get Vista out for a compounded effect.

Personally, I've been holding off of buying a laptop and a new mega-big-iron PC until Vista is done. I'm super- excited to get Vista Ultimate on that new PC and be able to hook Media Center up to my Xbox 360. And now I'll wait.

In my afternoon daydream, after Allchin's email went out, I imagined all the L68+ partners from the Windows division gathered together and told, "You are our leadership. When we succeed, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. When we fail, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. We've had enough of failure and we've had enough of you. Drop off your badge on the way out. Your personal belongings will be dropped off at your house. Now get out of my sight."

Sigh. Well, I'd settle for the version: "... When we fail, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. We reward success. We do not reward failure, especially sustained failure that has directly affected this company, its future, and its stock price. You will not receive any incentives this year. You will not receive a bonus. You will not get a raise. You will not be awarded stock."

People need to be fired and moved out of Microsoft today. Where's the freakin' accountability?

In the meantime, the discussion of how you'd sell Vista in 30-seconds to a non-techy consumer hasn't come up with much Abbie-understandable reasons other than "cooler games!" Sure, Abbie probably spends a lot of time with solitaire and minesweeper, so that's good. But most of it focuses either on issues so deep and technical that the average consumer is going to shrug and say, "Hell, I don't think I need any of that!" or on issues that make you think that XP is a ticking time-bomb of unstable code ready to explode 1s and 0s over anyone who looks at it wrong. And as for Alpha Geeks and super-users, it sounds like LUA is going to be a daily pain in the patootie.

The good news? Well, we've got plenty of time to conjure up reasons why Vista is going to be better than XP in a way that anyone can understand and agree with. Plus $500 million to spend doing it.

Oy. Oy. Oy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Buy An OS X License From Apple
Anonymous

You know, I've pondered for years what MS would do in this situation, when it became clear that the OS was a complete train wreck.

Apple was able to buy NeXT, but MS has killed off all of their viable replacements. OS/2, BeOS, PenPoint? All strangled by MS's anti-competitive (and illegal) tactics.

So, here's the way out: MS should swallow real hard, ante up half of what they blew on Longwind, and buy an OS X license from Apple. That would be about $10B up-front, and a hefty royalty. MS would have to assume the burden of making it run on all the crapbox PCs out there, which have had all the quality squeezed out of them, due to MS's having sucked up the lion's share of the profit from all PCs for the last 20 years or so.

The benefit is that MS could finally ship a securable OS, and the users wouldn't have to lose countless hours trying to work around the malware. Meanwhile, the only semi-competent part of the company, the Mac Business Unit, would take the lead in Apps development.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Scary
Anonymous

I am one of those lame testers that were "removed" approximately a month ago to pave the way for the full transition of BVT/FVT to IDC.

While I was employed for the past 11 months testing the code produced by Windows Core, I came across a staggering discovery, and that was that the majority of our tests when they failed spectacularly were deemed "Approved by Component Developer".

This was just shocking to me at first to pass packages and updates for GDR that were incapable of being removed or broke compatability with such things as Winlogon if the machine had not yet been activated. Now that was a fun issue that was thankfully repaired after a major complaint that I filed.

So, this really does not surprise me that everything started to slip. I have seen what Vista and Longhorn Server (as of the last build I tested) have been so am confident that I will not be upgrading my personal computers to it any time soon.

It is just scary to see things like the ability to access the "Help Viewer" through the Login screen to gain full control over the system (Yes, it was still there as of 5283).

As a hint, it involves a URL and EXPLORER.EXE and you can gain Admin Rights.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Rogue's Gallary at Microsoft
Shuttle 999 to oblivion

Here is a short list of the chief villians and idiots and their sins. They've made MS a much less successful company in the last 10 years.

[1] Steve Balmer - Prancing Public Buffon Antics, Customer Defocus, No Technology Depth - Fire him and get a real President with vision.
[2] Jim Allchin - .Net / Managed Code Fiasco, Longhorn Reset, Longhorn Basics Unfunded Mandates - Fire him and revoke his options before he retires.
[3] Brian Valentine - Ugly WAR Team Tyranny, COSD techno Luditism, Physical Violence & random Furniture tossing - Fire him immediately before he assaults someone.
[4] Will Poole - Open MPAA/RIIA Bedfellow & DRM Moron, Windows Client Lack of Vision, wasteful DMD Codec Wars - Fire him immediately before he dorks something else.
[5] Craig Munde - Billions wasted on WebTV, Tigre Media Servers, UPNP Community Alienation and ineffectual Politicking in WA DC. - Fire him retroactively and get back the BILLIONS he's wasted.
[6] Chris Jones - Semi-talented Wunderkid VP wannabe, an example of good old boy insider promo, Mr. Cut-Cut-Cut if it's not done by 8/05, Oh wait - we're slipping again! - Should be made an IC Program Manager somewhere useless like MSN or RedWest.
[7] Jawad Khaki - Perennial GM/PUM humiliation & Burnout, Random High Priority Demands, Warring with BrianV, Entire Org underleveled and underappreciated - Fire him and get a decent people manager
[8] Longhorn Basics Teams - Random Unfunded Mandates, Arbitrary and last minute Decisions on Quality and Security requirements, destroyed the ability of the product teams to deliver on their planned commitments - Put them in stocks in the village square for and let all the product teams beat them like dogs.
[9] WinSE - Minimial actual development, chronic pushback on produc teams, weekly security cluster fucks, nastiest possible working environment at WAR teams. - Fire them all and outsource Sustaining Engineering to actual engineers (in India or wherever).

I'm sure you can add to this list of rogue and also add to their voluminous sins. The real problem is that "partner" class players at Microsoft are "made men" and are not launched when they do major damage. Instead, they are just moved so they can do more of the same.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Overpaid Zeros
Anonymous

To those saying “stop pointing fingers, suck it up, take personal responsibility” I’ve got two words. F-YOU. And the brain-addled, arthritic goat you rode in on. I have been sucking it up. For five years. I’ve been working my ass off to build a product and I’ve seen GMs, PUMs, VPs and other overpaid zeros walking around with their heads up the asses. No leadership, no decisions, no goals, no hard choices, no accountability. I've watched at least 40 man-years of dev time down the ol’ crapper in my org because of worthless management. Now I spend my days adding SAL annotations, fixing PREF*** bugs, and changing comments in the code so we don’t call some third-world country by a politically incorrect name in some obscure header file that hasn’t had an edit since we were all using SLM. By the time we ship, the damn place will have had another coup and changed its name again, so who cares?

I’m willing to be accountable for my mistakes, but first I want to see some GMs held accountable for theirs. I’ve made lots of mistakes in my career, and I’ve been accountable by making up for them with even more successes. But now every good thing I do is craptulized by someone farther up the management chain. We are working hard, but can’t make a difference because we don’t have any coordination or direction. The managers who should provide that are MIA. Off buying villas in Italy, I guess. So Mr. Just-Suck-It-Up, what do you propose I do? Stage a dev coup and tell my PM team that I’m calling the shots now, so they can forget about those last few DCRs? That should look good on my September review, considering my boss the GM used to be the GPM. Or maybe I should march into Amitabh’s office and tell him I’m firing all his flying-monkeys and bulk resolving their PREFIX bugs. Should I go over to building 9 and tell the Shell team to dump Glass and just go back to the XP shell in the name of shipping?

Pardon me, I need to get back to adding some more ecounts to the code.
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/03...rship-now.html





Windows Is So Slow, but Why?
Steve Lohr and John Markoff

Back in 1998, the federal government declared that its landmark antitrust suit against the Microsoft Corporation was not merely a matter of law enforcement, but a defense of innovation. The concern was that the company was wielding its market power and its strategy of bundling more and more features into its dominant Windows desktop operating system to thwart competition and stifle innovation.

Eight years later, long after Microsoft lost and then settled the antitrust case, it turns out that Windows is indeed stifling innovation — at Microsoft.

The company's marathon effort to come up with the a new version of its desktop operating system, called Windows Vista, has repeatedly stalled. Last week, in the latest setback, Microsoft conceded that Vista would not be ready for consumers until January, missing the holiday sales season, to the chagrin of personal computer makers and electronics retailers — and those computer users eager to move up from Windows XP, a five-year-old product.

In those five years, Apple Computer has turned out four new versions of its Macintosh operating system, beating Microsoft to market with features that will be in Vista, like desktop search, advanced 3-D graphics and "widgets," an array of small, single-purpose programs like news tickers, traffic reports and weather maps.

So what's wrong with Microsoft? There is, after all, no shortage of smart software engineers working at the corporate campus in Redmond, Wash. The problem, it seems, is largely that Microsoft's past success and its bundling strategy have become a weakness.

Windows runs on 330 million personal computers worldwide. Three hundred PC manufacturers around the world install Windows on their machines; thousands of devices like printers, scanners and music players plug into Windows computers; and tens of thousands of third-party software applications run on Windows. And a crucial reason Microsoft holds more than 90 percent of the PC operating system market is that the company strains to make sure software and hardware that ran on previous versions of Windows will also work on the new one — compatibility, in computing terms.

As a result, each new version of Windows carries the baggage of its past. As Windows has grown, the technical challenge has become increasingly daunting. Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.

"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down," observed David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation."

Microsoft certainly understands the problem, the need to change and the potential long-term threat to its business from rivals like Apple, the free Linux operating system, and from companies like Google that distribute software as a service over the Internet.

In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

Last Monday afternoon, James Allchin, the longtime engineering executive who leads the Vista team, held a meeting with 75 Windows managers and senior engineers to discuss the status of Vista. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Allchin met with a handful of his lieutenants and told them of the decision to push back the consumer introduction, a move that was announced publicly later that day, after the close of the stock market.

Brad Goldberg, a general manager of Windows program management, who attended the Tuesday morning meeting, said he was not surprised, because he had been involved in the decision. "But it's a different place than Microsoft a few years ago would have wound up," he said.

Like other Microsoft executives, Mr. Goldberg bristles at the notion that little innovative work has come out of the Windows group since XP. In the last five years, he said, Microsoft has released two versions of the Windows Tablet PC software intended for pen-based notebook computers, and four versions of Windows Media Center. To combat viruses plaguing Windows, much of the engineering team focused for 18 months on fixing security flaws for a downloadable "service pack" in 2004.

"The perception that nothing new has come out of the Windows group since XP is just so far from the truth," Mr. Goldberg said.

But last Thursday, Microsoft reorganized the management of its Windows division. Steven Sinofsky, 40, a senior vice president, was placed in charge of product planning and engineering for Windows and Windows Live, a new Web service that lets consumers manage their e-mail accounts, instant messaging, blogs, photos and podcasts in one site.

Mr. Sinofsky, a former technical assistant to Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, was one of the early people in the company to recognize the importance of the Internet in the 1990's. He comes to the Windows job from heading Microsoft's big Office division, where he was known for bringing out new versions of the Office suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other offerings — on schedule every two or three years.

The move is seen as an effort to bring greater discipline to the Windows group. "But this doesn't seem to do anything to address the core Windows problem; Windows is too big and too complex," said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Vista delay, Microsoft executives said, was only a matter of a few more weeks to improve quality further, not attributable to any single flaw and done to make sure all its industry partners were ready when the product was introduced. Vista will be ready for large corporate customers in November, while the consumer rollout is being pushed back to January 2007.

Mr. Allchin conceded in an interview that the decision was "a bit painful," but he insisted it was the "right thing." Mr. Allchin, 54, will continue to work on Vista until it ships and then retire, as he said he would last year.

Microsoft will not say so, but antitrust considerations may have played a role in the decision that Mr. Allchin called the right thing to do. As part of its antitrust settlement, Microsoft vowed to treat PC makers even-handedly, after evidence in the trial that Microsoft had rewarded some PC makers with better pricing or more marketing help in exchange for giving Microsoft products an edge over competing software.

In the last few weeks, Microsoft met with major PC makers and retailers to discuss Vista. Hewlett-Packard, the second-largest PC maker after Dell, is a leader in the consumer market. Yet unlike Dell, Hewlett-Packard sells extensively through retailers, whose orders must be taken and shelves stocked. That takes time.

Hewlett-Packard, according to a person close to the company who asked not to be identified because he was told the information confidentially, informed Microsoft that unless Vista was locked down and ready by August, Hewlett-Packard would be at a disadvantage in the year-end sales season.

Vista was also held up because the project was restarted in the summer of 2004. By then, it became clear to Mr. Allchin and others inside Microsoft that the way they were trying to build the new version of Windows, then called Longhorn, would not work. Two years' worth of work was scrapped, and some planned features were dropped, like an intelligent data storage system called WinFS.

The new work, Microsoft decided, would take a new approach. Vista was built more in small modules that then fit together like Lego blocks, making development and testing easier to manage.

"They did the right thing in deciding that the Longhorn code was a tangled, hopeless mess, and starting over," said Mr. Cusumano of M.I.T. "But Vista is still an enormous, complex structure."

Skeptics like Mr. Cusumano say that fixing the Windows problem will take a more radical approach, a willingness to walk away from its legacy. One instructive example, they say, is what happened at Apple.

Remember that Steven P. Jobs came back to Apple because the company's effort to develop an ambitious new operating system, codenamed Copland, had failed. Mr. Jobs convinced Apple to buy his company Next Inc. for $400 million in December 1996 for its operating system.

It took Mr. Jobs and his team years to retool and tailor the Next operating system into what became Macintosh OS X. When it arrived in 2001, the new system essentially walked away from Apple's previous operating system, OS 9. Software applications written for OS 9 would run on an OS X machine, but only by firing up the old operating system separately.

The approach was somewhat ungainly, but it allowed Apple to move to a new technology, a more stable, elegantly designed operating system. The one sacrifice was that OS X would not be compatible with old Macintosh programs, a step Microsoft has always refused to take with Windows.

"Microsoft feels it can't get away with breaking compatibility," said Mendel Rosenblum, a Stanford University computer scientist. "All of their applications must continue to run, and from an architectural point of view that's a very painful thing."

It is also costly in terms of time, money and manpower. Where Microsoft has thousands of engineers on its Windows team, Apple has a lean development group of roughly 350 programmers and fewer than 100 software testers, according to two Apple employees who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.

And Apple had the advantage of building on software from university laboratories, an experimental version of the Unix operating system developed at Carnegie Mellon University and a free variant of Unix from the University of California, Berkeley. That helps explain why a small team at Apple has been able to build an operating system rich in features with nearly as many lines of code as Microsoft's Windows.

And Apple, which makes operating systems that run only on its own computers, does not have to work with the massive business ecosystem of Microsoft, with its hundreds of PC makers and thousands of third-party software companies.

That ballast is also Microsoft's great strength, and a reason industry partners and computer users stick with Windows, even if its size and strategy slow innovation. Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/te...gy/27soft.html





The sleeping giant goes on the offensive

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Is Ready To Take The Offensive.
Telis Demos

When Microsoft (Research) went public in 1986, there was no 3-D videogaming, no enterprise software, and no Google (Research).

Two decades and $285 billion in market cap later, CEO Steve Ballmer is facing a stagnant stock price and more competition than ever. His strategy? Take the offensive.

Microsoft is about to roll out new versions of Windows and Office. On the day he unveiled a bold $500 million marketing campaign to challenge IBM (Research) in the corporate tech market, the affable and energetic Ballmer, 50, bounded into FORTUNE's offices to discuss what Sony's troubles mean for the Xbox 360 game system, the future of advertising and why his kids shun iPods.

