Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 6th, ’06 - P2P-Zone

JackSpratts · 04-05-06, 02:13 PM

"I don't think there's anything better we could do to turn people onto the pleasures of unlimited, legal access to music." – Chris Gorog

"Broadband is becoming today's platform for everything we do: economics, education, safety, medicine and cultural enrichment. You can't blink this away." – Jim Baller

"What business does the F.B.I. have spying on law-abiding citizens simply because they oppose the war in Iraq?" – Sen. Patrick Leahy, D- VT

May 6th, ’06

listen to your junk, man
jack

just signed up and logged in under one of my old napster nics (jackspratts). went right to "track" and chose bruce springsteen's "new york city serenade." lots of strings, acoustic guitar and piano, soft and loud singing and a pretty good audio test for dynamic range and frequency response.

by now you all know that napster is a free service. you can listen to anything they have up to five times. it's not a download in the strict sense (although of course it is) but something more like instant request internet radio and in the business it’s called a stream.

the verdict is mixed. the convenience factor is unquestionably high. open up your browser (i used opera and firefox with no issues) and in seconds you're listening to anything and everything. the price is zero. the paranoia issues are null and the five-times limit is not exactly a crushing burden (it auto repeats and at least in one case way more than 5x). which leaves...the sound. funny thing that. not all bad for a low bit stream. clean, ok presence, decent highs and lows - except during crescendos - then it goes way over the harsh limit and it almost, hurts. going back to new york city serenade and the first third of the song, coming out of my thinkpad and into my sony phones it's good. not great, but good. then, as the boss ramps it up the flaws begin to intrude upon the experience and quite frankly, spoil the mood. fish lady! ouch.

as background it'll work a lot better…it's just that as any dj knows it's hard to play cuts without planting yourself in front of your box, and that means the tunes are right there too. if napster wants to get the most out of this model they're going to have to increase the bitrate and smooth out the stream, otherwise people will try it a few times and pass.

as a concept it's about as good as it gets in the (admittedly compromised) online music delivery business, but with just a little tweaking it can be a serious player, and in areas where users have handheld boxes running opera mini-browsers in wi-fi saturated cities it could be dominant. until then it will be an "almost there" also ran among serious listeners of music, although i’m sure many people will run this often, particularly in noisier environments like work and school.

is "napster" back? no, it may never be what it was. but this company, and this service, is, right now, as close to that promise as it has ever come, and over the next few days, a lot of us will be signing on, and playing long, and thinking about what almost was.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...652#post245652

Napster: New Tune, Same Chorus?

The digital-music outfit is hoping to engender buzz and pump up sales with its new offerings. But the skeptics are legion
Peter Burrows

If Napster (NAPS ) ever figures out a way to turn a profit, Chris Gorog, CEO of the digital-music site, is going to have one heckuva big last laugh. Ever since he began his quest to create a digital-music powerhouse around the brand made famous in the late 1990s for online piracy, the skepticism has been unceasing. "No one I know believes they're going to survive," says one digital-music executive.

Gorog's latest move doesn't seem destined to quiet the naysayers. On May 1, the Los Angeles-based company announced a new Web-based version of its software, along with a new service that lets users listen to any song among its catalog of 2 million songs absolutely free -- so long as they don't want to listen to any one song more than five times.

While Napster's share price had risen 30% since Jan. 1, based on expectations for a Web-based service, the actual unveiling did little to keep the momentum going. The stock closed at $4.61 on May 1, virtually unchanged from its previous close.

ADVERTISING PLAY. The idea is designed to tackle the twin problems that have caused Napster to lose $175 million on $237 million in sales over the past four years: lackluster sales growth paired with eye-popping costs. By launching this free service, Gorog hopes to get millions of consumers to come to Napster's Web site -- without having to invest nearly as much in advertising, the company's biggest discretionary cost.

Sales will get a boost, in theory, as some percentage of these consumers upgrade to Napster's for-pay services. Its basic subscription lets consumers listen to whichever songs they want on their PCs, with no limit on the number of listens and with greater sound quality than the Web-based offering, for $10 a month. It costs $15 if the songs are to be transferred to a portable music player.

The Web strategy also introduces an ad-supported plank to Gorog's strategy, since users of the free service are shown a variety of online ads. While some of the initial advertisers have past links to the company -- Samsung, for example, sells a digital-music player -- heavy-hitters including Walt Disney (DIS ) and the U.S. Navy are also present.

GOOD, OL' NINETIES. Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster doubts Gorog's claim that ad revenue could exceed Napster's expected fiscal 2006 revenue of $112 million within a few years. He reckons advertising will add closer to $50 million to the top line in that time frame.

Any success the strategy has will hinge on whether Napster can recapture anything approaching the buzz and loyalty its namesake site had in the late 1990s. Back then, 50 million Netizens routinely swapped songs digitally for no money down, until the recording industry won legal victories that shut it down. From the time Gorog purchased the Napster brand name along with other remaining assets for $5 million in 2002, he hoped to combine the famous name with new technology that would make it simple to legally find and then pay for the music.

To that end, Napster on May 1 also unveiled technology to let anyone add a link to a song, so it can be incorporated into an e-mail, blog, or home video (and played for as many as five times). These NapsterLinks, as the company calls them, "will unleash digital music across the Web in a very powerful way," says Gorog.

RISKY ASSUMPTIONS. It's the kind of big claim that Gorog has become known for. Despite Apple's (AAPL ) gargantuan success in digital music -- and Napster's relative insignificance -- Gorog continues to fire away at what he considers Apple's vulnerabilities. He notes that the average iPod owner buys only about 20 songs via Apple's iTunes online store. That's damning proof, Gorog says, that Apple isn't helping the music business go digital -- but rather using iTunes less to sell digital downloads and more as a means to crank up its own hardware profits as consumers rip their own CD collections or listen to MP3s from file-sharing sites.

With Napster's new free service, "we'll be able to help millions of people get out of the world of 30-second clips and of having to buy individual songs," Gorog says. "I don't think there's anything better we could do to turn people onto the pleasures of unlimited, legal access to music."

But the reality facing Napster is hardly so cheery. Even if some users of the free service decide to pay for Napster's basic offering, many current paying customers may decide to go for free instead. At the least, little evidence exists that a free offering will send sales through the roof. Since Real Networks (RNWK ) unveiled the Web-based version of its own Rhapsody music service last December, the number of subscribers has grown from 1.4 million to 1.575 million -- just a slight uptick from previous growth patterns.

"JUST SWINGING AWAY." And none of the new offerings solve the biggest problem: Napster's services don't work with Apple's iPod, which holds more than 70% share of the portable-music player market. As such, even free won't be a powerful lure to members of iPod nation. "My concern for Napster isn't that no one knows about them," says David Pakman, chief executive of rival service eMusic, which is compatible with the iPod because it sells music sold by independent labels that don't demand anti-piracy protections. "They claim to have the biggest brand in music -- with greater unaided recall than [Apple's] iTunes. But people are voting not to use the service. There's an issue with the product -- incompatibility with the device that everyone wants to use."

In all, Gorog's latest announcements probably don't presage a coming of age for Napster, but the start of just another scary chapter as the company fights for survival. Napster is expected to show a smaller quarterly loss when it announces fiscal fourth-quarter results on May 17, versus the year before. Still, the ambitious Gorog faces an uphill climb to profitability. "I think he's just swinging away right now" by trying many different tactics, Munster says. "But that's what he has to do."
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...502_659394.htm

Mmmm, lossless. Pitui! DRM!

Neil Young Goes With Download First, CD Later
Michael Kanellos

Neil Young has released his next album, "Living With War," on a Web site specializing in high-fidelity downloads--before the record hits stores.

The collection of songs, which will be sold as an album and not singles, is available on MusicGiants. The company sells music in the Windows Media Audio Lossless format, a beefier format that provides better sound quality than standard downloads from iTunes or other services, according to MusicGiants.

An average song in the Lossless format might be 15MB, said Elliot Mazer, a producer for Young (he mastered the 1970s album "Harvest") and a consultant for MusicGiants.

By contrast, an MP3 file of the same song might be 3MB. The reduction in file size for MP3s is accomplished through perceptual coding, he said. In that process, the dominant sound on a track--the primary vocal tone, for example--is retained, while overtones or other sounds are swept away. Mazer says perceptual coding is analogous to cranking down the color quality on a monitor from 32 bit to 16 bit.

While the smaller files economize on bandwidth and storage, sound quality diminishes. When a song in the lossless format is unzipped and played back, it contains more depth of tone and texture.

"On a Lossless file, when played back it is exactly like the CD. If you took a CD and listened to it and then listened to something on Napster or iTunes, it would sound deader or smaller," he said. "With bandwidth and storage the way it is, why would you want to go with the smaller format?"

The site sells songs for $1.29 a song. A complete album generally sells for about $15.29. The company has a music library of about 500,000 songs from labels such as EMI, Sony and Warner Music.

Windows Media Audio Lossless format files can be played back on Windows Media Player 10.
http://news.com.com/Neil+Young+goes+...3-6067937.html

Warner Music Rejects EMI’s $4.2 Billion Takeover Bid
Andrew Ross Sorkin

Things got off to a rocky start as the British music giant EMI Group rekindled its on-again off-again courtship of the Warner Music Group in the United States.

Reacting to reports that a bid was in the works, EMI said in a press release Wednesday that it had approached Warner Music on Monday in connection with a plan to buy the company for $28.50 in cash and EMI stock. But the offer, which carries a value of about $4.2 billion, was rejected the following day, EMI said.

Warner Music issued its own press release and said the company’s board had unanimously rejected the nonbinding proposal, which it described as “not in the best interests of our shareholders.”

That is not likely to be the end of the story, however.

EMI and Warner Music have tried to merge twice before, and many analysts see two companies as a compelling match. For EMI, adding Warner would bulk up the company’s presence in the United States and give it access to a catalog that includes Ray Charles, Madonna and Led Zeppelin.

EMI unsuccessfully bid to buy Warner from its previous parent, Time Warner, in late 2003 before losing out to an investment group led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. Before that, European regulators blocked a proposed merger of the two giants.

EMI is apt to raise the $28.50-a-share offer it presented on Monday, though how much higher is unclear. The company’s chairman, Eric Nicoli, has suggested that EMI is willing to pay about $30 a share for Time Warner, people involved in the negotiations said Tuesday.

Besides the price, there are other obstacles standing between a potential EMI-Warner merger, as The New York Times reported:

Any deal still faces several challenges, including regulatory hurdles and questions about the management structure. The two companies would probably be forced to sell one of their respective music publishing units — probably the Warner/Chappell unit — to satisfy regulators that the entity would not unfairly dominate that sector of the business.

The deal is also riddled with tricky personnel questions that could make it difficult to build a harmonious management team.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=2577

From last year

How Much Is Your Stolen Music Worth?

Probably more than you think.
Daniel Engber

Last month, a student at the University of Arizona was sentenced to three years probation and a $5,400 fine for illegally distributing music and movies on the Internet. A spokesman for the recording industry claims investigators found more than $50 million worth of pirated material on his computer. That seems like an awful lot of money. How much is stolen music worth?

A lot more than you might think. Since a song costs only 99 cents on iTunes, and movies go for less than $20 on Amazon.com, it seems impossible to amass $50 million worth of entertainment on one computer. (Indeed, even if you could find 50.5 million songs or 2.5 million movies to download, they would take up hundreds of terabytes of disk space, which would itself cost a fortune.) But in some court cases, the value of a pirated file is based not on its retail price, but on the damages done to the company that legally produces and sells it.

There are a number of ways to calculate these damages. Some federal prosecutors have assumed that about 10 people will download anything on a file-sharing network, so they multiply the retail value of shared song files by 10. But it can get much worse: Lawsuits brought by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have claimed statutory damages as set out in the United States Copyright Law from 1976. According to the section on "Remedies for infringement," each work carries a value of between $750 and $30,000, as determined by a judge. (These are the current figures; the Digital Theft Deterrence Act boosted statutory damages by about half in 1999.) While a judge must also determine what qualifies as a "work," RIAA lawsuits typically request statutory damages for each song—and not each album.

When the digital pirate can be shown to have "willfully" violated intellectual property rights (knowing it was an infringement), statutory damages go as high as $150,000 per song, movie, or album. That means the $50 million hard disk might have contained just 30 or 40 pirated albums.

As it happens, the Arizona student was prosecuted according to state laws in a criminal court—and it was the number, not the value, of his computer files that helped determine his final sentence. (He was convicted of a felony because he engaged in the "unlawful copying" of between 100 and 1,000 songs or between 10 and 100 movies.) For those prosecuted under federal copyright law, the punishment for criminal infringement may depend on the value of the copied work. The thresholds are low, however—all people who accumulate more than $2,500 worth of material face the same maximum penalties.
http://www.slate.com/id/2114507/fr/rss/

Getting what they asked for

Studios See Big Rise In Estimates of Losses To Movie Piracy
Sarah McBride and Geoffrey A. Fowler

The movie industry wanted the world to know exactly how much money it loses to piracy. But now a study shows the damage is far worse than expected, giving some studio executives second thoughts about releasing the information to the public.

The Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood's lobbying group, two years ago commissioned a detailed study that it hoped would pinpoint more precisely how much the industry loses to piracy annually.

The study, by LEK Consulting LLC, was completed last year, and people familiar with it say it reached a startling conclusion: U.S. movie studios are losing about $6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue to piracy, about 75% more than previous estimated losses of $3.5 billion in hard goods. On top of that, losses are coming not only from lost ticket sales, but from DVD sales that have been Hollywood's cash cow in recent years.