You guys took some heat for Xbox shortages over Christmas, but now Sony says its PlayStation 3 will be delayed until November. Did you pop a cork?

We weren't unhappy. In every other generation, the first guy to ten million consoles became the No. 1 seller. Did we just get an even better opportunity to be the first guy to ten million? Yeah, of course we did.

What might get your stock moving?

We've got companies like AT&T (Research) and Verizon (Research) driving this Internet television stuff very aggressively. If you can get a few bucks a month on a lot of televisions around the world, that's a pretty darn big opportunity. Same thing for Windows Mobile, where we're a negligible player but we have real market traction for the first time. The stuff we announced today has quite a nice growth profile. Frankly, our competition in the business market is more absent than not.

Did Time Warner (Research) made a mistake by selling a stake in AOL to Google instead of to you?

AOL is not making any investment in the future of the media and advertising business. [AOL would respectfully disagree.] It ceded that to Google. The argument I made is that some media company--as opposed to just Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo--should've cared enough to make the bet as well. Will anybody be selling newspaper ads in ten years? Or will they all get sold out of these online marketplaces? Even TV advertising. Who is better to deliver an ad, a computer that knows about you and can target you, or an ad sales guy who's walking around?

Do you have an iPod?

No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children--in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.

Think you can you crack the iPod market?

It's going to take an innovative proposition. In five years are people really going to carry two devices? One device that is their communication device, one device that is music? There's going to be a lot of opportunities to get back in that game. We want to be in that game. Expect to see announcements from us in that area in the next 12 months.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortu...3041/index.htm





Attacks on Unpatched IE Flaw Escalate
Brian Krebs

More than 200 Web sites -- many of them belonging to legitimate businesses -- have been hacked and seeded with code that tries to take advantage of a unpatched security hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser to install hostile code on Windows computers when users merely visit the sites.

In an update to its Security Response Web log, Microsoft security program manager Stephen Toulouse said the attacks Redmond is seeing against the IE flaw "are limited in scope for now and are being carried out by malicious Web sites."

I have to call Microsoft out on both counts, and I think some of what I've uncovered so far about these attacks should make it clear that the situation is serious and getting worse by the hour.

According to a list obtained by Security Fix, hackers have infected at least 200 sites, many of which you would not normally expect to associate with such attacks (i.e., porn and pirated-software vendors). Among the victims are a regional business council in Connecticut, a couple of vacation resorts in Florida, a travel-reservation site, an online business consultancy, an insurance company, and a site featuring things to do at various cities across the country.

On Friday, hackers broke into the Web site of shipping company DLPromotionFreight.com and planted code that attempted to use the flaw to steal user names and passwords stored by IE. Yaniv Zahavi, chief technology officer for Intermakers Inc., the Plantation, Fla., company that manages the site, said it appears that only a handful of customers browsed the site during the few hours the attack code was present.

Security Fix learned the location of one Web site being used as a virtual drop box for user name and password data stolen from people who'd visited the network of hacked sites (the SANS Internet Storm Center has a great post detailing exactly what one of these data-dump reports looks like). One of those victims was Abdel Marriez, a truck driver from Astoria, N.Y. The malicious program stole credit card information and credentials he used to access his e-mail online.

Marriez said he couldn't understand how the code could have landed on his computer, since he said he is fastidious about ensuring his Norton anti-virus program has the latest updates from Symantec. After this experience, he said, he plans to change browsers.

"IE and me are through, that's it," Marriez said.

That same password-stealing program landed on the Windows PC belonging to Reaz Chowdhury, a programmer for Oracle Corp. who works out of his home in Orlando, Fla. Chowdhury said he's not sure which site he browsed in the past 24 hours that hijacked his browser, but he confirmed that the attackers had logged the user name and password for his company's virtual private network (VPN). Chowdhury also uses Norton anti-virus, which did not pick up any signs of infection. He said he won't rely on his anti-virus program to clean things up.

"It's really not worth the risk," Chowdhury said. "I'm going to reinstall [the operating system] just to be sure."

Both of these situations illustrate the dangers of relying on only anti-virus software. That is not to say anti-virus software is useless. It is a necessary element of protection for any Windows PC, and for better or worse will remain so for the foreseeable future. But there is a window of time between the creation of a new virus or worm and the availability of new anti-virus "definitions" that identify the intruder as malicious.

Microsoft says Windows users should "take care not to visit unfamiliar or untrusted Web sites that could potentially host the malicious code" and that people who want to use IE should either disable "active scripting" or download the IE7 beta2 preview.

Instructions for disabling active scripting are under the "workarounds" section of this Microsoft advisory (which incidentally is three clicks away from Microsoft.com homepage). Microsoft warns, however, that this may cause problems loading some Web sites.

Indeed, I tested this solution as Microsoft recommends and found I could no longer access my Web mail. Turns out I also needed to add it to my list of "trusted sites," though Microsoft's advisory doesn't really make that clear. See this non-Microsoft site for a decent tutorial on how to set up your trusted-sites list.

Rather than download a "beta" (read: potentially unstable) version of IE or wait around for Microsoft to issue a fix, a far better idea would be to ditch IE altogether (or only use it only when absolutely necessary). I use Mozilla's Firefox for everyday browsing, but your mileage may vary. There are other options, of course, such as Opera and Netscape, to name a couple.

What amazes me is how many Windows users seem to blindly equate Internet Explorer with access to the Internet -- in much the same way that many America Online users are unsure whether they can use someone else's browser once they've signed on to their account. Even after you tell people that they may have just been whacked with a virus due to a flaw in IE, they still use it.

Case in point: One guy I contacted to tell him his site was serving up this exploit code went to check his home page and then told me his browser just crashed on him. I had to ask: "Don't tell me you just visited the site in IE?" He had. I could only shake my head and sigh.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/secur...lorer_f_1.html





P2P Worm Identified
Jason L. Miller

A new worm is catching the attention of computer security agencies. W32/Inject-H spreads via peer-to-peer networks, acting as a backdoor Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to exploit Windows-based computers.

Running continuously in the background, the worm/trojan becomes a server that allows remote access and control over the computer via IRC.

Sophos says W32/Inject-H installs itself in the registry and advises P2P file sharers to download its virus identity (IDE) file.

IRC is a common protocol used in many file-sharing applications like Napster.
http://www.securitypronews.com/news/...dentified.html





Paint rainbows all over your blues

Ophcrack 2.2 Password Cracker Released

Ophcrack is a Windows password cracker based on a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables. This is a new variant of Hellman’s original trade-off, with better performance. It recovers 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords in seconds.

We mentioned it in our RainbowCrack and Rainbow Tables article.

Changes:
(feature) support of the new table set (alphanum + 33 special chars - WS-20k)
(feature) easier configuration for the table set (tables.cfg)
(feature) automatic definition of the number of tables to use at the same time (batch_tables) by queriying the system for the size of the memory
(feature) speed-up in tables reading
(feature) cleaning of the memory to make place for table readahead (linux version only)
(feature) improved installer for windows version
(fix) change of the default share for pwdump4 (ADMIN$)

Get it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ophcrack
http://www.darknet.org.uk/2006/03/op...cker-released/





Skype, Zennstrom, Friis Et Al Sued for RICO Violations
Andy Abramson

Anyone can sue anybody, and a lawsuit does not imply guilt but I've been informed that in documents fled in the U.S. District Court's CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA (Western Division - Los Angeles) CIVIL DOCKET FOR CASE #: 2:06-cv-00391- FMC-E that back on January 20th StreamCast Networks, best known for their Peer to Peer technology, called Morpheus, filed a RICO suit against Skype Technologies SA, Niklas Zennstrom, Janus Friis, BlueMoon OU (the company that reportedly did a lot of the development work on Skype) alleging RICO violations. RICO stands for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
http://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwa...zennstrom.html





Why the Media Centre PC is Destined for the Home Office
Asher Moses

The forthcoming update to Intel's Viiv will see the media centre PC move from the living room to the home office. Asher Moses explains why.

Before anyone mentions it, no, we haven't been smoking any particularly potent herbal products lately, nor were we repeatedly beaten over the head with a two by four on the way to work this morning. Hear me out.

Thus far, every play to bring the PC into the living room has revolved around plonking an entire machine down in the lounge, right next to your existing home theatre equipment. In our opinion, this method was doomed from the outset.

The only moderate success of Windows Media Center-equipped PCs has highlighted the fact that most consumers aren't interested in having an all-singing, all-dancing computer in their lounge room. We're not interested in editing word documents, manipulating spreadsheets, browsing the Web or playing games in a three metre interface from the couch (as opposed to sitting directly in front of the screen like we normally do when interacting with a PC). Rather, we'd simply like to watch/record TV, view DVDs and play other audio/video files on-demand through a simple, intuitive interface.

This is where the genius of Viiv comes in. Shortly, Intel will release a range of "digital media adapters", which connect to your existing home theatre components (e.g. your TV, stereo system, etc) and can stream content wirelessly from any Viiv-certified PC. Bingo!

The existence of digital media adapters will totally remove the need to have a media centre PC taking up space in your living room, unless you're one of the few users that finds it practical to do anything other than passively soak up multimedia content whilst relaxing on the couch.

As a result, the PC in your home office will likely act as a digital media hub, distributing content wirelessly throughout your house to various media adapters. And since the Windows Media Center Edition operating system used by all Viiv-enabled machines is virtually identical to Windows XP when it's not in media centre mode, you can go about your regular office-related tasks -- word processing, web browsing, etc -- while others are seamlessly streaming content in the lounge.

Such multi-tasking makes dual-core processors a necessity, which explains why Intel requires all vendors of Viiv machines to adopt a dual-core processor before gaining certification.

Suddenly, the logic surrounding some manufacturers' decisions to offer Viiv machines in an office-like tower form factor -- for example, the Acer Aspire e650 -- is beginning to make sense.

What do you think? Will the PC pull out of the lounge room, leaving your home office machine to act as both a media hub and a productivity workhorse? Have your say below!



Brad
Location: Mokane, MO
Comments: This article reinforces the old saying "If you can't do, teach . And if you can't teach, become a journalist".

Viiv is nothing more than a hardware DRM solution for Microsoft and Media Center is just WinXP Pro with a few new programs.

I built a Via Epia ITX box that looks nearly identical to my home theater equipment that uses no fans and runs ubuntu Linux and MythTV. I paid a fraction of the cost a Intel/MS solution would and I can do anything with my media unlike this DRM from hell system. Plus I built it three years ago.

It would be nice if C/Net would hire someone with any amount of technical ability.
http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/pcs/...0061467,00.htm



No kidding. It's about divergence.
shotgunefx

I think I used my DVD player once to play a CD (my stereo was apart).

Maybe at some point convergence works, but right now you get things that are so-so at a lot of things and excellent at none. Cell phones are a good example.

I don't want or need a shitty camera built in. What's the point? The quality sucks, bad resolution, bad picture quality, maybe an LED for a shitty flash. I rather carry my small digital camera instead. Having one company as your gate keeper is perilous too. Take the cell phone example. I got a LG PM-325 from Sprint. I used the camera twice before realizing unless I paid X dollars a month for "Picture Mail", there was absolutely no way to retrieve them from the phone.

The future downside is that if they every do make the ultimate device that does everything, you're fscked if it get's stolen. There goes your media, your pictures and probably tons of other stuff that you wouldn't want other people to have access to. Carrying your life in your pocket might be convienent, but also dangerous.
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/03/28/0929236.shtml

[JackSpratts]

Pirate Parrot Swept Up In MPAA Net
Jackson Pratts, AFDNews

A parrot famous for poor hygiene was added to the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) latest group of movie swappers sued for copyright violations, according to a late announcement by the Hollywood trade organization.

The bird, a 75-year-old male named Colonel Rico Dupree, is owned by William "Doc" Bones, a retired circus performer living in Connecticut, and had been a featured part of many famous trick-bird acts in the 1930’s, '40’s and '50’s.

Reached at his home in Fairfield County, Dr. Bones was at a loss to explain how his parrot got caught up in the dragnet. "Sure, the Colonel can use a computer, he’s actually pretty good with one, so what? He generally hates movies, unless Errol Flynn is in them or they have boats. He watches Pirates of the Caribbean over and over, but we have that on tape. I think those Hollywood big-shots are all wet."

This is not just any parrot however, no matter how talented, but one with an extraordinary pedigree. According to the International Society of Insufferable Bird Snobs, Colonel Rico Dupree is a direct descendent of perhaps the most infamous parrot of all-time, Monsieur Plein DeMerde, best known as French pirate John Lafitte’s favorite shoulder companion and generally regarded as the foulest smelling avian in history. So inseparable were pirate and parrot that some aristocratic Ladies held hostage by Lafitte were said to complain in private the buccaneer was more affectionate to DeMerde than to them, and nearly impossible to stand next to. "Parrots become quite attached to their owners," said Winifred Softbothom, president of the Society, "They can live long lives. It’s not unheard of for the birds to be passed down to family members as grandparents and even parents die, but the transition is unfortunately not always successful. In this case," she brightened, "it has been proven satisfactorily that Colonel Dupree is third generation DeMerde. Billy Bones’ bird is plainly Plein DeMerde’s grandson. I mean honestly, all one has to do is sniff."

When asked if this present lawsuit and Monsieur DeMerde’s historical association with the notorious French pirate is evidence of any peculiar family affectations, Miss Softbothom conceded to a reporter that anything’s possible with parrots. "Unlike humans, and men especially, parrots are stable, loyal, and usually very bright. Breeders know this and choose behavioral traits accordingly, which are often passed down. It’s quite possible Colonel Dupree enjoys the attention of flaunting his expertise with computers, even flapping his feathers and making wind at authority, just like his seafaring ancestors."

That assessment didn’t sit too well with his owner however. "Nonsense," sputtered Dr. Bones. "The rudest thing this bird ever does is cybering chicks on Myspace."

Maybe so, but Ed Heard of the MPAA wants a closer look. "Before we toss this suit out we’re going to take a good long look at that bird, and I don’t care how stupid we come off to you pro-user zealots. If we even think this parrot is a copyright violator we’re clipping his wings but good."

This may not be the end of Rico however. Producers from Hollywood have quietly expressed interest in the bird, considering him for several projects, in part because of his previous entertainment experience, but also, rumor has it, because his famous odor is distinctly less offensive than that of most other industry players.

"Who knows," says his owner, "when the heat’s off a little maybe we can settle out of court for a few grand and work a movie deal. He usually turns up his beak at media bigwigs but I know the Colonel would swear off crackers for a shot at 'Pirate’s of the Caribbean 2'."





Who's Building the Next Web?

Got a lot of free time? You're going to need it to enjoy the fruits of Silicon Valley's latest labors: start-ups that want you to spend even more of your life online.
Brad Stone and Steven Levy

Deciphering the exact meaning of the phrase Web 2.0 is a popular parlor game in Silicon Valley. The expression can stand for many things—the kind of start-up that forges new connections among Web users, lets them share their tastes in music and video or simply exploits their creativity and participation in new ways.

In the broadest sense, the Web 2.0 moniker captures the renewed exuberance (perhaps irrational) in high-tech circles. There are so many start-ups, in fact, that inventive observers of the newly crowded business scene have taken to mashing all their logos together in one colorful and jumbled image, then posting their work to Flickr for others to appreciate (to see some examples, Google "logo 2.0"). So consider these standout firms below, which we've noticed in the past few months, some threads from the larger quilt.