The MPAA froze plans to release the survey. Late yesterday, in response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, the MPAA released some information from the survey, including members' U.S. and global piracy losses. "A study this magnitude takes some work to roll out," says an MPAA spokeswoman. She says the numbers weren't far out of line with what the industry expected. For months, MPAA members debated whether and how to release the information. Some studios argued that making the figures public would help the industry win tougher laws and enforcement. Other studios said the figures were so bad that releasing them would hurt their stock prices and make a laughingstock of their enforcement efforts.

The result: Piracy, an issue that normally brings Hollywood studios together, was driving them apart. Although the studios eventually agreed to release parts of the information, it was only after months of infighting. Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. and News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox fought hardest to release the information, people familiar with the matter say, while Walt Disney Co. and Viacom Inc.'s Paramount were very reluctant. General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal and Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures fell in the middle, these people say.

The estimate showing a dramatic increase in piracy is a function of different methodology used in the report. Previously, people familiar with the matter say, the MPAA used figures based on a series of random calculations that estimated how much was lost in each country. In one market, it was calculated that for every bootleg DVD that turned up in raids, seven more existed. Thus, estimates for piracy losses ran from $280 million in China to $275 million in Russia. There was no previous estimate for the U.S. alone, but in the new survey, losses from piracy are believed to total almost $1.3 billion solely in the U.S.

The LEK report provides staggering revisions elsewhere in the world: Mexico overshadows Russia and China to rank as the world's largest market for pirated U.S. films, accounting for an estimated $483 million in lost revenue to MPAA member studios in 2005. That is up from $140 million in 2004 by old tallying procedures, according to partial data the MPAA released in February.

The new approach reduces the estimated losses in some of the world's most notorious pirate markets, even as it adds Internet-related losses for the first time. China's losses slipped to an estimated $244 million in 2005, from $280 million in 2004 under the old counting technique. Russia's estimate declined by about $10 million. These international results have also generated skepticism about whether Mexico could really be a bigger piracy market than giants like China.

The survey was conducted over 18 months in 28 countries and cost $3 million. It uses more consistent methods and incorporates consumer research for the first time -- in the form of telephone and Internet surveys and focus groups -- to derive estimated losses. In recent months, the MPAA has been fine-tuning the totals after factoring in outside analysis and new information, in some cases lowering the estimated losses -- for example, the losses due to potential customers receiving illegal copies of movies from friends.

The previous estimates didn't include the impact of free Internet downloading, which is incorporated in the LEK report. Another surprise involves the fast expansion of online piracy by consumers compared to the losses stemming from professional bootleggers who sell DVDs. Last year, according to a person familiar with the matter, copies of movies downloaded or received from people who had downloaded them cost the studios $447 million in the U.S., whereas copies stemming from professional bootleggers cost the studios $335 million. An additional $529 million in losses came from consumers making copies of legitimate films they bought on DVD or VHS.

Critics have faulted some piracy estimates for equating each pirated DVD with a lost sale, when many consumers would have skipped the movie altogether if they hadn't gotten a cheap or free unauthorized version. This time, the survey specifically asked consumers how many of their pirated movies they would have purchased in stores or seen in theaters if they didn't have an unauthorized copy, giving studios a different picture of their true losses.

The study also shows that home video, not theatrical distribution, is the market that piracy hits hardest, accounting for two-thirds of the studio's lost revenue. That is a big blow to the studios, which had been counting on the lucrative DVD market to increase their bottom lines, but in recent months have found DVD sales are slowing considerably.

The survey also bucks the assumption that piracy is a kids' activity. In Japan, one of Hollywood's biggest foreign markets, 50% of the overall industry's losses are the result of piracy by people ages 25 to 39.

While piracy hasn't had much of an impact on the stock prices of the big conglomerates that own studios, that could change if investors feared DVDs would no longer generate sales at the pace they expected, says Michael Nathanson, an analyst with Bernstein Research. "If it became an issue, you would see a collapse in [valuation] multiples," he says.

While new data are potentially helpful in negotiating with foreign governments because they also estimate losses to local film industries, the information is also bad news for the MPAA's antipiracy efforts. Those have ranged from public-awareness campaigns to beefing up laws to raids of illegal DVD plants. Dan Glickman, the organization's president for almost two years, has made fighting piracy a priority. He joined the organization a few months after it hired John Malcolm, a former Justice Department official, to head its world-wide antipiracy operations.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1146..._whats_news_us

How The RIAA Does Math: Why You Might Be A $50 Million Felon
Mike

Yesterday, in discussing the odd case of a teen convicted under Arizona state laws for unauthorized copying, we wondered about some of the details -- including the $50 million claim pinned to the material on his hard drive in early versions of the AP story (later removed, for no clear reason). Luckily, we've got some answers. Slate takes a look at the $50 million and explains how the content industry does math to come up with such figures. The real answer is they basically make it up. They determine that each work can be valued somewhere between $750 and $30,000, even if they can all be downloaded legally for $1 a piece. It certainly seems a bit presumptuous to put such a high number on the value. However, this story gets even better. Ernest Miller takes a crack at the specific Arizona state law that tripped up this guy, and realizes it turns fair use copying into a felony. That's right. The details show that if you're simply ripping your own legally purchased CDs into MP3s for personal use or backup, you are breaking this particular law, and could reach the felony stage with as little as 1,000 songs -- even though fair use copying is legal. Of course, at $30,000 per song, that's only $30 million. To get up to $50 million, you'd need to rip 1,667 songs. If we assume an average album has... say... 12 songs, you'd just need to rip approximately 140 CDs to reach the $50 million felon mark. Not so hard. You might already be there. So, while it appears this particular kid was doing much more, you too could be convicted of a felony for having $50 million worth of content on your hard drive just for legally (oh, wait, maybe not...) ripping a bunch of your legally purchased CDs into MP3s.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...752252_F.shtml

Grossly Excessive Penalties in the Battle Against Illegal File-Sharing

The Troubling Effects of Aggregating Minimum Statutory Damages for Copyright Infringement
J. Cam Barker

Texas Law Review, Vol. 83, No. 2 83 Texas L. Rev. 525 (2004)

Abstract:
The recent copyright-infringement lawsuits targeting individual file-sharers have in common the following facts: a statutory damage award with a substantial punitive component, a large number of like-kind violations, and fairly low reprehensibility as assessed under the relevant Supreme Court test. The substantive due process principles laid out by the Court in BMW v. Gore provide a roadmap for evaluating whether the aggregated punitive effect of these awards has become unconstitutionally excessive.

In this paper, I argue that there is a constitutional right to not have a highly punitive statutory damage award stacked hundreds or thousands of times over for similar, low-reprehensibility misconduct. I point to the rationale behind criminal law's single-larceny doctrine, identify the concept of wholly proportionate reprehensibility, and use this to explain why the massive aggregation of statutory damage awards can violate substantive due process.

I conclude that massively aggregated awards of even the minimum statutory damages for illegal file-sharing will impose huge penalties and can be constitutionally infirm like the punitive damage award of Gore itself. Yet practical and institutional reasons will likely make this norm underenforced by the courts, pointing to Congress as the actor that should modify copyright law to remove the possibility of grossly excessive punishment.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...ract_id=660601

Are The RIAA's $750-Per-Song Fines Unconstitutional?
Mike

In the past, many have questioned why the RIAA gets to request $750 to $30,000 per song fines against those they've charged with offering up unauthorized songs on file sharing networks. Last year there was actually a research paper published that questioned whether or not these fines were unconstitutional, since they may be excessive. That paper included some interesting case history to suggest why the fines might be a bit too high. It appears that one lawyer is finally testing a similar theory in court, and has filed a motion in one such case suggesting that $750 fines are unconstitutional. If you look at the details, it looks like the argument is based on different case law than the research paper -- and the motion seems pretty weak overall in describing the details (i.e., it has very few details). The RIAA quickly filed a response that hits back pretty strongly against the original motion, saying that the case cited isn't really relevant at all -- and that the comparisons made in the motion don't really apply. The original motion points to the money the recording industry would make from someone buying the song on iTunes, but the industry points out that buying a song on iTunes isn't the same thing as a license to distribute it -- which makes sense. It seems highly unlikely that the court will buy the unconstitutional argument, especially as presented, but it's an interesting tactic nonetheless. It's not clear why the original motion didn't delver further into the issue, or use some of the info in last year's paper as a resource to back up the claim... but maybe the lawyer decided it wasn't that compelling.

Dear Mike

I appreciate your critical thinking; if the Courts do as well, we'll all be okay.

However, I must say that comparing a scholarly law review article to a letter like ours isn't exactly fair, since (a) some poor lady has to pay for our letter; nobody has to pay for the law review article; and (b) advocacy just isn't the same thing as pure scholarship; judges would hate it, and the lawyer's clients would be losing more than winning, if every time there was a legal point to be made the lawyer handed the judge a law review article-type analysis discussing each and every case that ever touched upon the subject. A good advocate knows if you have a controlling case, you shut up. Parker v. Time Warner happens to be a controlling case for Judge Trager.

Additionally, your comparison is a little bit off in some respects.

1. The letter which we sent is not a "motion", it is a letter requesting a pre-motion conference;

2. such a letter has a short page limit, and would not be used to discuss each and every authority which the writer intends to cite in his motion; even a motion would not necessarily discuss every possible authority;

3. the letter and the excellent law review article do indeed rely on the same line of cases; Parker -- cited in both -- is an interpretation of Campbell and Gore in the statutory damages context;

4. the Napster decision upon which we relied, which follows Parker and is the closest case on the facts to the situation described by the law review author, came out in 2005; the law review article was published in 2004.

Keep up your good work!

Best regards,

Ray

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com

http://techdirt.com/articles/20060503/0411203.shtml

RIAA Targets Piracy 'Hot-Spot' Cities
David Miller

Music piracy, long associated with peer-to-peer (define) file-sharing networks, is a booming business offline.

Professional pirates have become more sophisticated and are costing the music industry $300 million a year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry.

In a report released on Wednesday, the RIAA, cited 12 piracy "hot spots" -- Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, San Diego, and San Francisco -- where " multi-state criminal operations" are producing and selling bogus CDs.

The RIAA plans to work with law enforcement and deploy its own investigative resources in these cities in the coming year, said RIAA spokeswoman Jenni Engebretsen.

"With the problem as widespread as it is, we have to focus our resources," she said. "So in these 12 cities we are making a commitment to step up investigative and training efforts with local law enforcement."

The RIAA also intends to shift its efforts from pursuing individuals to stopping piracy at the source of the distribution chain where, according to the report, "law enforcement can not only seize illegal goods but also shut down the means of production and thus have a far greater impact on the overall availability of pirate product."

The RIAA claims that unauthorized compilations of popular music hits and counterfeit CDs with bonus tracks are increasingly being created and offered for sale.

Engebretsen said that these CDs are sometimes purchased by consumers who are unaware that the CDs contain pirated music.

Consumers were urged to avoid purchasing deeply discounted CDs, "dream compilation" CDs (songs by numerous artists who record on different record labels), CDs packaged in shoddy wrapping (misspelled words, blurry graphics), and to avoid purchasing CDs from places like flea markets or street corners.

It's no surprise that professional piracy is on the rise, said Mike McGuire, vice president or research at Gartner.

McGuire said that the tools for counterfeiting -- DVD and CD burners and pro-level authoring software -- have gotten much cheaper and easier to use. Since the costs of producing pirated disks isn't much, distributors can charge $5 a disc and still make a profit.

He believes the RIAA can make a dent in the counterfeiters' business but said it would be difficult to end the practice.

"You could argue it's similar to the war on drugs. You can go after the demand side, but it's hard to say you'll stamp it out completely," he said. "And it's pretty hard to say to people 'don't buy that CD for $5.' There's always a demand for bargains."

But McGuire added that the RIAA needs to combat offline piracy if only to raise awareness that the counterfeited materials are being produced.

"A lot of folks were saying that piracy was only happening on P2P networks."

According to the RIAA's research, seizures of counterfeit CDs from commercial manufacturing facilities grew by 46 percent - - more than 424,000 units -- in 2005 and the total number of cases at the manufacturer level was up 7 percent. In response, legal seizures of piracy equipment grew by 57 percent in 2005.

Rap and Latin music accounted for nearly 95 percent of pirate operations stopped by authorities last year, according to the RIAA.

In other piracy news, The Motion Picture Association of America's own study, conducted by LEK Consulting, found that studios lost $6.1 billion to film theft in 2005. The majority of movie theft -- about $4.8 billion -- happened in China, Russia and Mexico.

According to an article published in The Wall Street Journal this week, the MPAA study was completed last year but the MPAA opted not to release the results publicly due to a debate among its members.

Some felt that publicizing the figures would enable the industry to push for stricter antipiracy laws and enforcement while others believed that releasing the figures would hurt stock prices and "make a laughingstock of their enforcement efforts," according to the Journal.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3603751

UN Broadcasting Treaty Seen As Severely Limiting Essential Freedoms
Anders Bylund

A remarkably unacceptable treaty proposal is currently being pushed through the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, seemingly concieved by the RIAA and MPAA and backed by traditional old-line media businesses. The Broadcasting Treaty, currently undergoing review at a UN convention in Geneva, Switzerland, contains passages that would severely restrict the concepts of fair use and freedom of speech—on a global level. IP Watch has an excellent overview of the issues:

The proposed broadcasting treaty would create entirely new global rights for broadcasting companies who have neither created nor own the programming. What's even more alarming is the proposal from the United States that the treaty regulate the Internet transmission of audio and video entertainment.

It is dangerous and inappropriate for an unelected international treaty body to undertake the task of creating entirely new rights, which currently exist in no national law, such as webcasting rights and anti-circumvention laws related to broadcasting. A global treaty is not the place for experimentation with new rights, but rather for the harmonization of existing legal norms. WIPO treads on shaky ground by proposing to create new rights that no elected body in the world has yet agreed to.