Digg
Take everything you know about how a media company works and invert it. That's Digg. Founded last year by Kevin Rose, a former on-air personality on cable network G4, Digg is a techie news site that asks its users to be editors. Anyone can submit a link to a news story or blog entry from elsewhere on the Web (the site gets 1,300 submissions a day), and then users vote for or "Digg" in the suggestion queue the stories that they think should get promoted to Digg. Users can also subscribe to their friends' Digg lists, in effect watching over their shoulders as they read the news. "From the beginning, we didn't want any editors or moderators. We wanted to give all the power back to the community," Rose says. The company has 12 employees and plans this summer to expand beyond tech into other topics. Will its users Digg Britney-Kevin stories?

Plum
When Hans Peter Brondmo's father got sick in 1999, the Norway-born entrepreneur found himself, as many others do, using the Internet to research the illness. But a few years later, when he heard of someone else trying to learn about the same rare cancer, he found that he was unable to easily pull together the collection of searches, e-mails, documents and online conversations that comprised his quest. That gap was the impetus for Plum, a company he cofounded with his friend Margaret Olson that attempts to eliminate the boundary between your desktop and all the stuff you accumulate on a given topic, no matter where it's stored. Using a custom tool called the plummer, you can grab information from any available source—everything, including Web pages, pictures, podcasts and dynamic RSS feeds—annotate it, remix it with other things and save it in a collection. Then you can share the collection with others (individually or in groups) or even blog it as you go. There's also a social-networking aspect that connects you with those whose collections are similar. Plum hasn't launched its public beta yet, but you can go to the site and sign up in advance.

Sharpcast
Gibu Thomas's two-year old Palo Alto, Calif., start-up offers something in addition to new photo-organizing software: a powerful idea. When you have a digital image, Word document or e-mail on one computer, you shouldn't have to send that file to another PC or your mobile phone. All your gadgets should synchronize seamlessly and invisibly, "so you're never even thinking about backing up," Thomas says. A veteran of Palm, he's been working quietly on the concept for more than two years with 25 employees in Palo Alto. This spring they'll launch a proof of concept: a digital photo organizer you load onto your PC, which automatically harmonizes all your computers and Windows Mobile devices so that your photos are accessible wherever you are. Ultimately, Thomas hopes to integrate Sharpcast into every software application, so that users never have to think about backing up files or synchronizing devices again.

Jajah
In the mad rush to launch new Internet telephone services, Google, Yahoo and a range of start-ups are closely emulating market leader Skype. Not Jajah. The firm, with offices in Israel, Austria, Ireland and Silicon Valley, brings online rates to regular telephones instead of clunky PC headsets. Starting this week, a caller can go to jajah.com, enter his own number (landline or mobile phone) and the number he wants to call. The company's servers in Ireland connect the call over the Internet to switching stations in the cities of both caller and recipient, and two local calls are placed from there to the regular phones. The calls cost pennies per minute, and the phone companies don't even hate the service, since at least callers are paying local rates.

Prosper
Chris Larsen does not want you to pay 14 percent interest on your next credit card. He also thinks that lending small amounts of money to regular folks is an investment opportunity that's hoarded by big financial institutions. So the e-Loan founder introduced Prosper. The San Francisco firm allows regular users to take out loans of up to $25,000. They register with the site, specify how much they need and propose a rate of repayment over three years. Lenders either compete to fund that loan, or don't touch it if the buyer's credit rating or reputation is too risky.

To improve their reputations, borrowers can band together in groups with their offline friends. Members of a PTA, for example, might join together to form a virtual credit union and can all vouch for each other's identity and standing. Groups build their status on the site over time, and the better their reputation, the lower the interest rates they can seek. Larsen thinks borrowers will be less likely to default on loans if there's a real-world stigma attached. Meanwhile, the 35-employee company performs all the background credit checks and takes a 1 percent cut of each loan from the borrower. If it can explain this tricky model to consumers, Prosper might do as its name describes.

la la
For his latest creation, serial entrepreneur Bill Nguyen went to the Web 2.0 spice rack and took a few jiggers of MySpace social networking, a slice of iTunes and a half cup of Netflix, then blended it together in a stock rich with vintage Napster peer-to-peer sharing. The result is la la, a music-discovery site that lets you find new music and connect with people who share your taste. Then you ask them to send you their used CDs, a gift that costs you only a dollar each. You qualify for that bargain by sending one of your CDs to someone else (la la supplies you with shipping materials). Once you send a CD away, you are supposed to erase the tunes from your computer because you don't own them anymore. Despite the dubious likelihood of such rigor, Nguyen insists that the music industry has no problem with this. (La la kicks back 20 percent of revenues to the artists.) Currently la la is on an invitation-only basis, but plans an open rollout this summer.

FilmLoop
The challenges and opportunities posed by the digital-camera boom minted a whole new generation of entrepreneurs, and Kyle Mashima was one of them. A former VP at software maker Adobe, Mashima looked at his digital camera and the early online photo services two years ago, and wondered if there was a better way to upload and share photos on the Web. FilmLoop is his answer. The company asks users to download a photo player, which sits on the desktop and scrolls images in a revolving horizontal slide show. Here's how it works. Go to the beach with some friends, and after you transfer your photos to your PC, you create a loop by dragging and dropping the images into the FilmLoop player. The images are uploaded to the Web, where your friends see them, get copies and add their own pictures, which in turn are added to your slide show. Or, users can put their cameras away and browse a general library of 500 photo loops of news, entertainment and groups of images that other users have publicly posted and tagged. The company makes money by inserting an ad at the end of a loop, before it starts over. Mashima has already scored some partnerships: eBay, among other firms, is using the tool to show shots of cars for sale on the auction site. Seeing pictures of classic De Loreans and MGs scrolling across their computer screens might entice even reluctant buyers.

Mercora
As unlikely as this sounds, India-born Srivates Sampath is a huge Jethro Tull fan. On Mercora, the company's founder can choose from more than a dozen radio stations from all over the world devoted to the flute-favoring rockers. The site allows anyone to become a DJ. Download the Mercora player and, using your own music, you can program up to five radio stations, which Mercora's million other users can listen to any time they want. There are currently 60,000 stations to choose from—all user-programmed. It's legal, too. Mercora paid $35,000 last year in royalties to recording-industry trade organizations like ASCAP.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12011437/site/newsweek/





Didn't Want To Change The World, Just Wanted To Work On Computers
John Boudreau

Steve Wozniak says he never intended to change the world. That was the other Steve, Steve Jobs.

He just wanted to build computers. Oh, and he really -- really -- wanted to spend his career as a Hewlett-Packard engineer, a position he reluctantly left.

Life turned out very differently for the self-trained electrical engineer. In 1976, he and Jobs started Apple Computer, which would help launch the personal computer revolution. Observers say Apple would never be what it is today without either Steve -- Jobs, the tech evangelist and visionary, and Wozniak, whose technical genius created computers for the masses.

``I didn't want to start this company,'' said Wozniak, known in Silicon Valley simply as ``Woz.'' ``My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.''

Wozniak, 55, left Apple in 1981 to work on his engineering degree at the University of California-Berkeley and dabble in other things. He returned for three years in 1983. Though he has been involved in other ventures since Apple, Wozniak will always be identified with the Cupertino company.

Wozniak, who will publish an autobiography, ``I, Woz,'' this fall, prefers to stay out of the spotlight but willingly signs autographs on everything from laptops to an apple (the kind you eat).

He also recently linked up with former Apple Chief Executive Gilbert Amelio, who was ousted from Apple in 1997, and Ellen Hancock, who was chief technology officer, also until 1997, to form Acquicor Technologies. It raised $150 million this month to buy other technology companies.

Wozniak recently sat down with the Mercury News to talk about Apple's 30th anniversary in his home perched in the Los Gatos hills. Here is an edited version of that interview.

Q
In 1976, how did you think a personal computer would change people's lives?

A
We did believe that computers would fit into every home because of the price and some of the things they did. We thought people would use the computer in the home for normal home things: You have a kitchen so you keep recipes on it. You have a checkbook and you can have the computer do the subtraction for you. We didn't realize what having a computer in virtually every home would be like -- how you can make a decision and a million lives are affected.

I was just doing something I was very good at, and the thing that I was good at turned out to be the thing that was going to change the world. That wasn't my plan. I didn't think, I'm going to change the world. No, I'm just going to build the best machines I can build that I would want to use in my own life. Steve was much more further-thinking. When I designed good things, sometimes he'd say, ``We can sell this.'' And we did. He was thinking about how you build a company, maybe even then he was thinking, ``How do you change the world?'' He spoke like that.

Q
The big computer companies of the day didn't see the potential for a small computer for the home. Why is that?

A
Some of them expressly said this is not going to be a successful business. They didn't see the little bends in the curve. They probably didn't see the ease of running cheap applications software, a lot of little start-ups using low-cost technology to build peripherals and software, or things like VisiCalc (spreadsheet software).

Q
You were working at Hewlett-Packard while you and Steve Jobs were creating Apple Computer. Did HP know about your Apple work?

A
Yes. As soon as Steve Jobs suggested, ``Why don't we sell a PC board of this computer,'' I said, `I think I signed something, an employment contract, that said what I designed belongs to Hewlett-Packard.' And I loved that company. That was my company for life. So I approached Hewlett-Packard first. Boy, did I make a pitch. I wanted them to do it. I had the Apple I, and I had a description of what the Apple II could do. I spoke of color. I described an $800 machine that ran BASIC (an early computer language), came out of the box fully built and talked to your home TV. And Hewlett-Packard found some reasons it couldn't be a Hewlett-Packard product.

Q
Did HP ever express regret to you about passing on the Apple I and Apple II?

A
Oddly enough, by the time I was working on the Apple II, and we were selling the Apple I -- and I was working at Hewlett-Packard still -- they started up a project on my floor without telling me. . . . I asked to be on the project. I really wanted to work on computers. And they turned me down for the job. To this day I don't know why. I said, ``I don't have to run anything,'' even though I'd done all these things and they knew it. I said, ``I'll do a printer interface. I'll do the lowliest engineering job there is.'' I wanted to work on a computer at my company and they turned me down. When you think about it, every time they turned me down, it was fortunate for the world and it was fortunate for myself.

Q
Eventually, the two of you sought out investors. And is that when you left HP?

A
A venture capitalist got Steve Jobs talking to Mike Markkula. Mike had been an engineer and he had gone into marketing, which he was superb at. He had early stock options at Intel. He was looking for things to do, dabbling around in investments, and here we were. He wanted to bring technology into the home. He looked at what we had and got excited. He took the time to see that what we had was such a huge leap in technology. He decided to back us fully if I decided to leave Hewlett-Packard. I balked at first. Steve was getting all my relatives to call me and tell me, ``You should do it.'' But I had a job for life at Hewlett-Packard and that meant more to me. It was a tough decision. Finally, I decided I can start this company, but I don't have to run it. I just have to be an engineer.

Q
How would you describe your relationship with Steve Jobs?

A
We are friends and polite and talk to each other once in a while. . . . We've never had an argument. There have been a couple of artificial ones over misinterpretations of things in the press. I'm a real analytical person. When I talk with reporters, I will talk about the pluses and minuses of an issue and, boy, sometimes they like to grab a little minus, twist the words a little, exaggerate it and make a headline.

Q
Does Steve Jobs ever give you heads-up on a hot new product?

A
I would never ask. And the reason I would never ask is I think it was bad for Apple to have all the rumors and leaks from the inside. I also didn't like to get pre-released products from the inside because whatever I got had some bugs, and I'd have to go down to the company and get it upgraded, get it upgraded, get it upgraded. I'd rather know what real people are getting and buy stuff in real stores. I've got a lot of friends who work there and I will never, ever ask them what's going on. I don't want to know. Once in a while, though, if a computer doesn't work with a cell phone I have, I loan my cell phone to some engineers and they'll make sure the next operating system version works with it.

Q
What's it like being Steve Wozniak and shopping in an Apple store? Are you recognized?

A
I was in Boston once. I needed two AC adapters. I ran into this new Apple store. I went up to the counter, ``I'd like two 65-watt AC adapters.'' I didn't say anything about who I was. And they bring them out. I say, ``How much?'' They say, ``We are expensing it.'' I said, ``Yeah, but how do I pay for it?'' They said, ``No, no, no -- we are allowed to give gifts to special people.''

Q
Do you attend Apple product announcement events?

A
That's actually one of the nicest things Steve does for me: He makes sure I am always invited to the VIP guest area for the product rollouts. I appreciate that more than I can ever say. Those things have inspired me. They have inspired my children when I have brought them in the past. They are really great to see.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...printstory.jsp





Apple's Intel Challenge

Shortly after release of the new Apple operating system for Intel processors, Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computer announced he would be eager to sell computers with OS X installed – if Apple were willing to license a version for use on Dell-branded equipment. Of course, Steven Jobs said it wasn't in the cards....

Official Apple intentions aside, thousands of people are already running pirated copies of the new Apple OS on Dell systems. Both a modified “developer version” and the standard commercial versions of the Apple OS X operating system for Intel processors (now often, and unofficially, nicknamed OSX86) can be successfully installed on most Dell desktop systems released since 2003 – though please note this does not mean it is in any way legal to do so. Indeed, it appears most of this increasingly popular “experimentation” constitutes flagrant software piracy.

This site explores the current “not-only-for-geeks” fad of installing the Apple OSX86 operating system on standard desktop PC’s, and what it means for the future of Apple Computer. In light of Michael Dell’s comment, we will focus particular attention on Dell and Apple OS X.

All information presented herein is widely available on the internet. Nothing stated in these pages should be interpreted as an endorsement of software piracy or other illegal activity.

OS X for Intel

Until January of 2006, Apple’s elegant and highly secure OS X operating system ran only on Apple-manufactured hardware designed around the PowerPC processor, produced by Motorola and IBM. Unfortunately, and despite Steve Job’s many entreaties, development on the PowerPC chip lagged woefully behind the Intel CPU platform. Not only was the PowerPC chip relatively slow, but it was plagued by high power demands and excessive heat production. This latter problem constituted a huge obstacle for Apple laptop design. After considering its options and its deteriorating relationship with Motorola and IBM, sometime in 2004 Apple secretly made the bold decision to abandon the PowerPC and redesign its entire computer line around new Intel dual-core processors.

The first test version of the re-engineered OS X operating system for Intel-based computers was released to developers in July 2005. The operating system came with a specially configured test computer, and with an new OS X software system designed to work exclusively with the supplied prototype Apple hardware. Indeed, Apple has made clear the new Intel version of OS X is intended to function exclusively on its own hardware. Special code is incorporated into the software that, by mating with an encryption layer in the matching hardware, attempts to thwart installation on anything other than Apple computers.

Within weeks, however, eager hackers discovered several arcane ways of installing and running OS X for Intel on many common “Windows” computers using both the Intel and the AMD CPU. Original techniques for accomplishing this involved a prolonged and complex series of tasks suited only to a Mac-lusting geek with a weekend to burn. But that was just the first version of the hack.