Under the treaty, broadcasters such as cable companies, radio stations, and Webcasting operators would essentially take over the rights to control material broadcast over the Internet, to the point where the original content creator would have to "beg permission from broadcasting companies in order to make any use of their own performances." If you don't think you should care about a measure like this, consider the effects it could have on freedoms we take for granted today in the US:

For example, if US President Bush gave an interview to Fox News, Fox could prevent any subsequent use of that footage including fair use, commentary, or criticism of President Bush - at its sole discretion - under the new anti- circumvention rights created by this treaty. Much of the political humor available on Comedy Central's "The Jon Stewart Show" could become illegal under this treaty.

In addition, countries signed to the agreement would have to enforce the implementation of DRM shackles akin to the proposed Broadcast Flag, harsh enough that even Intel objects. Because you can never protect your pilfered ownership rights too much, you know. Unsurprisingly, the EFF has voiced its opposition to the proposal:

As we've noted elsewhere, EFF believes that these new rights will stifle innovation, create a new layer of liability for Internet intermediaries, impair consumers' existing rights, restrict the public's access to knowledge and culture, and change the nature of the Internet as a communication medium. Many of these concerns could be addressed by limiting the scope of the treaty to its intended purpose—signal theft. Unfortunately the new draft doesn't remove any of our concerns, but only deepens them.

It's disturbing how often it happens that innocuous or even positive legal drafts get additional and often quite scary addendums tacked on along the way toward final approval. And opposing views seem to have a tendency to be overlooked, ignored, or pushed aside. In this case, a majority of the UN member states have already rejected the Webcasting inclusions, but that hasn't stopped the current draft of the main document from retaining that language. Instead, many of the proposed changes that would lead to lesser broadcaster controls and better protection of basic freedoms have been thrown out or relegated to a separate document.

"Core" parts of the proposal form the Draft Basic Proposal, while "alternatives" make up the Draft Working Paper, where parties to the treaty are free to opt out of individual clauses. Several countries have complained about their voices not being heard in this process, and after this week's discussions, the draft most likely goes on to receive the official stamp of approval. Is the whole world really that eager to protect the interests of big, established media to the detriment of independent expression?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060503-6742.html

Senators Question F.B.I. Director
John O'Neil

The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, came under sharp questioning from senators of both parties today on matters ranging from slow progress in intelligence sharing to an attempt to search the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson.

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, cited what he said was evidence of more than 100 instances in which F.B.I. agents improperly conducted surveillance of antiwar groups. He said the list included Quakers, a Catholic antiwar organization and the Raging Grannies, which Mr. Leahy sarcastically called "a scary group."

As Mr. Leahy and his Democratic colleagues criticized Mr. Mueller, and by extension, the Bush administration, most sharply, the F.B.I. director heard little praise from Republicans on the committee.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvanian Republican who is the panel's chairman, asked Mr. Mueller about a report issued last month by the General Accounting Office that he said "raises questions about the adequacy of information sharing" between the F.B.I. and other agencies involved in counterterrorism.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, asked Mr. Mueller about reports that F.B.I. agents had "tried to trick" Mr. Anderson's 79-year-old widow into allowing a search of his files after being turned down by her son and the family's lawyer.

And Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a close ally of the Bush administration, told the F.B.I. director that he was "troubled" by the agency's actions in the case of an Oregon lawyer who was arrested in connection with the Madrid train bombings in 2003 based on mistaken fingerprint evidence.

After describing how a report had concluded that it was the "arrogance" of agents in the F.B.I. lab that led them to disregard doubts raised by Spanish fingerprint experts, Mr. Cornyn told Mr. Mueller, "I certainly hope that strong actions will be taken if these are indeed the facts."

Mr. Mueller responded that "the report is absolutely accurate in that we made a mistake," although he questioned the choice of the word arrogant.

"There was self-assurance when they shouldn't have been self-assured," he said.

The sharpest exchange of the hearing came when Senator Leahy read from F.B.I. memos he said had been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act concerning surveillance of members of the Thomas Merton Center, a group that describes itself as "Pittsburgh's Peace and Social Justice Center."

The memos described surveillance of a meeting of the group and of an event in which antiwar leaflets were handed out on street corners shortly before the invasion of Iraq; each noted the number of people of Middle Eastern descent in attendance.

"What business does the F.B.I. have spying on law-abiding citizens simply because they oppose the war in Iraq?" Mr. Leahy demanded.

"Those memos are an outgrowth of an investigation to identify an individual," Mr. Mueller said. "We were not concerned about the political dissent."

"To my knowledge, we have not surveilled the Quakers and I have not heard of the other group you talked about, the grannies," he said. "I am concerned about this raising to this level, without a shred of evidence, without support for those rumors."

Mr. Leahy said he would make copies of the memos available to the director.

Mr. Leahy also questioned the F.B.I.'s effort to search the files of Mr. Anderson, who feuded with the bureau during his long investigative career. "There's a concern that the F.B.I. may go into his files because of things he discovered about J. Edgar Hoover's personal life," he said.

Mr. Mueller said, when asked about the subject by Mr. Specter, that the effort was spurred by the recent discovery of "information indicating that there may be classified national security documents within Mr. Anderson's collection and that the collection may be made available to the public."

Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, asked Mr. Mueller about a Justice Department report submitted to Congress last week that showed that the F.B.I. last year issued more than 9,200 "national security letters," which allow agents to collect data on individuals from businesses without a court warrant. The information was first reported today by The Washington Post.

Mr. Feingold noted that the requests made for national security letters was a "far, far larger" total than the number of requests for data on individuals made to businesses last year under another provision of the Patriot Act known as Section 215.

"I fear that the reason might be that under 215 you have to go before a judge, and you don't under N.S.L.," he said.

Mr. Mueller pointed out that the 9,200 national security letters involved only 3,500 individuals. But he acknowledged that the report only covered citizens or people legally within the United States and did not include requests for phone or Internet records.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, pressed Mr. Mueller for answers about how his agency was working with the Coast Guard in the wake of an inspector's general report that said their overlapping missions could lead to a "confused and potentially disastrous" response to a maritime terrorist attack.

"We have a preliminary agreement with the Coast Guard," Mr. Mueller said. "And we are discussing with the Coast Guard how we can be more precise in our allocation of responsibilities."

"If I were director," Senator Feinstein said, "I think I'd want to be able to say more than I'm looking into it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/wa...ne r=homepage

U.S.: FBI Sought Info Without Court OK
Mark Sherman

The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court's approval, the Justice Department said Friday.

It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge's approval or a grand jury subpoena.

Friday's disclosure was mandated as part of the renewal of the Patriot Act, the administration's sweeping anti-terror law.

The FBI delivered a total of 9,254 NSLs relating to 3,501 people in 2005, according to a report submitted late Friday to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate. In some cases, the bureau demanded information about one person from several companies.

The numbers from previous years remain classified, officials said.

The department also reported it received a secret court's approval for 155 warrants to examine business records last year under a Patriot Act provision that includes library records. However, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said the department has never used the provision to ask for library records.

The number was a significant jump over past use of the warrant for business records. A year ago, Gonzales told Congress there had been 35 warrants approved between November 2003 and April 2005.

The spike is expected to be temporary, however, because the Patriot Act renewal that President Bush signed in March made it easier for authorities to obtain subscriber information on telephone numbers captured through certain wiretaps.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the same panel that signs off on applications for business records warrants, also approved 2,072 special warrants last year for secret wiretaps and searches of suspected terrorists and spies. The record number is more than twice as many as were issued in 2000, the last full year before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The FBI security letters have been the subject of legal battles in two federal courts because, until the Patriot Act changes, recipients were barred from telling anyone about them.

Ann Beeson, the associate legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the report to Congress "confirms our fear all along that National Security Letters are being used to get the records of thousands of innocent Americans without court approval."

The number disclosed Friday excludes requests for subscriber information, an exception written into the law. It was unclear how many FBI letters were not counted for that reason.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060428/...ot_act_records

Feds Try To Dismiss Domestic Spying Suit
AP

The Justice Department said Friday it was moving to dismiss a federal lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's secretive domestic wiretapping program.

The lawsuit, brought by the Internet privacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, does not include the government.

Instead, it names AT&T, which the San Francisco-based group accuses of colluding with the National Security Agency to make communications on AT&T networks available to the spy agency without warrants.

The government, in a filing here late Friday, said the lawsuit threatens to expose government and military secrets and therefore should be tossed. The administration added that its bid to intervene in the case should not be viewed as a concession that the allegations are true.

Gonzales said the administration, assuming the conversation related to al-Qaida, would have to determine if the surveillance were crucial to the nation's fight against terrorism, as authorized by Congress following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The EFF lawsuit, alleging AT&T violated U.S. law and its customers' privacy, seeks to stop the surveillance program.

The San Antonio-based telecommunications giant said it follows all applicable laws.
http://news.newstimeslive.com/storyprint.php?id=83336

FCC Approves Net-Wiretapping Taxes
Declan McCullagh

Broadband providers and Internet phone companies will have to pick up the tab for the cost of building in mandatory wiretap access for police surveillance, federal regulators ruled Wednesday.

The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to levy what likely will amount to wiretapping taxes on companies, municipalities and universities, saying it would create an incentive for them to keep costs down and that it was necessary to fight the war on terror. Universities have estimated their cost to be about $7 billion.

"The first obligation is...the safety of the people," said FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat. "This commission supports efforts to protect the public safety and homeland security of the United States and its people."

Federal police agencies have spent years lobbying for mandatory backdoors for easy surveillance, saying "criminals, terrorists and spies" could cloak their Internet communications with impunity unless centralized wiretapping hubs become mandatory. Last year, the FCC set a deadline of May 14, 2007, for compliance. But universities, libraries and some technology companies have filed suit against the agency, and arguments before a federal court are scheduled for Friday.

"We're going to have a lot of fights over cost reimbursement," Al Gidari, a partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie, who is co-counsel in the lawsuit, said in an interview after the vote. "It continues the lunacy of their prior order and confirms they've learned nothing from what's been filed" in the lawsuit, he said.

The original 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, authorized $500 million to pay telecommunications carriers for the cost of upgrading their networks to facilitate wiretapping. Some broadband and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers had hoped that they'd be reimbursed as well.

Jonathan Askin, general counsel of Pulver.com, likened Wednesday's vote to earlier FCC rules extending 911 regulations to VoIP. "It essentially imposed a mandate on the industry without giving the industry the necessary support to abide by the rules--and the same thing seems to be happening here," Askin said.

Even without the CALEA regulations, police have the legal authority to conduct Internet wiretaps--that's precisely what the FBI's Carnivore system was designed to do. Still, the FBI has argued, the need for "standardized broadband intercept capabilities is especially urgent in light of today's heightened threats to homeland security and the ongoing tendency of criminals to use the most clandestine modes of communication."

The American Council on Education, which represents 1,800 colleges and universities, estimates that the costs of CALEA compliance could total roughly $7 billion for the entire higher-education community, or a tuition hike of $450 for every student in the nation. Documents filed in the lawsuit challenging the FCC's rules put the cost at hundreds of dollars per student.

But during Wednesday's vote, commissioners dismissed those concerns as unfounded. "I am not persuaded merely by largely speculative allegations that the financial burden on the higher-education community could total billions of dollars," said FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, a Republican.

The FCC's initial ruling last fall had left open the question of whether broadband and VoIP providers would be reimbursed for rewiring their networks and upgrading equipment to comply with CALEA.

Another open question is what portion of a university's or library's network must be rendered wiretap-friendly. One possibility is that only the pipe (or pipes) connecting a school with the rest of the Internet must be made CALEA-compliant. Another is that the entire network would be covered.

The FCC adopted its second order on Wednesday but released only a two-page summary, which didn't offer much clarity. In its initial ruling last year, the FCC said only that it had reached "no conclusions" about exactly what universities and libraries would have to do, prompting a flurry of comments filed with the agency and the federal lawsuit. (Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Sun Microsystems, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the American Library Association, the American Council on Education and VoIP firm Pulver.com.)

Commissioner Copps acknowledged that there is "still some clarity to be provided" for library and university network operators, but he suggested that additional clarity would not be forthcoming from the FCC. Instead, "all those agencies and offices of government who are involved in CALEA implementation should be working together to provide clarity there to avoid confusion and possibly expenses for these institutions," Copps said.

At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference here Wednesday, John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology said libraries and universities are still left with more questions than answers.

"There's some serious uncertainty about how it will really play out for universities," Morris said. Even if the FCC technically calls for Internet interception at the edge of a campus network, that likely won't be enough to satisfy law enforcement demands for all of an individual student's network traffic, including on-campus activities, he added.

Injecting additional uncertainty is whether the FCC's action is legal. It represents what critics call an unreasonable extension of CALEA--which was designed to address telephone features such as three-way calling and call waiting--to the Internet.

A House of Representatives committee report (click here for PDF) prepared in October 1994 emphatically says CALEA's requirements "do not apply to information services such as electronic-mail services; or online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online or Mead Data (Central); or to Internet service providers."

When Congress was debating CALEA, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh reassured nervous senators that the law would be limited to telephone calls. "So what we are looking for is strictly telephone--what is said over a telephone?" Sen. Larry Pressler, R-S.D., asked during one hearing.

Freeh replied: "That is the way I understand it. Yes, sir."

Two of the four FCC commissioners who voted for the initial CALEA ruling last fall acknowledged that the federal government was on shaky legal ground. The FCC's regulation is based on arguing that the law's definition of "telecommunications carrier" applies to broadband and VoIP providers.

Then-FCC Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy, a Republican, said, "Because litigation is as inevitable as death and taxes, and because some might not read the statute to permit the extension of CALEA to the broadband Internet access and VoIP services at issue here, I have stated my concern that an approach like the one we adopt today is not without legal risk."