Apple shipped developers a second and third edition of the new Intel-based operating system in October and November. Each incorporated more completely developed features and security measures. Both were soon “cracked” to allow installation on non-Apple hardware. In early 2006 the first commercial versions of OS X were released with still more complex routines to bond the OS X exclusively to the new Apple Intel computers. Within ten days these were also cracked. All major work modifying the Apple OS for use on generic Intel systems has been done by one extremely talented Russian programmer using the nom de hache of (caution, speaking this name can raises pixilated goose bumps of admiration in certain circles): Maxxuss.

By early 2006 several software modifications based on Maxxuss cracks were circulating around the internet. When these "patches" are applied to the Apple OS X installation disks (developer release version 10.4.3 or the commercial release versions 10.4.4 and 10.4.5), OS X can be installed on many currently available Intel desktop systems -- including most Dell desktop systems released after 2003. The hacked versions of OS X run at speeds equivalent to Apple's own Intel-based systems (much faster than most Apple PowerPC-based systems) and offer "almost" bug-free functionality (more on that below).

Rapid progress is being made by hackers toward developing an unauthorized installation DVD that will allow the current version of OS X to be easily installed on most recent PC's. (See Hacking a Mac for further details.) Stay tuned…things are developing quickly.

Bottom line: Despite Apple's effort, the commercial releases of OS X has been effectively cracked. And Steve Jobs is now faced with a real problem. Lots of people would love a dual-boot box, with OS X for home and Windows for office compatibility. Absent an offering by Apple of an OS X version configured for non-Apple hardware, and given the huge appeal of the OS X operating system in security and ease of use, software piracy could end up taking a big bite out of the golden Apple. Hey, the kids (and quite a few more mature people) already get iTunes software for free. They obtain 90% of the tunes loaded onto those ubiquitous iPods with “free” (read that “often illegal”) downloads from BitTorrent and peer-to-peer networks. Might they not decide to add an Apple to the download queue?

The Hack Scene

Immediately after release of the new Intel OS X systems, several internet sites appeared dedicated to “facilitating” installation of OSX86 (as the new Apple OS is popularly nicknamed) on standard Intel and AMD based systems. The sites are seeing lots of traffic these days. By early February 2006, one of the web forums (osx86project.org) reported 20,000 visitors had signed up for user accounts. Search on “OSX86” with Google, and you will locate tens of thousands of internet pages about “hacking” OSX86.

Even ZDNet and TechRepublic (both part of the respected CNET Networks) published detailed guides reviewing their experience installing pirated copies of Apple OSX86 on Intel based computers.

DivX, a big player in video compression software, recently posted a software update proclaiming: “DivX 6 for Mac for Intel is now available! That's right, now all of you on hacked Windows PC's running OS X.... er, wait, um... I mean, now all of you getting the new Intel based iMacs and future MacBook Pro's can use DivX 6 for Mac as well!”

Perusal of the download counter at one well-known Swedish BitTorrent site shows pirated versions of Apple OS X for Intel near the top of the popularity list. By mid-February site counters had ticked off over 100,000 downloads of various versions of the Apple Intel OS X installation disk. This is not just a drop in the bucket. It looks like the “community” is hot on the tracks of something they want badly.

History of the crack is documented in various internet posts. The new OS X for Intel software contains special routines – including the TMP protection layer and a hardware-dependent software encryption layer – to “lock” it to Apple hardware. The first job hackers faced was unlocking TMP and fooling OS X into thinking it was working on a genuine Apple computer. That done (and it was done early in the game), the next complex task was emulating the new EFI technology (a BIOS replacement used in Apple Intel computers but not yet widely adopted by other manufactures) and decrypting the hardware- dependent software encryption routines incorporated in Apple production systems. Maxxuss again accomplished both tasks.

Next problem is making the system software interface with diverse hardware – CPU’s, keyboards, video cards, audio devices, network cards – other than the stock devices natively supported by the developer and production versions of OSX.

The Apple’s Intel OS X is entirely forward-looking; it is designed to run on dual-core Intel processors and includes no backward support for less capable CPU’s. In order for OS X to work with older systems, support for the newer CPU instructions – specifically, SSE3 and NX – had somehow to be worked into the OS X kernel.

Among Maxxuss’ very impressive programming achievements was creating code to emulate the SSE3 calls used by the OS X operating system. His (her?) patch inserts SSE3 software emulation routines into the operating system kernel, thus allowing OS X to install and run on CPUs supporting only the older SSE2 instruction set. This modification (along with the protection cracks) allows OS X to run on most Intel processors manufactured after 2003 and pretty much all Dell computers shipped in the last two years. Of course, newer systems equipped with more recent versions of the Pentium that include SSE3 and NX support (Pentium Prescott, Pentium D, Celeron D, Intel Duo-Core T series) do not require the emulation modifications, but can still run perfectly well using them.

Then there is the issue of input and output devices. Apple computers exclusively use USB keyboards and mice. Many Intel systems still use PS2 type keyboards. A driver was needed, and created, to support this hardware. Network interfaces are tricky. Dell’s commonly integrated Intel Pro network interface works well, but a several other models will not, and a compatible network card sometimes has to be added into a hacked box. With the exception of USB plug-in devices, most other wireless network cards are not supported.

Graphics integration are still more difficult. Drivers exist in the Apple OS X setup for only a few specific devices. Since Apple uses ATI graphics hardware, most ATI graphics cards work. Support for everything else is a little less perfect. Integrated Intel graphics setups (like those found on many Dell motherboards) seem to work, as do many nVidia cards, but these units may not support some of the fancier graphics routines (Core Graphics and Quartz) used by the Apple Aqua desktop interface. Small graphics imperfections – "mouse tearing" – remain a problem for most hacked systems. (Interestingly, early reports suggest this is a small problem on the production systems as well.)

What would a Mac be with out sound? Apple is all about iTunes and that cool Mac Aqua desktop copulating with the 20 zillion little iPods Apple sold last year. But sound is also a bit of a problem. The audiophile add-in audio boards like the Creative Audigy series shipped as an upgrade with Dell systems are not supported by Apple or the hacked OS X systems. Nonetheless, the integrated sound present on most Intel motherboards (and on most all Dell systems) is supported and can be easily turned on even if the box still has an Audigy card plugged in. USB-connected sound systems also are reported to work without a problem.

Other important peripherals – printers, USB devices, hard drives, CD and DVD burners – all are generally reported to work without alteration of the stock OS X setup. Installation on laptop computers is also possible (and sometimes quite successful), however drivers for integrated video, audio, touch-pads, battery power management and networking are sometimes difficult to configure.

The Patch

In late-2005, the various pieces of this complex crack project appeared on the internet one by one, and often in multiple evolving versions. Earlier adopters – er ah, hackers – faced the daunting task of pasting the different pieces together into a workable installation. Internet posts leave a bread crumb trail of the angst-plagued path trodden by Hackintosh pioneers, a veritable trial by fire – or at least of burning, and re-burning, and reburning trial OS X installation DVDs.

Then in early January, along came “The Patch”. With a little help from his friends, a hacker named JaS put it all together in a consolidated installer, the Jas 4.2b patch. Just call it the Patch. What does the Patch do? In a few quick clicks, it takes the original Apple Developer installation DVD (version 10.4.3 8F1111) and rewrites it, adding all the refined Maxxuss-authored changes to kernel code and appending automatic installation scripts for most of the commonly needed peripheral support kernel extensions. This “patched” OS X installation disk is then simply burned to a new DVD. Similar patches are now also appearing for the most recently release commercial versions of OS X.

And with a patched installation DVD in hand: Voila! Drop the disk into the computer’s DVD drive, boot the Apple OS X installer program, and in twenty short minutes… It Breaths! It Bounces!

…Or it is DOA, and the wannabe Mac displays a grey tombstone (Apple’s polyglot equivalent the infamous Microsoft “Blue Screen of Death”) stating politely in four languages that you are screwed: The noble Apple OS X won’t install in your illicit wormy Windows besmirched boxen.

But more often than not, at least on a commonly configured Dell system, it just works. In twenty minutes or so the installation program completes and the system reboots into the wondrous world of an Apple OS X re-engineered for Intel processors. Having seen this marvel materialize before my own eyes – and even given a weary cynicism about the digital revolution – I admit being somewhat awed by a bouncy OS X toolbar floating above the Dell logo on a 20” LCD monitor plugged into a stock Dell office system. Was it a faint echo of the ancient and mysterious alchemical coniunctio oppositorum: a wedding of two divergent visions rushing toward a connubial digital future? Whatever. It was cool.

Of course the best of hacks is still an illegal hack, and hundreds of frantic posts on the forums suggest large numbers of would-be Mac hacks are meeting the gray screen of death. But using a clean copy of a properly-patched installation disk DVD, more and more people are also gleefully declaring success in creating their own hackintoch boxen. (For a personal assessment of your hacker potential, take the Hacker Aptitude Test.)
http://macadell.com/index.html





Run the new Intel Apple OS X on a Dell computer? It can be done with little more difficulty than it takes to install Windows XP. Apple knows it. But will they cash-in?

Hack a Mac - Doing it with Andy

Special note to Oprah: The anonymous author of this purported true-life account has confessed to the editor that all names and events depicted have been edited, amplified and/or fictionalize to protect the innocent, and the guilty. The author admitted he has really never spent even a single night in jail, and does not want to go there now. Editorial review has further confirmed that information contained in this account is widely available on the internet. Nothing stated in this account should be interpreted as an endorsement of software piracy or other illegal activity. If you really want a Mac, buy the genuine article.

Important Notice: Before reading any further, please take the Hack-a-Mac Aptitude Test

Last December a young friend at the office popped open his Dell Inspiron to proudly display OS X Tiger booting up. I was duly amazed, and intrigued. Over the course of the next month, I did some browsing on Apple and Intel. Finally, I asked my friend (call him Andy) to give me a hands-on introduction to the magic of making OS X run on a Dell.

Andys’ basement is a typical techie lair. On the work bench sit three different system boxes, including an Apple G5 and a big honker of a tower glowing gamer neon from every orifice, two LCD monitors, and surrounding trip wire maze of 5/1 speak and Ethernet cables. In center ring sits Andy’s new custom-built Hackintoch – pasted together from scratch, he explains, with Apple OS X compatible components. “It’s a perfect clone, but faster….”

We sit down for the polite geek preliminaries. He makes his HackMac jump gracefully through a few hoops. It displays widgets and bounces! It plays tunes! It runs iLife ‘06! I am admiring. But I am here for another reason. I want to see what OS X can do on the two-year old stock Dell 8300 I have dragged along.

“No problem”, says Andy. He moves the G5 out of the way, lays my box on the table, pops a button and spreads its case wide apart. Thrusting in a nimble hand, he yanks out my IDE drive, and drops it into an anti-static bag. “This is your first time, so let’s us protection.”

From a crate of junk on the floor he pulls out a 20GB drive that has obviously been round the block. “We’ll start with a fresh (more or less) drive. So technically, we are not putting anything on YOUR system. Your stuff is in the bag. When we’re done, I destroy the evidence, and you take home a clean box.” Hum. This kid is quick.

I am in for the ride, and ask the first question obvious question: “So where did you get the Apple OS?”

Okay, I admit, I already sort of know the answer. Andy gives me a look of disbelief, turns to his hacked mac box and opens a Google search. He types in “10.4.3 8F1111”, the version number of the developer release, followed by the word “torrent”. Lots of links appear. Four clicks later he is downloading a copy of the Apple developer OS X.

I’ve used BitTorrent clients to download (legally) a couple of Linux distributions. Some of these were huge DVD-sized files, like the Apple OS install disk, and can take a few days to download, even with a fast broadband connection.

But I also know lots of “other people” use torrents to download pirated software, music and movies. Therefore, let me make something clear about the way BitTorrent software works: Whenever you are downloading a file with a torrent, you are also at the same time uploading it back to other users. If you are downloading software that is being illegally distributed, you are also at the same time uploading and distributing illegal material yourself. Get the point? I ask Andy to kill the download.

“No problem. Just answering your question. I already have the file.” He turns to the glowing gamer tower (running Windows XP) and opens up a folder.

"What you want is a completely patched and ready to install DVD image, and several of these are available on BitTorrent host sites, like The Pirate Bay. Unfortunately, some for those big files are corrupted in the download process or when they are burned to a DVD. A corrupt file will not work. To check integrity of a DVD image, you need to know the expected MD5 of the file. For example, the MD5 checksum on an iso image of the 10.4.3 8F1111A installer disk that has been pre-patched with the JaS4.2b patch should be exactly [16139ae55ac283c114a5231f85c3f54c]. If the burned DVD of this .iso has this MD5, it is a good copy and should work. If it has a different MD5, it is probably a corrupted download or DVD copy." (A freeware program to check MD5 of files is MD5summer. UltraISO can all check the MD5, see below.)

“Anyone installing OS X on a PC for the first time should start by installing the 10.4.3 version with the Jas 4.2b patch. This is the version most likely to work on the largest number of computers, and with the least trouble. Most of the newer patches for version 10.4.4 and 10.4.5 (the commercial versions shipped with the first Apple Intel systems) use parts of this original cracked version. Lots of times you need this version working to install other new versions. So we will do a 10.4.3 install on your box."

"But what," I ask, "if you do not have -- or are not sure you have -- a known good cracked disk?" Andy explains, "Then the file you need is the final developer version of 10.4.3 released by Apple in November.” The real thing is "macosx_10.4.3_8f1111_for_dtk_userdvd.dmg”, and it has an MD5 of [3665735d1b651b5a4ad15ca59ab40142]. The ".dmg" stands for a disk image, the Macintosh equivalent of a Windows ".iso" file.

"For instructional purposes, I will show you the complete way to produce an install disk, starting with an image of the Apple developer installation disk, version 10.4.3 8F1111."

With an image of the Apple macosx_10.4.3_8f1111_for_dtk_userdvd.dmg installation disk in hand, a few preparation steps are required. The Mac format disk image .dmg file has to be converted to an equivalent Windows compatible .iso disk image before it can be “patched” (“cracked”). Using a shareware program called UltraISO he runs the image conversion routine, copying the dmg format file to a new .iso file.

“Now we check the MD5 again, to make sure the conversion was clean. People who don’t do this spend days wondering why their installs won’t work.” Using UltraISO again, he selects the "Check CD/DVD Disc", and runs the MD5 checksum on the newly created .iso image. This time the numbers don’t match up with the expected result. “Happens sometimes. Lots of bits to bite. We need to do the conversion again.” Second time, the resulting file gives the correct sum.

Next comes the real crack operation: applying the patch files to the Apple installation disk. Andy clicks back to a bookmark for a web forum post titled “JaS 1111a Generic Patch v4.2b”, and finds there a download link. The patch downloads in a few seconds.

“This JaS patch is great. It writes all the needed changes into the .iso disk image we just made.” Using the downloaded file, Andy opens the included patcher software, clicks a few boxes, enters the name of the input .iso he just created and the new patched output .iso file he is about to create, and clicks start. A few minutes later, the patched .iso file sits in his file folder. Checking the MD5 of the converted file against the numbers on the website [16139ae55ac283c114a5231f85c3f54c], he declares the patch good.