The FCC is no stranger to having its decisions rejected by a federal appeals court that can be hostile to what it views as regulatory overreaching. Last May, for instance, the FCC's "broadcast flag" was unceremoniously tossed out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
http://news.com.com/FCC+approves+Net...3-6067971.html

Official: National Card Due By 2010
Louise Dodson and Stephanie Peatling

AUSTRALIANS will need a photo identity card within four years to receive Medicare and welfare payments but will not be forced to carry it at all times.

The new "smart card" will contain "enhanced security" and replace 17 existing cards for Medicare benefits, family tax, child-care and unemployment payments, pensions, Austudy and pharmaceutical and transport concessions.

People will be able to register for the card from the beginning of 2008 and it will be phased in over two years.

The card will also be used to check identities for immigration and security purposes and to crack down on fraud. Its embedded computer chip will include a photograph, number, signature, date of birth and address.

From 2010 people will not be able to receive government health and welfare payments without a card.

People may choose to have other information stored on the card, such as health and emergency contact details which, for example, ambulance officers could use.

Although it will cost $1 billion it is estimated it will save the Government $3 billion a year.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, said the Government had considered a national identity card after last year's London bombings but in the end it "was not predisposed to adopt a national ID card".

He denied the card was "a Trojan horse for an ID card" but acknowledged it would have "enhanced security features".

He said the security features of the smart card were one reason that a separate national identity card was not deemed necessary. Its perceived "Big Brother" features were another reason.

The Government's decision followed a number of cabinet debates. Mr Howard said it showed a balance had been struck between ease of access to government payments and enhanced security measures on the one hand and legitimate concerns about storing personal information on the other.

However some of his ministers think of it as an identity card. Before the announcement the Treasurer, Peter Costello, referred to it as just that, and then corrected himself.

The NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, whom Mr Howard consulted before the announcement, welcomed the card.

He said it was possible to balance threats to security with individual rights.

However, the president of the NSW Council of Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, said the card would put people at risk of identity theft and fraud.

"Everybody is interested in streamlining accessibility to government services," he said.

"It's really how you go about doing it and ensuring any system is safe and secure and people aren't forced to provide information that is unnecessary and exposes them to the risk of fraud."

The president of the Australian Council of Civil Liberties, Terry O'Gorman, said the announcement "marked a move towards an eventual ID card".

Business reacted suspiciously, saying it could easily turn into an identity card.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's chief, Peter Hendy, said that although he supported clamping down on welfare fraud he was concerned that "an upgraded card runs the risk of providing government with a platform for a far more costly and intrusive Australia Card-type proposal".

The Opposition's human services spokesman, Kelvin Thomson, gave in-principle support to the card but warned of a potential cost blow-out.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/...861419456.html

Selling Surveillance to Anxious Parents
Matt Richtel

KEVIN REYNOLDS, a real estate appraiser and father of two, is confronting a quandary: should he put his daughters under electronic surveillance?

It's a question more parents will face in the next months, thanks to new technology that lets them use cellphones to monitor their children's location.

Next month, Verizon Wireless plans to introduce a child-monitoring service, joining Sprint Nextel and Disney Mobile, which started similar services this spring. Cingular is working on the concept, too.

The systems track cellphones by satellite, allowing parents to look on the Internet to make sure their children arrived safely, say, at school or at a friend's house.

"If you don't do it and something happens to your kids, how would you feel?" said Mr. Reynolds, 49, contemplating giving such phones to his daughters, ages 4 and 8. But he is also wary of being overly intrusive.

"It's Big Brother on a kid's level," he said. "What's it like to live in a world where everybody has a device that tracks where we are?"

We may soon find out. Several new programs for consumers use cellphones to tell us — and our parents and employers, not to mention advertisers — where we are, how fast we're moving, what direction we're moving in and how close we happen to be to restaurants, movie theaters, banks and other businesses.

Soon our cellphones will locate, record and even herald us with digital precision: "You are here."

These location-based services take advantage of technology built into dozens of the newest phones. It can instantaneously identify a phone's location by using satellites and the Global Positioning System, or by determining the location of the cell tower connected to the phone.

For the telecommunications companies that are eager to sell these services, they are a possible new source of revenue at a time when nearly every American old enough to read the user manual is already carrying a cellphone.

For users, the technologies raise social, psychological, legal and interpersonal questions. A gadget that could save lives or bring peace of mind by identifying where a lost, rebellious or even kidnapped child is can also be viewed as a surveillance device, threatening one's privacy.

There is also the question of reliability. The network could fail, or the person with the phone could turn it off, making it futile as a monitor and perhaps causing more concern.

"If I was going somewhere I wasn't supposed to, I'd just turn it off and say my phone died," said Marshaye Savoy, a 10th grader at Grant High School in Sacramento.

Marshaye lives with her mother, Maisha Savoy. Marshaye's grandmother Montreal McClain, 54, said she had mixed feelings about the service. Mrs. McClain worries that it will be worthless if a child turns it off — but she likes the idea of being able to locate Marshaye.

"Children tell us they're going to be in one place and they're in another — this could make them accountable," Mrs. McClain said, adding that she was also afraid of children being abducted. "There are a lot of wicked people."

The companies behind the technology bristle when it is characterized as a surveillance tool. Sensitive to accusations of fearmongering, cellular carriers argue that they are supplying parents with "peace of mind."

Verizon Wireless, which plans to introduce its $9.99 monthly service, called Chaperone, in June, said it tried to balance privacy and safety concerns, discussing its plans with law enforcement officials, educators and missing-children advocates.

Concerns about the services have not stopped Verizon from plunging ahead. The company aims to take the concept beyond spot-checks on a child's whereabouts. For $19.99, parents can program a child's phone with geographic boundaries (around a school, say). When a child leaves the area, the parent will get a text message indicating the perimeter has been breached.

"Whether the child is arriving at or leaving the zone, the parent will get a text message," said Lee Daniels, who oversees location-based services at Verizon. The company calls the service "geo-fencing."

"It's a tool to enhance peace of mind," Mr. Daniels said, though he acknowledged that the system might not always work.

"You'll always have that risk that the kid can turn off the phone, destroy the phone, take off the battery," he said. "It's not the be-all, end-all. We don't see this service as being an alternative to a parent, or as a babysitter for the parent."

Chaperone and its geo-fencing service could be good for the phone companies' sales. Industry analysts say the companies, whose rapid growth has begun to taper off as American society has reached cellphone saturation, are looking for new revenue sources. Location-based services — from child monitors to car navigation systems — are a hot opportunity, the analysts say.

"They will be very big," said Ed Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. "Tracking your kids is something everybody will pay $5 or $10 a month for."

Sprint Nextel hopes people will pay for other things too, like determining how far and how fast they run and bike. In February, the company began offering a service called Bones in Motion, which for $9.99 a month records the distance traveled, speed, elevation and even calories burned during a workout.