Last step is burning the .iso image to a DVD. Andy opens Nero, selects the newly created Apple OS X image as source, throws a DVD+R disk into his drive and hits the burn button. Fifteen minutes later the installation disk pops out of the drive. Oh yes, one more thing – check that MD5 sum again. Should be the same as the iso from which it was burned, but Andy warns me – like a parent telling his kid for the hundredth time to look both ways before crossing the road -- that with some computers and some DVD burners, people may burn five or more DVD disks before they get the perfect copy. A less than perfect copies usually won’t install. Ours is good on the first burn. (Of course, he notes, some people already have a good pre-patched install DVD. He has one and could have just dropped in in the drive and started the install. All of the above was done to show me the process.)

The moment of truth: We turn on my Dell 8300, and at startup hit the F2 key to enter the BIOS setup. Andy explains, "We have to turn on your motherboards native audio - the AC97 thing. Soundcards like your Audigy don't work. But on-board sound does. Also, the Apple installer doesn't like Intel processors running Hyperthreading on the CPU, so we will turn that off too. You can turn it back on later, and after the install it will probably work." He selects the BIOS options, and reboots.

The system reboots, and now as things startup he hits F12 key to select the boot device (we need to boot from the DVD drive). Andy selects option 5, to boot from the CD/DVD drive (and not the default HD). He drops the newly created DVD into the drive drawer, and away we go.

The DVD whirls, a cursor, and then a little “Darwin” prompt, and then a big grey Apple splash screen appear. In a about 25 seconds, the installer routine boots.

It’s working. The first screen asks us to select an install language. Checking my paranoia level, Andy perversely clicks on something that looks like Arabic, or Japanese, or something.... “Lets cover our tracks.” A few more screens appear. This part is a little unclear, since everything is now Arabic. But Andy makes up the translations as he goes. A couple screens later he clicks the top tool bar “Disk Utility” option, explaining we need to format the old HD before running the rest of the install. With Disk Utility, he chooses the hard drive, which I see does actually have a prior installed partition. “A SUSE Linux install,” he explains, “Kiss it good bye. We got OSX86!” He selects to repartitions the whole drive as a new Apple journaling file system. That done, the install runs without further user input. Twenty minutes later, it gives what appears to be an Arabic gesticulation of success and reboots.

It worked. Apple OS X starts with a polyglot flash of graphic mania, spins the screen, and invites us (in a foreign tongue) to register our new Apple. Total time from arrival in Andy’s basement to booting OS X on the Dell 8300 is about 2 hours, and that includes a few habitually awkward geek social nanoseconds.

Andy smiles at me. “Okay. Are you ready to go all the way?” Huh? “I mean, do you want to really do it, put a double boot setup on your system?” I wiggle on the pirate hook. Okay. It is a spare box I don’t use it much. Hey, this is only a “test of concept” activity. I will scrub out the OS X partition when we are done….

Back my hard drive goes into the Dell. We boot Windows XP. I already have Acronis Disk Director installed, and have previously used this great application to partition drives and create dual boot Windows 2000 and Linux systems. Using Disk Director, I create a new 30 GB primary partition on my 80 GB hard drive (note it must be a “primary” and not an extended partition for an operating system to install). And then I install the Disk Director boot manager tool that elegantly handles the startup of multi-boot installations. Andy takes over. He reboots the Dell, hits the F12 key, selects to boot from the CD/DVD drive, and puts the cracked Apple OS X install DVD back in the drive. This time when the Apple install program starts he uses its Disk Utility to format the new blank partition on the drive as an Apple file system (the Windows partition is left alone), and then runs the install into this partition. Again, it works.

When the system reboots, the Acronis OS selector pops on screen asking us to select either Windows XP or the new “Unknown OS” (Acronis software does not recognize the Apple OS, since the very possibility of such a dual-boot system was not conceived by its designers). We select to boot from “Unknown OS”.

The grey apple splash appears, and then OS X boots with all its graphics glory, inviting us (this time in English) to register a new Mac.

Andy runs the box through a few test routines. Everything seems to work great. He downloads the free XBench benchmarking software for Macintosh, and we run the speed trial. The Dell 8300 scores around 60, equivalent to Andy’s single processor G5, and a couple times the score of an average G4 system.

BUT -- it is a hack. What I want is a legal dual-boot box. And so, as the sun set in the Western waters, I kiss the OSX86 partition good-bye, and I take my all-too-ordinary Dell Windows XP back home.

However, my wife's birthday is just around the corner, and her old Dell Latitude laptop is falling apart. Don't let the big cat out of the bag, but I think she is going to be getting an Apple Intel MacBook. Me? I am waiting for the dual-boot miracle machine.
http://macadell.com/macadell4.html





Beatles Take Rival Apple To Court Over Core Business
Liz Chong

IT IS the ultimate battle of the generations over an image of a half-eaten piece of fruit.

In one corner Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the ultimate stars of vinyl who defined music in the 1960s. In the other, the creators of a small white box that has revolutionised the way we buy and listen to music.

This week the Apple Corps goes to the High Court seeking multimillion-pound damages against Apple Computer, the creators of the iPod, over their hugely successful iTunes Music Store.

Apple Corps, owned by the former Beatles and their heirs, still owns the licensing rights to Beatles’ products. It is claiming that the introduction of iTunes broke a $26 million settlement under which Apple Computer agreed to steer clear of the music business, for which the Beatles’ company retains the famous trademark. It is the latest clash in one of Britain’s longest-running corporate legal battles.

Any damages for this latest clash could amount to tens of millions of pounds because it concerns Apple Computer’s hugely successful iTunes Music Store and iPod digital music players.

The court will be treated to a demonstation of an iPod, but it is unlikely to play a Beatles song, as they have not been licensed for download and it would therefore be illegal.

The Beatles first used a logo of a Granny Smith in 1968 when they founded the Apple Corps to distribute their records and those of other artists they signed to the Apple record label. The records had a ripe apple on one side and a neatly sliced half on the reverse.

The Apple Records subsidiary is still active as the licensing agent for Beatles products.

Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple Computer, founded his company in 1976 with a logo of a rainbow-coloured apple with a bite taken out of it. Apple Corps sued him five years later, accepting an $80,000 settlement and a promise that the computer company would stay out of the music business.

The companies clashed again in 1989 after Apple Computer introduced a music-making program. The computer company settled in 1991, for $26 million. Apple Corps was awarded rights to the name on “creative works whose principal content is music” while Apple Computer was allowed “goods and services . . . used to reproduce, run, play or otherwise deliver such content”.

Critically, however, the agreement prevented Apple Computer from distributing content on physical media. This was designed to cover CDs and tapes, but it is unclear whether it included later inventions such as digital music files or devices used to play them.

Apple Computer will argue that its music service, which has sold more than a billion songs since 2002, is merely data transmission.

The case is scheduled to begin on Wednesday at the High Court before Mr Justice Mann, a self- professed fan of music and computers. He is no stranger to the iPod, having inquired of both sides some time ago if he should disqualify himself from hearing the case because he owned one.

The owners of Apple Corps — Sir Paul, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison — will not attend the hearing, but witnesses will include Neil Aspinall, the company’s managing director and the former Beatles road manager; and Eddy Cue, head of internet services at Apple Computer.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...105800,00.html





Apple vs Apple: High Court Freaks Out
Philippe Naughton and agencies

The Royal Courts of Justice came alive to the beat of the 1978 disco classic Le Freak today as two giants of the music business clashed in a battle over internet downloads and a piece of forbidden fruit.

Apple Corps, the music company set up by the Beatles in 1968, is suing Apple Computer over its iTunes Music Store, which it says infringes a 1991 trademark agreement that the computer-maker would steer clear of the record business.

Apple Computer denies infringement and says that its iTunes service is an electronic data-processing device - an argument dismissed by Geoffrey Vos QC, representing Apple Corps, as a "perversion" of the 1991 deal.

As the case opened in the High Court, Mr Vos argued that Apple Computer was clearly in the music business, having sold a billion tracks already through its iTunes service. He quoted Steve Jobs, founder of the computer firm, as saying that downloading music from the internet now was exactly the same as buying an LP in the era of vinyl.

And to prove his point that Apple Computer was using the trademark to sell music even though its download service is branded otherwise, he demonstrated to Mr Justice Mann how to download a track from the iTunes website onto an Apple iPod music player.

Choosing Le Freak - which spent six weeks at No 1 for the group Chic before the internet had even been invented - Mr Vos took the judge through the procedure, pointing out how many times the Apple logo appeared as he did so.

The song and its chorus - "Aah Freak Out! Le Freak, c'est Chic!" - boomed around court No 73. Mr Justice Mann proved no beginner: the learned judge is an iPod owner had earlier offered to disqualify himself the case on that basis.

Mr Vos told the court that both sides had respected the 1991 agreement and all had gone well between the two companies until the advent of the iPod, the portable music player that can store thousands of tracks downloaded from the internet or ripped from a user's CD collection.

He said that Apple Computer violated the agreement when it launched iTunes in 2003 and described as "plainly wrong" its argument that it uses the apple mark only in connection with a delivery system.

Customers of the service now have access to 3.7 million songs and when Mr Jobs launched Music Store in 2003, part of the presentation included exclusive tracks from artists including U2, Eminem, Bob Dylan - "tracks for the Store that you cannot get anywhere else".

Mr Vos said: "[Apple] Computer was promoting a store at which to buy music, and more particularly, Computer's musical recordings - permanent downloads - with special characteristics. No objective onlooker could think otherwise.

"What Apple Computer are not doing using the Apple mark is selling software, delivery systems, or anything of the like. They are selling music," Mr Vos added, "and that is in violation of the agreement."

The computer company’s logo is a cartoonish apple with a neat bite out of the side; the record company is represented by a perfect, shiny green Granny Smith apple.

He added that Mr Jobs wanted to use the mark "apple" for the Music Store but realised that the agreement prevented this. Before the launch of iTunes it had even approached Apple Corps and offered $1 million for the trademark Apple Records. That offer was rejected by Neil Aspinall, the Beatles former road manager, who is now managing director of Apple Corps.

Although Computer recognised that the use of "apple" marks would be impermissible, it "succumbed to its earlier desire" and used the logos with "great prominence" and the name "apple" and had continued to do so up to the present date, Mr Vos said.

Apple Corps is seeking court orders to stop Computer using the "apple" marks in connection with the iTunes Music Store and is also asking for damages after an investigation into Apple Computer’s profits from the world's dominant music download service.

Apple Corps' current owners - Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono - did not attend the hearing.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...109802,00.html





iHate iTunes
Stephie Coplan

When I downloaded iTunes onto my computer, I sold my soul to Apple.

For years, I had downloaded songs from Morpheus, Kazaa and LimeWire (or whichever P2P file-sharing program wasn't being prosecuted at the moment). It was fun and instant and, most importantly, it was cheap. But Apple was offering me safety, accurate tagging (none of this "01-By By By-Backstreet Boyz.mp3" business) and album art for less than a dollar.

Song by song, album by album, I became an addict - which was a problem I was probably prone to anyway, due to my impulsive personality. I'd look at my $50 e-bills, sigh, and think about how I'd explain this month's splurge to my father.

Three months after putting iTunes on my computer, I had probably paid for Steve Jobs' entire cancer treatment.

However, like a relationship that starts off all puppies-and-rainbows but, a year later, feels more like rattlesnakes-and-raindrops, I can now say - without calling myself a heathen - that iTunes can be an iPain.

This was a gradual realization that started the day I downloaded Prokofiev's Carnival of the Animals and noticed that iTunes had labeled the third movement "Hens and C**ks" with a red "explicit" label next to it.

The store has since removed the "explicit" label (obviously the iTunes honchos gave it a listen and were no longer horribly offended by the violin and trumpet). But they continue to mask the euphemism for "rooster" for apparently no reason at all other than the unwarranted paranoia that some child under the age of eight (searching for Prokofiev?) might get confused and ask his parents why iTunes is selling a song about Hens and Penises. Hilarity ensues; Prokofiev rolls over in his grave.

Strike two: what iTunes likes to call "iTunes Originals." These are albums, often acoustic, recorded exclusively for iTunes and infused with boring interview clips in which most of the artists say things they've already said in 10,000 other interviews. Should you, for whatever reason, want to download just the interview segments and not the music, you're out of luck. The interviews are "album only."

The artists never sing a bonus verse (like Simon and Garfunkel did during "The Boxer" at the famous Concert at Central Park) or break into 12 minute Iron Butterfly drum solos.

Fans fear that if they don't purchase their favorite artist's iTunes Originals, they are either not true fans or they are missing out on a milestone in the artist's career.

It's a shame that so many talented artists who have always seemed to remain unaffected (or at least put out an image of remaining unaffected) by the economic aspect of the music biz - Ben Folds, Death Cab for Cutie, Aimee Mann - have agreed to participate in such a blatant marketing gimmick. But then again, iTunes can make you do crazy things.

Strike three, iTunes is out: while it's cool that the iTunes Music Store sells TV shows, it's not cool that it ruins the endings of the episodes in each episode description, which is necessary to view if you're interested in downloading a particular episode instead of an entire season.

I, for example, didn't want to buy all 20 episodes of Season One of "Saved By the Bell," I only wanted a few. But the only way to determine which ones sounded interesting was to read their descriptions. Check out this description of an episode entitled "The Election:"

"When Zack discovers that the new student body president will win a trip to Washington D.C., he runs against Jessie solely to win the trip. After he wins, Zack feels guilty and resigns, handing the office to Jessie."

I'll concede that "Saved By the Bell" is no "24" when it comes to plot development. But that doesn't give iTunes the right to steal Bayside High's thunder.

I've saved my biggest tiff with iTunes for last: media previews. One would think that a 30-second preview of a song or TV show would be a good way of determining if the media were worth purchasing - and it is, but not the way iTunes does it.

Every preview of every episode of every show includes at least 20 seconds of the theme song, which, naturally, is exactly the same from episode to episode. This type of preview demonstrates that the file works properly, but it doesn't serve its purpose.

I'd like to download a 30-second clip of Nickelodeon's "Zoey 101" starring Jamie-Lynn Spears so I could make fun of it, but iTunes only provides the nauseating 29-second theme song and one second of MiniBrit opening her mouth to speak.

Similarly, iTunes likes to play applause during clips of live tracks rather than a guitar solo, dialogue during Broadway tracks rather than belting, and unfamiliar bridges during pop songs rather than the catchy hooks. Don't they realize that this ploy makes a popular song like "Dirty Little Secret" unrecognizable to someone who heard it on the radio and wanted to download it when she got home?

When used as a music-organizing program, iTunes is marvelous. But after a year of buying from its music store, I think I'd rather buy my music from a drug dealer.

Unfortunately, iTunes corners the market on online media stores just as Apple dominates the MP3 player market. Other online music stores exist, like Rhapsody, now-legal Napster and the upcoming MTV-Microsoft store, to name a few. But they are so unpublicized and inaccessible (most stores either require a monthly subscription or only allow their songs to be downloaded to non-iPod MP3 players) that they might as well go out of business. The only comparable legal competitor I've found is www.mp3search.ru, which has a smaller selection than iTunes (artists tend to be either extremely popular or extremely obscure without anything in between) but sells its songs for a dime and full albums for $1.08.

And come on, if nothing else, can they please stop putting a lowercase "i" in front of everything?
http://www.tuftsdaily.com/media/stor...ftsda ily.com





What's That Sound?

French MPs vote to control digital downloads, but suppliers probably won't be facing the music
Grant Rosenberg

When the French National Assembly last week approved legislation that would force "interoperability" on Apple, Microsoft and other digital-music providers, much of the commentary focused on whether or not Apple would cease operating in France, rather than give up exclusive rights to its popular iTunes Music Store and iPod technology. That would be a bit premature; the "authors' rights" bill still has to pass the Senate in May. And in any event, the bill seems likely to have little effect on music downloading in France, because comparatively few use iTunes anyway.

While Internet users in other countries seem to be making the shift toward legitimate digital-music purchases, France saw its illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing double in 2005 from the previous year, with legal files representing just 2% of downloads, according to a Dec. 2005 joint study by tech magazine SVM and market research institute GFK. And the bill seems unlikely to affect that behavior. It imposes penalties for illegal downloading, but they're miniscule: slap-on-the-wrist fines of just j38 to j150 for individuals. This probably won't discourage the estimated 8 to 11 million people who download pirated music online.

Some critics maintain that the bill is unenforceable and won't benefit artists. The Association des Audionautes (ADA), a P2P-rights group, slammed the draft law, saying it erodes the notion of private use and criminalizes cultural exchange. Furthermore, as the National Assembly rejected a proposed idea of "global licensing" — a government-set flat fee for unlimited downloading — there is still no mention of how artists would be compensated in the bill. Says the ADA's president, Aziz Ridouan, 17, "I think there really should have been more consultation and time spent on the bill."
http://www.time.com/time/europe/digi...177629,00.html





A Web Site So Hip It Gets Laddies to Watch the Ads
Saul Hansell

"This will be over faster than your last relationship" and ".001% of your daily ad intake" are the sorts of wisecracks users see right above the video commercial that greets them when they visit Heavy.com.

And that pretty much sets the tone of knowing commercialism for a Web site that has become one of the most popular among a growing crop of sites attracting young people with racy, humorous video programming.

Heavy is honed especially for young men. It mixes animation, music, video games, grainy home movies of oddball characters, supermodels in bikinis and pop culture parodies. Often, all of these elements are squished into a single two-minute clip. Advertising is everywhere.

This potent stew drew 5.5 million users to Heavy.com in February, according to comScore Media Metrix, nearly triple the audience of a year earlier.

Heavy's founders and chief executives, Simon Assaad and David Carson, both 35, say they modeled the frenetic site — with quick-triggered interactive features and almost no text — more on a video game than any other media form.

About half of the videos are submitted by amateurs, but Mr. Carson and Mr. Assaad put up only those that fit Heavy's rude and wry sensibility.

"Heavy has always been about our point of view," Mr. Carson said. "That's why we have attracted an audience." The site makes money through advertising, and all of the videos and game offerings are free.

Howard Handler, the chief marketing officer at Virgin Mobile, which advertises on Heavy, said that the site worked because Mr. Carson and Mr. Assaad "really get the 18- to 34-year-old market."

More and more Internet services are being built around video programming rather than traditional Web pages, and much of it aims to attract viewers in their late teens and 20's.

Viacom, which dominates the youth market on cable television, has created sites with video taken from its main networks, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. Yahoo has made itself the Web's most popular destination for music videos.

Much of America Online's growing video programming, which includes music, extreme sports and TV reruns, is aimed at a younger audience.

Likewise, smaller Web sites from Mania TV, YouTube and Atom Entertainment are competing for viewers and advertisers with games, music and video, often sent in by their users.

Heavy has attracted mainstream marketers like Virgin, Sony, Unilever, Verizon, NBC Universal and Burger King, often by blending content with advertisers' products.

For example, it commissioned amateur videomakers to create short videos featuring the masked king character who now appears in Burger King's TV commercials. And Sony paid Heavy.com to create an animated series called "Pimp My Weapon," which is recut from Sony's "God of War" game for PlayStation 2.

These kinds of segments have proved to be extremely popular. People have watched the Burger King character videos 9.1 million times and the "Pimp My Weapon" segments 6.5 million times since September.

The site's mix of creativity and commercialism reflects the background of its two founders. Mr. Assaad, a onetime filmmaker, and Mr. Carson, trained as a composer, founded Heavy Industries, an advertising agency focusing on the Internet, in 1998.

They started experimenting with a series of animated parodies of the VH1 feature "Behind the Music," taking humorous jabs at pop stars and celebrities. After the series became popular on other sites, they started Heavy.com in 1999, raised money and hired 60 people to create programming.

Of course, soon after, the Internet advertising market collapsed with the dot-com bubble. Heavy, based in New York, was forced to abandon most of its programming efforts, although it continued to show its old programs and music videos.

For a time, Mr. Carson and Mr. Assaad returned to the marketing business, largely helping Cablevision start its music channel, now known as Fuse.

By 2004, as the audience for Heavy grew to more than 250,000, they quit the Cablevision account to devote their energy to expanding the programming on Heavy.

"We knew it was the business we really wanted to be in, because we could have a direct relationship with consumers and an outlet for our creativity," Mr. Assaad said. "We felt it was only a matter of time before we could do it using our weapon of choice: the Internet."

Last year, Heavy, which is privately held, raised $10 million from Polaris Ventures, its first outside capital since 1999, to pay for a series of expansions. It expects advertising revenue of about $20 million this year, up 300 percent from 2005.

This year Heavy will increase its production of original programming tenfold, to 600 segments. It will spin off one of its popular channels, "Teriyaki Strips," which features animation with an Asian theme, into a separate site aimed at teenage boys. And it is developing content for mobile phones, like the "massive mating game," modeled after the "Dating Game" television program. One woman —perhaps a minor celebrity — will interrogate perhaps thousands of contestants by text message.

One of Heavy's hallmarks is how it weaves advertising into the animated experience of moving around the site. Each time a user clicks to move to a new section, an ad briefly moves to fill the screen. When a video begins to play, the ad remains as a frame around the video.

These bold graphic ads account for about two-thirds of Heavy's advertising revenue. About a quarter of its revenue comes from customized content, like the programs with Sony and Burger King. Less than 7 percent comes from traditional commercials on the site.

While advertisers initially want to run their existing commercials on Heavy, Mr. Assaad said, many soon learn that less-intrusive forms of advertising can get five times the number of people to click on them. At first, though, the advertisers bristle to hear this.

"It's kind of like telling someone they have an ugly baby," Mr. Assaad said. "Nobody wants to hear they have a TV commercial that nobody wants to watch."

Today, Mr. Carson says, young people see no difference between entertainment and advertising; he points to celebrities like Snoop Dogg, the rap star, and Tony Hawk, the skateboard champion, who are closely associated with their product endorsements.

"I grew up in a time when if you did something like that, you were a sellout," said Mr. Carson. "For kids under 24, the notion of sellout is nonexistent. If Snoop sponsors Pepsi, it's not that Snoop has sold out, it's 'Snoop is getting paid by the man.' "

For advertisers, this shift means they have to alter the way they use their brands and icons.

Burger King was initially leery of Heavy's proposal that it send masks of the king character to two dozen of the site's regular contributors. And rather than permitting the company and its lawyers to approve each video, Mr. Assaad asked the company to keep its hands off.

"We said, 'Legal will have nothing to do,' " Mr. Assaad said. " 'It will be user-generated content, and you will have to trust our editorial judgment.' "

In fact, Mr. Carson and Mr. Assaad rejected several video submissions. But the ones that were shown on Heavy were certainly more risqué than is typical for Burger King.

One video showed what seemed to be a scantily dressed woman flirting with the viewer over a Webcam. As she removed her bra, she revealed herself to be a man wearing a king mask, holding up a sign that said, "You've been served by the king."

Gillian Smith, Burger King's senior director for media and interactive marketing, said the program with Heavy was "a calculated risk."

Ultimately, the company concluded that people who were likely to be offended by this sort of video were not likely to spend much time on Heavy.com, and besides, it no longer had the ability to control its brand imagery the way it had in the past.

"Anyone could have purchased a king mask, which we sell online, done exactly the same stuff and put it up on their own blog," Ms. Smith said. "It was a great way to let people have fun with the king masks and see the king as another piece of pop culture."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/te...y/27heavy.html






Cablevision Tests 'Remote Storage' DVR Use
David Lieberman

In a move that could ignite a major debate about consumer "fair use" of TV programming, Cablevision Systems will unveil plans to test a service that gives cable subscribers the ability to record and time-shift shows using existing digital set-top boxes.

Although it works just like TiVo and other digital video recorders (DVRs) — consumers choose in advance which shows to capture and can fast-forward through ads — the recording itself will be stored at the cable system, not on a hard drive in the consumer's home.

The technology for what Cablevision calls its "remote storage digital video recorder" (RS-DVR) "is here today, and in Cablevision's case, we can use it to put DVR functionality in more than 2 million digital cable homes instantaneously, without ever rolling a truck or swapping out a set-top box," COO Tom Rutledge says in a statement.

It will be tested on Long Island in the second quarter in advance of a broad commercial rollout. The system will give each subscriber about 80 gigabytes of storage capacity — enough for about 45 hours of programming — on the central server. They'll also be able to record two programs simultaneously while watching a previously recorded show.

Although pricing hasn't been set, the company expects it to be less than what it charges for DVR, currently $9.95.

Cablevision's plan is sure to irk TV networks and programmers. If it catches on, it would weaken their ability to sell reruns of their shows via Internet downloading or video on demand. They also have long held that recordings of their shows — particularly by commercial entities — violates their copyrights.

That's one reason Time Warner in 2003 scrapped plans to introduce a centralized DVR-like system it called Mystro. It would have recorded all TV shows, giving consumers the ability to select shows to watch on demand up to a month after they had aired. (Related: Time Warner talks "Hits" channel with networks)

Time Warner followed up in October with a system called "Start Over," now in 65,000 homes in South Carolina. It gives cable customers who tune in late to a show the opportunity to watch it from the beginning — but without the ability to fast-forward through ads.

Cablevision says it believes its RS-DVRs don't violate copyright laws.

"Consumers have well-established rights to 'time-shift' television programming by making copies for personal, in-home viewing," the company says. "This new technology merely enables consumers to exercise their time-shifting rights in the same manner as with traditional DVRs, but at less cost."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/product...sion-dvr_x.htm





How To: Back up your DVDs in Ubuntu

I wrote a bash script to help you duplicate your DVDs. This may be illegal depending on where you live, but if you use your DVDs regularly you should have backups, to protect your investment. This script will backup the DVD to your hard disk, decrypt it, and create a directory structure that you can burn back to DVD-R. The following assumes that you are using Ubuntu, but I’ve run the script on both Libranet and Mandrake with only minor modifications (see comments within the script for hints.)

Add universe and multiverse repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list (if you need help doing that, drop me a line via the comments below).
On the command line: sudo apt-get install libdvdread3-dev mkisofs dvdbackup dvdauthor transcode libdvdcss2 (alternatively select all of the mentioned packages in synaptic, and install)
Download streamanalyze (mirror) and streamdvd (mirror) from http:// www.badabum.de/streamdvd.html
tar -zxvf streamanalyze-0.4.tar.gz; cd StreamAnalyze; make; sudo make install
tar -zxvf streamdvd-0.4.tar.gz; cd StreamDVD-0.4; make; sudo make install
Download my script
gunzip DVD-Duplicator.gz
Now, some final configuration is needed; first, you need to work out the file system and mount points of your dvd drive, if you don’t know them already.

To do this, type: cat /etc/fstab; you should see a table which includes something like the following:

/dev/hda /media/cdrom0 ...
/dev/hdb /media/cdrom1 ...
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom2 ...

Put a DVD into the dvd drive that you want the script to use
It should automount; in gnome or kde you’ll see a prompt asking you what you want to do. Hit cancel, or ignore.
To work out which is the drive in question, I did the following:

> ls /media/cdrom0
> ls /media/cdrom1
> ls /media/cdrom2
AUDIO_TS JACKET_P VIDEO_TS

So, in my case, /media/cdrom2 is the drive, and (from the drive table that I got above) I can see that this refers to /dev/hdc filesystem.

Use your favorite text editor (vi, gedit, kate, whatever) and edit DVD- Duplicator; you’ll need to change DVDDEV and DVDDRIVE to whatever values you just discovered are appropriate for your system. Save.
Now you’re ready to make some backups!

To use it, on the command line, type: ./DVD-Duplicator folder-name, where folder- name is the name of the directory that you want the dvd to be backed up to. The directory will be created if it doesn’t exist already. Example, you might type ./DVD- Duplicator thematrix. Once the script finishes, you can now use k3b (or your favorite dvd/cd burning program) to burn the dvd from the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS directories that were created under the directory you specified. (Hint: the script can also generate an iso file for you to burn, if you have the hard disk space to spare; that way, you don’t have to worry about copying the files from AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS. To use the script in this way, you might type: ./DVD-Duplicator thematrix thematrix-iso.)

If you have questions on getting it working, suggestions for improvement, etc, please post a comment here.
http://flavor8.com/index.php/2006/03...vds-in-ubuntu/





Low-D TV

Next-Gen DVDs' Blurry Picture
Cliff Edwards

The battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD was already tricky for consumers. But new content protection may mean buyers get even less than they might have hoped

After years of waiting, the new era of high-definition home theater has finally arrived. In April, Toshiba (TOSBF ) plans to introduce HD-DVD, its high-definition successor to the DVD player,
two months ahead of rival consumer-electronics companies who plan to sell a competing format called Blu-ray Disc.

Electronics makers hope the new gear will keep sales in the $120 billion industry humming, while Hollywood hopes the lure of interactive features and crystal-clear pictures five times the resolution of current DVDs will jump-start slumping home-video sales.

"IT'S CRAZY." Here's the problem: Both camps are shooting themselves in the foot before they get to the starting line. Consumers already were faced with the prospect of mass confusion, thanks to two next-generation DVD formats, whose disks do not work in each other's machines but look essentially the same. Remember Betamax versus VHS? At least then you could tell one tape from the other.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Turns out, most of the 20 million high-definition TVs sold over the past three years aren't capable of displaying the disks in their full resolution. Worse, at least one major studio intends to downgrade the picture even more unless consumers hook their players up through a special, pricey cable aimed at preventing piracy.

"It's crazy," says chief analyst Richard Doherty of consumer-research firm Envisioneering. "The sticker on your new player promises the equivalent of a high-performance car, but the fine print says you may be buying an Edsel instead."

OPTING OUT. The new content-protection scheme would be the first time any consumer electronics purchaser -- not just those who try to break copyright laws -- could be penalized. In this case, even if you have a perfectly equipped TV, content providers retain the right to automatically downgrade the picture quality because of piracy concerns. Current DVD releases like Batman Begins and Walk The Line include software to prevent unauthorized duplication, but still play normally.

New software included on both Blu-ray and HD-DVD releases, however, will automatically slash the image, making it only marginally better than current DVDs, unless consumers have a relatively new connector and cable called HDMI to hook up players to their televisions. Only one in 20 HD sets sold to early adopters over the past few years has the right version of the connector. Only 15% of new sets sold this year will include it, and deliver the full 1080 resolution capable of showing such detail.

Sony execs say a majority of Blu-ray content, at least initially, will play at the highest resolution possible on a consumer’s HDTV, regardless of how the player is hooked up. Four major studios -- Sony Pictures (SNE ), 20th Century Fox (NWS ), Disney (DIS ), and Paramount (VIA ) say they initially will not use the new copy protection on their releases. Universal execs told BusinessWeek on Mar. 21 that they, too, will forego the protection. Execs at Warner Brothers declined to comment, but sources with knowledge of the studio's plans say "at least some" of the 20 HD-DVD releases planned through April will use the software. "What do you have then? A very expensive DVD player," says Sony Senior Vice-President Tim Baxter.

To make matters more confusing, Sony and other consumer-electronics companies are adding features to the next-generation players that then may "upconvert" -- boost the image quality -- so the same disk may look vastly different, depending on which machine you purchase and the size of the TV (see BW Online, 3/27/06, "Sony's Renaissance Geek"). Experts say both of the new formats shine on sets 50 inches or larger.

The confusion may be just enough for consumers to say good night, and good luck. Already, a growing number of so-called technology influencers and Web sites are recommending sitting out the first round of the new DVD wars.

Many believe the best bet for either format to gain acceptance now lies with next-generation game consoles. Sony plans a November worldwide release of its new PlayStation 3, which will include a Blu-ray player. Execs at Sony hope by then that enough new HD sets will be sold, with the right connectors, to make the player worthwhile. And Microsoft (MSFT ) has said it may add an HD-DVD player to its Xbox 360 in coming months. Until then, the crystal ball for crystal-clear movies remains fuzzy.
http://cache.directorym.com/creative...e=AB_Context_B





Google Joins the Lobbying Herd
Kate Phillips

For a company that takes pride in being the quintessential outsider, Google is moving quickly into the ultimate insider's game: lobbying.

Started less than a decade ago in a Stanford dorm room, Google has evolved into a multibillion-dollar business, its search engine ubiquitous on the Internet. Its sprawling growth, fueled by a public stock offering in August 2004 that created a market behemoth, has now thrust it into the glare of Washington.

As lawmakers and regulators begin eyeing its ventures in China and other countries and as its Web surfers worry about the privacy of their online searches, Google is making adjustments that do not fit neatly with its maverick image.

It has begun ramping up its lobbying and legislative operations after largely ignoring Washington for years, in a scramble to match bases long established here by competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as the deeply entrenched telecommunication companies.

Google has hired politically connected lobbying firms and consultants with ties to Republican leaders like the party chairman, Ken Mehlman; Speaker J. Dennis Hastert; and Senator John McCain; and advisers say the company may set up a fund-raising arm for political donations to candidates. And in a town where Republicans hold the levers of power, Google has begun stockpiling pieces of the party's machine.

To some, Google is a novice arriving late to the table. To others, the company's embedding on K Street, which serves as home to many of Washington's top lobbyists, represents a new and not necessarily welcome sign of sophistication.

"It's sad," said Esther Dyson, editor of the technology newsletter Release 1.0 and former chairwoman of Icann, a nonprofit group that plays a role in Internet administration. "The kids are growing up. They've lost youth and innocence. Now they have to start being grown-ups and playing at least to some extent by grown-up rules."

In doing so, Google provides another example of how Internet companies, no matter how unconventional their roots or nonconformist their corporate cultures, increasingly find themselves wrestling with the same forces in Washington that more traditional industries have long faced. Google's executives consider the moves necessary as they achieve a prominence that allows them to elbow their own interests onto the political stage.

"We've staked out an agenda that really is about promoting the open Internet as a revolutionary platform for communication," said Alan Davidson, brought on board less than a year ago as the company's policy counsel to set up offices in the Penn Quarter area of Washington. "It's been the growth of Google as a company and as a presence in the industry that has prompted our engagement in Washington."

Even as they emphasize policy over politics to raise their profile, Google executives and advisers are also fully aware that they are embracing the lobbying world at a time when it has been rocked by the Jack Abramoff scandal of influence peddling. Some advisers say the company may wait until after Congress decides whether or how to overhaul lobbying laws before it wades more deeply into fund-raising and politics.

With its stock price closing on Monday near $370 a share and its vaulting onto the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index this week, the company also cannot afford to be caught flat-footed by regulatory agencies or its competitors.

"They are brilliant engineers," said Lauren Maddox, a principal in the bipartisan lobbying firm Podesta Mattoon that was hired by Google last year. "They are not politicians."

In signing on Podesta Mattoon and other consultants, Google is spreading its lobbying dollars on both sides of the political aisle, increasing its spending on outside firms this year to well beyond $500,000, officials said, although that does not include its own new office complex or payments to some of the consulting groups being added on. (By comparison, the giant Microsoft spent almost $9 million last year in lobbying, and Yahoo spent more than $1 million for just part of last year, according to partial-year filings compiled by PoliticalMoneyLine, an independent campaign finance Internet site.)

Podesta Mattoon is led by Anthony Podesta, a Democrat, and Daniel Mattoon, a Republican and longtime friend of Speaker Hastert, an Illinois Republican. The speaker's son Joshua also works at the firm, along with Ms. Maddox, a former top aide to Newt Gingrich.

Adding to its arsenal is the DCI Group, a firm with top-flight corporate clients and strong ties to Mr. Mehlman and Karl Rove, President Bush's senior political adviser. DCI, Google officials say, will help it establish links to Republicans, as well as promote its book search project, an effort to make the full text of books searchable online, among publishers and authors.

At the helm of that operation is Stuart Roy, senior vice president of DCI and a former aide to Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas. Mr. Roy also counts as a client Progress for America, the conservative group that successfully rallied grass-roots support for Mr. Bush's Supreme Court nominees.

Ms. Maddox said Google's emerging army of advisers would help it fight fires along several policy lines, including copyright law, access to the Internet and privacy issues like its successful court fight this month to narrow a Justice Department subpoena over disclosure of its users' searches.

"We have a team of Republicans and Democrats who are helping them sort out these issues," Ms. Maddox said, an effort that recognizes that the "policy process is an extension of the market battlefield."

The big Internet companies, including Google, are bracing for an uphill struggle with lawmakers and the titans of the telephone and cable industries over whether fees should be charged for heavy data traffic, like video streaming over broadband width.

"Our belief is that this is going to be an issue of great concern for consumers," Mr. Davidson said. "The telephone companies have been lobbying these committees for generations. Our industry is very young."

Google's political awakening was nowhere more evident than on Capitol Hill last month, when it, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Yahoo were slammed by Republicans and Democrats alike over business dealings in China. Elliot Schrage, vice president for global communications and public affairs at Google, was lashed repeatedly with the company's motto, "Don't Be Evil," as House members accused the corporations of abetting China's government in censoring Internet communications and imperiling the safety of Chinese Internet surfers.

It is an issue that Google and others know will not go away soon. Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, and other legislators are demanding that Internet companies be more sensitive when dealing with foreign countries.

"I think they are just going to lobby to spread this yarn that by being there, they're going to spread democracy," said Mr. Smith, who presided at the hearing. "This dictatorship can go on for generations if it's not unchecked."

Mr. Davidson said companies were trying to address the prickly subject. "I think we all said in our testimony that we were serious about trying to work out standards for engaging in countries where these kinds of censorship issues come up," he said.

By some accounts, China may be so radioactive that even a longstanding relationship with Congress would not have tempered that hostile reception. But "the lack of a presence is what they recognized needed to get remedied fast," said Harry W. Clark, managing partner of the Stanwich Group, who has just been hired as a management consultant for Google. A veteran adviser to Internet corporations, Mr. Clark is a tightly connected Republican who worked in the Bush administration and who is now doing volunteer work for Senator McCain, an Arizona Republican.

Google's recruitment of heavy hitters in the nation's capital has not stopped. While it had already retained the firms of Public Policy Partners and Capital Tax Solutions, the headhunter Russell Reynolds Associates is in the midst of a search to fill a senior position alongside Mr. Davidson. Mr. Clark also predicted that Google would name a political director, probably a Republican.

Because some Republicans still view the company as Democratic-leaning, citing the 2004 election analyses that showed nearly all its employees' contributions went to Democrats, the company will be careful, Mr. Clark said, to spread its wealth around.

"The folks I've talked to," he added, "everybody recognizes that the employee contributions were weighted heavily toward Democrats, and they're waiting to see a course correction."

And despite the climate of indictments and investigations that pervades K Street right now, industry experts say Google has no choice but to get into the arena.

Rhett Dawson, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, admonished that lobbying was not "a dirty word." Google, Mr. Dawson noted, "is quickly going through a maturation phase that a lot of companies have gone through that shows it pays to pay attention to Washington or it can hurt you in ways that don't reflect well on you."

He added, "It doesn't have to be a system that makes you embarrassed to talk to your mother about."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/po.../28google.html





Vapo-rub

InPhase Demos 515 Gigabits Per Square Inch Data Density
Press Release

InPhase Technologies announced today that it has demonstrated the highest data density of any commercial technology by recording 515 gigabits of data per square inch. Holographic storage is a revolutionary departure from all existing recording methods because it takes advantage of volumetric efficiencies rather than only recording on the surface of the material. To compare, magnetic disk drives allow 300 gigabits per square inch data density.

InPhase will deliver the industry’s first holographic drive and media later this year. The first generation drive has a capacity of 300 gigabytes on a single disk with a 20 megabyte per second transfer rate. The first product will be followed by a family ranging from 800GB to 1.6 terabyte (TB) capacity.

Densities in holography are achieved by different factors than magnetic storage. Density depends on the number of pixels/bits in a page of data; the number of pages that are stored in a particular volumetric location; the dynamic range of the recording material; the thickness of the material, and the wavelength of the recording laser.

In this demonstration there were over 1.3 million bits per data page, and 320 data pages spaced 0.067 degrees apart were stored in the same volume of material. A collection of data pages is referred to as a book, and InPhase’s PolyTopic recording architecture enables more holograms to be stored in the same volume of material by overlapping not only pages, but also books. Three tracks of overlapping books were written with a track pitch of 700 microns. The InPhase TapestryTM material was 1.5 millimeters thick, and the laser wavelength was 407 nanometers.

“The latest results from our ongoing tests on holographic data density have surpassed expectations,” said Kevin Curtis, chief technology officer of InPhase. “We are particularly pleased at the rate of improvement. In April of 2005, we demonstrated 200 Gb/in2 data density and - a year later - the density has increased more than 2.5 times. “

The write transfer rate is determined by the time required to position the laser at the correct angular address, the speed of the shutter, the laser power, and the exposure time. In this demonstration the average exposure time per page was 2.7 milliseconds, which translates into a user write transfer rate of 23 megabytes per second.

The impact that these data densities will have on future products is tremendous. For the home video fan, one disk could hold the equivalent of 106 DVD movies. For IT managers dealing with archiving millions of email messages, higher densities mean savings on space, time, and power.

Michael Mangiona, president of offsite storage provider Data Solutions, adds that “with extremely high densities of holographic storage demonstrated by InPhase, IT companies such as Data Solutions benefit, as greater storage density ultimately translates into lower storage costs for us and for our customers.”

InPhase will be presenting several holographic storage papers at the Optical Data Storage Conference from April 23-26, 2006 in Montreal, Canada.
http://www.physorg.com/printnews.php?newsid=12169





Does Power Corrupt?
Martin Mittelstaedt

Kevin Byrne is a man in the prime of his life who feared he had an old man's problems. Last summer, he was devastated by chronic back pain and thought his hips were about to give out.

"I'm thinking, gee, I'm 47 years old and I'm going to need hip replacements already," he said.

The hip pain was the beginning of a strange personal odyssey for Mr. Byrne, a technical writer who lives in Newcastle, a bedroom community east of Toronto. He is now convinced his ailment wasn't a sign of premature aging, but an allergy to one of modern society's ubiquitous substances: electricity.

No one knows how many people are sensitive to electricity. Scientific debate is intense over whether the condition exists or is a figment of people's imagination. Some estimates place the number afflicted at a handful out of every million. Others view it as more common but still a tad unusual, perhaps a few individuals out of every thousand.

Mr. Byrne counts himself among those unlucky few. He began researching the topic when a neighbour expressed the belief that electricity was dangerous. In an act of desperation brought on by constant pain, he did something he initially thought was off-the-wall. He spent $1,000 on filters that, much like surge protectors on a computer, clean up fluctuations and surges in the electricity flowing in the wires around his home.

"When you're in a lot of pain, you'll do just about anything. So I was sort of grasping at non-medical straws," he said. "I didn't think they would work, to tell you the truth. I thought I was probably wasting my money."

But within a couple of days, after months of pain for which his doctor could find no cause, he started feeling fine again. "I said to my wife, 'This has got to be the placebo effect,' " he said, referring to the well-known medical phenomenon of patients reporting that they are cured of illnesses after being given a sugar pill doctors suggest will help them.

Mr. Byrne also noticed another odd health effect after he cleaned up his power, convincing him that electricity was at the root of his problems. Both he and his wife suddenly began to sleep more soundly and his dreams became "incredibly real and very vivid."

Stories such as Mr. Byrne's are not isolated tales. In fact, they're becoming increasingly common, rising in lockstep with homes filled to the brim with electronic gadgets and the proliferation of wireless technologies.

Symptoms of electrical sensitivity include the joint pain Mr. Byrne experienced, but also a bewildering array of other common problems most everyone feels at one time or another, such as fatigue, headaches, poor sleep quality with frequent wakefulness, ringing in the ears, depression, difficulty remembering things, and skin rashes. The list of symptoms has created speculation that some cases of sick building syndrome, where people working in buildings complain of nausea and headaches, might be due to electrical sensitivities.

Madga Havas, an associate professor at the Environmental Studies Department of Trent University who is an expert on the health claims about electricity, says she receives "almost a call a day" from people who say electricity is making them ill and they can't find help in the medical system. "It's not just from Canada. It's usually from the States as well," she says.

She thinks the condition is more widespread than commonly thought, and speculates that for some people, exposure to electricity causes physiological stress, producing symptoms of tiredness, difficulty concentrating and poor sleep.

The possibility of such a widespread health impact from electricity is greeted with skepticism in the electricity industry, where such an effect would have wide-ranging consequences.

"We don't have support to suggest that there is electrosensitivity in members of the population," says Jack Sahl, a manager of safety and environmental issues at Southern California Edison, a large U.S. electricity provider.

The industry position has been bolstered by studies showing that most of those who say they have allergies to electricity are unable consistently to detect the presence of electric currents in laboratory experiments.

Medical authorities and scientific researchers have consequently been baffled over these wide-ranging claims of ill health, not only in Canada and the United States but in Britain and other European countries. In Sweden, the electrically sensitive are so numerous they have established their own self-help and lobby group.

Those with the condition bristle at suggestions their symptoms are imaginary. "This is not psychosomatic at all. . . . We're not delusional," says Susan Stankavich, who lives near Albany, N.Y., and says her problems developed after a large cellphone tower was erected near her home. She's had debilitating headaches, among other symptoms, and can barely tolerate being under fluorescent lights.

Reacting to this rising tide of claims of a new illness, the World Health Organization issued a fact sheet in December on the allergies, which it dubbed "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" and likened it to multiple chemical sensitivities.

The WHO says the "symptoms are certainly real" and "can be a disabling problem for the affected individual."

Reports about sensitivity to electricity began with the introduction of computers, predating the recent spread of Wi-Fi and cellphone towers, which release a related but more powerful type of electromagnetic energy than that produced around electric wires.

There have been long-running concerns about the possible health effects of electricity because it is a source of both electric and magnetic fields, invisible lines of force that surround all power lines and any power-consuming device, from the lowly kitchen toaster to a computer. Electric fields are always present near power wires and appliances, even when devices are turned off, but magnetic fields are generated only when devices are on.

The nerves in living things work on electrical impulses. So do other biological processes, such as the voltages in hearts detected using electrocardiographs. This has given rise to worries that man-made electricity fields, to which humans were never exposed before the modern era, might be biologically active, just like chemical pollutants.

The WHO has been looking at electrical sensitivity as one aspect of a larger investigation into the health effects of the cocktail of electromagnetic fields enveloping people in modern societies via everything from power lines to cellphones. It says that exposure to electromagnetic fields represents "one of the most common and fastest growing environmental influences, about which there is anxiety and speculation spreading."

Until now, most of the medical researchers looking at electricity and health have searched for links to cancer, rather than the fatigue-related symptoms the electrically sensitive claim.

The cancer research has linked childhood leukemia to power-line magnetic fields. About 5 per cent of the U.S. population is regularly exposed to fields of the strength associated with leukemia in children, a percentage that is probably similar in Canada. For adult leukemia and brain tumours, some studies have found links to electricity, as they have with Lou Gehrig's disease, but the research is less conclusive than that for childhood leukemia.

Richard Stevens, an epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, has been studying electricity for nearly two decades, and first advanced the hypothesis that the use of electricity is a factor behind the rise in some cancer rates in developed countries. He says there is strong evidence linking the use of night lighting to cancer because exposure to light at night disrupts people's production of the hormone melatonin.

But he's unsure what impact the fields around electric wiring and devices might be having. Some studies have found that magnetic fields suppress melatonin in animals, something that might explain the allergy-like symptoms, but this effect hasn't been observed in humans. "Whether or not magnetic fields have any effect at all, I do not know," Dr. Stevens says.

The allergy-like symptoms are a far different medical condition than the cancers Dr. Stevens studies, and some researchers are speculating that a possible culprit is the recent deterioration in the quality of electricity flowing in power wires.

Power quality is a well-known problem in the utility business, caused by the proliferation of computers, lighting dimmer switches, energy efficient bulbs, and other modern electronic gadgets. These new devices cause a more complicated use pattern for electricity than old-fashioned items such as incandescent bulbs, producing negative feedback involving high-frequency peaks, harmonics and other noise on electric wiring.

The way to picture the quality effect is to imagine that electricity is like water flowing in a pipe. An incandescent bulb uses electricity steadily, just like an open tap allows a constant flow into the sink. Computers and other modern devices use power in variable amounts, similar to turning the tap on and off, or any setting in between, causing water pipes to clang.

This deterioration in power quality has been going on for years and would have likely escaped public notice, except that when home computers became popular in the 1990s they would frequently crash or malfunction because of it.

The change in power quality means more variable electromagnetic fields, and possibly more biologically active ones, are associated with electricity than there used to be. This is a possible explanation for the rise in electrosensitivity complaints in the view of Denis Henshaw, a professor at the University of Bristol in Britain, who is an international authority on the health effects of power transmission lines.

He says that if electricity were flowing in a constant way, most people's bodies would likely adapt, but with all the interference from modern devices, the resulting fields are too variable for people to get used to. "We just don't get to adapt to these because they don't have any special pattern to them," he said. "There is no proof of this, it's just an opinion."

In Canada, Dr. Havas has been investigating whether the deterioration in power quality has led to sensitivity. To this end, she's been installing filters that clean up the interference on electrical wires to see if people notice.

In 2003, she installed filters in a Toronto private school where a student was electrically sensitive for a six-week test, three weeks with the devices and three weeks without them. Half of the teachers who responded to her questionnaire said they felt health improvements, such as being able to concentrate better and feeling less tired, when the filters were in place. Even more unusual, the teachers, who were not told what the research was about, reported that 60 per cent of their classes showed improvements in student behaviour when the filters were installed.

Based on this finding, Dr. Havas estimates that perhaps half of the population may have some sensitivity to electricity.

In another test, she installed filters in the homes of people with multiple sclerosis, a disease that might be reactive to electricity because it is associated with poor sheathing on nerves. Brad Blumbergs, 29, says his MS improved so much last year that he could walk without shaking and could even run again. "It allows me to retire my cane," he said. "It hasn't cured me, but my symptoms are a percentage of what they used to be," Mr. Blumbergs said.

Dr. Havas has presented some of these findings at scientific conferences on electrosensitivity, but the work hasn't appeared in the gold standard of research, the peer-reviewed scientific journals that would confer more legitimacy on the results.

The utility industry's Mr. Sahl is skeptical about efforts to improve power quality, which generally cost about $1,000 to handle one home, and calls them a "waste of money."

He agrees that the action may make some people feel better, but only because they're affected by the power of suggestion and not by the power of electricity. "I hate to be blunt about it, but there is this well-established effect in science and we've studied it over and over and it's called the placebo effect."

That doesn't ring true to Mr. Byrne. He says his sensitivity might have been prompted by his decision last year to conserve energy by replacing much of his home's simple incandescent lighting with high-efficiency compact fluorescent bulbs, some brands of which cause the power-quality problem.

He's become so convinced that electricity can make people sick that he's set up a website, offering tips to fellow sufferers on how to alleviate their symptoms, such as urging them to throw out their dimmer switches and limiting exposures to electronic gadgets. When it comes to electricity, Mr. Byrne says, "I think people should automatically begin changing their lifestyles."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...eRequested=all





Toshiba’s Environmental Commitment
Press Release

At Toshiba, we believe that investing in the earth means that we are investing in the future of its inhabitants. We strive to apply stringent environmental standards to the products we’re currently manufacturing. In fact, every notebook computer we currently produce is RoHS compliant even though these standards established by the European Parliament don’t go into effect until July 2006.

We also want to ensure that older notebook computers, LCD monitors and Pocket PCs that weren’t developed under our strict environmental guidelines are safely dismantled and retired. These efforts are reflected in a number of Toshiba environmental initiatives:

Toshiba’s Environmental Recovery and Recycling Effort (TERRE)
What happens when non-functioning PCs are sent to landfills? Many of the materials used to make notebook computers, LCD monitors and Pocket PCs contain toxic elements that pose environmental risks and can also affect our personal health when they seep into our ecosystem.

What is TERRE?
TERRE is a proactive program to ensure that end-of-life computers are disposed of in an environmentally respectful manner. Toshiba will recycle any manufacturer’s notebook computer, LCD monitor, or pocket PC free of charge. As an added incentive, Toshiba will send the system’s owner a USB flash drive.

How do I arrange to send my old devices to TERRE?
Click here for a step by step process on how you can arrange to send your devices to TERRE. Ultimately, you will determine when you would like UPS to pick up your old PC products at no cost to you. Once you are registered with TERRE, we will send you your USB flash drive within eight to ten weeks.
If you have any additional questions, please e-mail TERRE@toshiba.ca and we’ll be happy to provide additional information.

Why are you giving away free USB flash drives as part of TERRE?
We want to ensure that TERRE is an appealing initiative to ensure that we recover as many non-functioning devices as possible. Anyone using a PC regularly in their daily lives will find a USB flash drive a useful device. We hope that this is an added incentive to the safe environmental recycling of PCs.

What if my PC still works?
Should an individual wish to dispose of a functioning PC, there are a number of worthwhile programs that channel these systems to needy organizations in the community.

Where does my old non-functioning notebook PC, LCD monitor or Pocket PC go when I use TERRE?
When you register with TERRE, Toshiba will send a courier to retrieve your old PC product and deliver a USB flash drive within 8 – 10 weeks.

When Toshiba takes possession of the non-functioning PC product, they are then disassembled and the PC components are separated and placed in temporary storage bins for recycling.

Does Toshiba do the recycling?
Toshiba has partnered with a registered ISO 14001 company that disassembles incoming notebooks and personal computers into their basic components such as plastics, circuit boards and metals.
Plastics are ground to achieve consistency of size and recycled into other useful materials such as foundation pads for buildings, containers used for agriculture potting systems and plastic lumber.

Circuit boards are smelted to reclaim various precious and semi precious metals.

The metal portions are separated and reprocessed into basic commodities, such as copper, aluminum and steel.
http://www.toshiba.ca/web/link?id=2200





BT Cracks Down On 'Broadband Hogs'
Will Sturgeon

BT is cracking down on heavy Internet users who are habitually breaking its monthly download limit, suggesting that they either pay more or shop elsewhere for their Internet access.

BT has agreements in place with users of its ADSL broadband service that limit them to up to 40GB of downloads per month. However, although the incumbent telecommunications company claims to be relaxed on occasional breaches of this limit--and has no automatic blocking in place once a limit is exceeded--it reports that some customers are taking liberties and regularly downloading up to 200GB each month.

"I think it's fair to characterize these people as broadband hogs. You would have to be downloading pretty much all day, everyday, to manage that level of downloading," a BT representative told Silicon.com.

BT has contacted 3,200 customers identified as excessive users. The letters offer customers the chance to pay for their excess bandwidth consumption or seek service from another provider.

Last October, BT sent a similar letter to 1,800 customers, and while "a small percentage" of them agreed to a new payment plan to cover their monster downloads, the majority saw their contracts with BT terminated. The company representative suggested that "it would probably be fair to extrapolate out those results," in terms of a prediction regarding the likely outcome of the current crackdown.

Such high levels of downloading are certainly far from typical for the average person and are likely to indicate a heavy diet of large media files such as music or movies.

If these customers were downloading music, for example, at a rate of 200GB per month, they could nearly be filling an iPod Nano twice over every single day--or 50 times over in just one month. That's approximately 50,000 songs.
http://news.com.com/BT+cracks+down+o...3-6054223.html





Cloned Pigs Are Porky And Best, Say Scientists

Researchers say they have created cloned piglets that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, the oil that is prized as being beneficial to the heart.

Omega-3 is mostly found in fish, but this supply is threatened by overtrawling and clouded by worries about mercury pollution, which accumulates in fish livers.

A team led by Yifan Dai of the University of Pittsburgh's School of Medicine transferred into foetal pig cells a gene called fat-1 that had been identified in a well-studied lab animal, a tiny worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans.

Fat-1 converts the abundant but less desirable omega-6 fatty acids into the coveted omega-3.

The nucleus of pig eggs was then removed and substituted with the nucleus from these engineered cells, following the now-classic method of animal cloning that began with Dolly the Sheep in 1996.

The research's prime aim is to gain a better understanding of cardiac function, where hog and human are strikingly similar, the team reports on Sunday in the specialist journal Nature Biotechnology.

"We would use these animals as a model to see what happens to heart health if we increase the omega-3 levels in the body. It could allow us to see how that helps cardiovascular function," said co-author Randy Prather, a specialist of the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Given that the animals are experimental -- not to say extraordinarily expensive -- no one knows what their meat tastes like, whether it is safe to eat and whether the piglets will retain high levels of omega-3 when they reach adulthood.

If, eventually, the transgenic hogs go to market, there could be double benefits, argued Prather.

"First, the pigs could have better cardiovascular function and therefore live longer, which would limit livestock loss for farmers. Second, they could be healthier animals for human consumption."

Genetic manipulation of animals and plants for agricultural purposes is fiercely opposed by environmentalists as being potentially dangerous to health and the ecology.

Their concerns are shared by many experts, who urge extensive testing to obey the so-called precautionary principle when introducing novel technology.

Animal cloning, with the present technology, also results in many failures, as shown in Dolly's premature demise in 2003.

The endeavour to create the world's first omega-3 pig entailed the creation of 1,633 cloned embryos, which were implanted into 14 sows.

Only 12 pregnancies resulted, of which five came to term, delivering just 10 live piglets and two dead ones.

Of the 10 survivors, only six had the fat-1 gene -- and three (including two with fat-1) had a heart defect and had to be killed at the age of three weeks.

The demand for omega-3 has surged in recent years because of their deemed benefits in cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes.

But a review of the evidence, published on Saturday in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), casts doubt on this.

It looked at 89 studies into omega-3, and said there was concern that people who have angina might suffer a higher risk of a fatal heart attack by taking supplements of the oil.

In 2002, Prather's team created pigs designed to produce organs that were more suitable for transplantation into humans.

Pig organs are coated with sugar molecules that trigger acute rejection by the human immune system. The modified piglets lacked one of the two copies of the sugar-making gene, thus marking an important experimental step towards so-called xenotransplantation.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060326...s_060326181525


















Until next week,

- js.


















Current Week In Review






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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

[multi]

Pirate Parrot Swept Up In MPAA Net
Jackson Pratts, AFDNews

A parrot famous for poor hygiene was added to the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) latest group of movie swappers sued for copyright violations, according to a late announcement by the Hollywood trade organization.

The bird, a 75-year-old male named Colonel Rico Dupree, is owned by William "Doc" Bones, a retired circus performer living in Connecticut, and had been a featured part of many famous trick-bird acts in the 1930’s, '40’s and '50’s.

Reached at his home in Fairfield County, Dr. Bones was at a loss to explain how his parrot got caught up in the dragnet. "Sure, the Colonel can use a computer, he’s actually pretty good with one, so what? He generally hates movies, unless Errol Flynn is in them or they have boats. He watches Pirates of the Caribbean over and over, but we have that on tape. I think those Hollywood big-shots are all wet."

This is not just any parrot however, no matter how talented, but one with an extraordinary pedigree. According to the International Society of Insufferable Bird Snobs, Colonel Rico Dupree is a direct descendent of perhaps the most infamous parrot of all-time, Monsieur Plein DeMerde, best known as French pirate John Lafitte’s favorite shoulder companion and generally regarded as the foulest smelling avian in history. So inseparable were pirate and parrot that some aristocratic Ladies held hostage by Lafitte were said to complain in private the buccaneer was more affectionate to DeMerde than to them, and nearly impossible to stand next to. "Parrots become quite attached to their owners," said Winifred Softbothom, president of the Society, "They can live long lives. It’s not unheard of for the birds to be passed down to family members as grandparents and even parents die, but the transition is unfortunately not always successful. In this case," she brightened, "it has been proven satisfactorily that Colonel Dupree is third generation DeMerde. Billy Bones’ bird is plainly Plein DeMerde’s grandson. I mean honestly, all one has to do is sniff."

When asked if this present lawsuit and Monsieur DeMerde’s historical association with the notorious French pirate is evidence of any peculiar family affectations, Miss Softbothom conceded to a reporter that anything’s possible with parrots. "Unlike humans, and men especially, parrots are stable, loyal, and usually very bright. Breeders know this and choose behavioral traits accordingly, which are often passed down. It’s quite possible Colonel Dupree enjoys the attention of flaunting his expertise with computers, even flapping his feathers and making wind at authority, just like his seafaring ancestors."

That assessment didn’t sit too well with his owner however. "Nonsense," sputtered Dr. Bones. "The rudest thing this bird ever does is cybering chicks on Myspace."

Maybe so, but Ed Heard of the MPAA wants a closer look. "Before we toss this suit out we’re going to take a good long look at that bird, and I don’t care how stupid we come off to you pro-user zealots. If we even think this parrot is a copyright violator we’re clipping his wings but good."

This may not be the end of Rico however. Producers from Hollywood have quietly expressed interest in the parrot, considering him for several projects, in part because of his previous entertainment experience.

"Who knows," says his owner, "when the heat’s off a little maybe we can settle out of court for a few grand and work a movie deal. He usually turns up his beak at media bigwigs but I know the Colonel would swear off crackers for a shot at 'Pirate’s of the Caribbean 2'."