In March, the company introduced a search engine for mobile phones that lets people willing to pay $2.99 a month find businesses nearby. For instance, a person can click on the phone to search for restaurants, and the phone will report back the nearest ones, with phone numbers, maps and directions.

Infospace, the company that makes the mobile search technology, has programmed the service so that, with a few clicks, a phone user can find movie theaters, A.T.M.'s, even doctor's offices — some 13 million business nationwide.

Infospace, Verizon Wireless and others said that another promising concept would allow people to make their whereabouts known to friends. With this service, friends can receive alerts if they are in each others' vicinity — at the mall, say, or a club.

This idea of mobile social networking could extend to Internet dating services. For example, members in a dating service could receive notifications if others in the service were nearby.

Another technology under development at Verizon Wireless would allow people who can receive e-mail on their phones and other portable devices to click on any physical address pasted into the e-mail to receive information on its proximity and directions.

Earlier this year, Verizon announced a service that uses satellite systems to let people with certain phones use them to get turn-by-turn driving directions, either in text format or spoken aloud by a computerized voice. The service, called VZ Navigator, is one of several new phone-based car and on-foot navigation tools the carriers are offering.

Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon's chief operating officer, said location-based services were the next big advance for the industry.

"Before you knew the phone was out there; now you know exactly where the phone is," he said. "It allows you to do a whole bunch more complicated tasks."

The issues raised by the services are part of a growing awareness that cellular communications can be a double-edged sword, allowing enormous efficiencies at the expense of making people accessible any time and virtually from anywhere.

There are also potential legal issues raised by location-based services, particularly the child-monitoring technology, said Roger Entner, an analyst with Ovum Research.

In the nightmare situation, he said, a child with a phone might be abducted and harmed but unreachable because the phone had been turned off or the network was down. Another potential problem, Mr. Entner said, could arise if adults used the service to track one another without permission. For instance, he said, a disgruntled spouse could surreptitiously attach a phone to his partner's car to track its movements.

By offering these services, the carriers "put a lot of responsibility on their shoulders," Mr. Entner said.

The carriers counter by saying they are not responsible for how people use the services, nor are they pitching the technology as 100 percent effective.

"Sprint cannot and does not guarantee the availability of its network, products and services in all instances," the company said in a statement, adding, "We believe wireless customers understand this and do not expect otherwise."

Critics also say that some of the monitoring services capitalize on and reinforce fear not just among parents but among employers, too.

"There's too much hype and too much worry," said Parry Aftab, executive director of wiredsafety.org, an organization that, among other things, educates the public on how to protect children using technology. "I've never seen parents more freaked out than they are now." Ms. Aftab said she blamed television mostly for blowing things out of proportion.

"These technologies reflect our neuroses by having to protect against very unlikely scenarios," said James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. The devices, he said, could "diminish the quality of life between now and when a catastrophe occurs, if it ever does."

For her part, Ms. Aftab is a consultant to Disney Mobile for its own child-monitoring service, a job she said she took only after the company agreed it would not use fear to market the service. "Under no circumstances should they be talking about 'peace of mind,' because that's just selling fear," Ms. Aftab said.

But, perhaps underscoring the gray areas raised by the technology — and putting Ms. Aftab at odds with her employer — George Grobar, general manager of Disney Mobile, says "peace of mind" is exactly what the company is selling.

"It lets parents follow up and make sure their kids have arrived somewhere," he said.

What is also critical is that some employees have been equipped with monitoring phones.

"We hardly have any privacy as it is now — you go to a gas station and there's a camera on you, there are cameras outside of residential homes," said Pam Dickey, a San Francisco resident who works in sales for a major pharmaceutical company, which has asked its national sales force to carry phones that monitor their whereabouts. "Now you have a telephone that will potentially tell people where you are, too — when you're in the bathroom, and how long you're there.

"It's too much an invasion of privacy," she said.

She said she had no plans to ask her daughter to carry such a phone. But Megan Dickey, 17, a junior at Lowell High School in San Francisco, said she wouldn't mind if her mother did ask.

"It's a really good safety feature," she said. "You never know what will happen, and it seems like more bad things are happening now."

"But isn't crime going down?" asked her friend, Morgan Molvig, 17, also a junior at Lowell, as they recently ate lunch on campus.

Morgan says she wants no part of such a device. "I want my parents to trust me," she said. "I would feel my privacy was being invaded."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/te...008&ei=5087%0A

File-Sharing Is The New Email

As our digital photos and videos get bigger and bigger, email can't handle the load. Three stealthy startups say file-sharing is the answer.
Om Malik

Thanks to record-label lawsuits and spyware scares, file-sharing has a bad reputation among consumers. But three startups are nevertheless betting that they can harness the technology to solve a growing problem: Conveniently sharing photos and home videos with friends and family.

The three oufits that are exiting stealth mode this week -- New York-based Pando Networks, Perenety of Sunnyvale, California, and WiredReach of Austin, Texas -- have developed products that aim to supplant email for sharing digital photo albums, home videos, and other weighty files.

Digital cameras and camcorders are fast increasing the resolution they capture, which in turn leads to larger files. But Internet service providers typically block users from sending files bigger than 10 megabytes to prevent large email attachments from clogging up their systems. For email recipients, it's no easier: Even though free services like Yahoo (Research) Mail and Google's (Research) Gmail now offer gigabytes of storage, it's easy to run through that limit with just a few photo albums or videos.

"Most of us attach dozens of photos to an email and send them to our friends and family," says Pando co-founder Yaron Samid. "It is quite a big hassle, and you are never sure if the email gets to the person you are sending."
The big picture

There are websites like Flickr and YouTube, of course, where users can post photos and video -- but those are designed for material you want to share with the world, not just a few friends or family members. Photo-sharing websites like Kodak (Research) EasyShare Gallery, Snapfish, and Shutterfly all share a common flaw: The need to upload photos to a Web server, a process which just gets lengthier and more prone to error the bigger the files get.

That's where file sharing comes in handy. Unlike email or website uploads, which have to go through a central server, file sharing connects two computers directly for more efficient content transfer -- what's known as "peer-to-peer networking."

Peer-to-peer networking came to the forefront in the late 1990s when Napster (Research) made it relatively easy for far-flung users to share music files. Napster drew the ire of the music industry and went bankrupt, only to be replaced by the more exotically named Kazaa, Gnutella, and other networks. (A reborn Napster took the old company's name, but doesn't use file-sharing technology.)

File-sharing got its outlaw reputation because the technology made it easier to download large files, but difficult to trace where digitally pirated movie and music came from.

This new wave of file-sharing startups isn't aiming to share music or Hollywood movies, however. It's just using the technology to speed and simplify the problem of moving a large file from computer A to computer B.

Pando's Samid founded the company in December 2004 with Laird Popkin, a former director of digital technology for Warner Music (Research), and Robert Levitan, the cofounder of media website iVillage, now owned by GE's NBC Universal unit. The three started developing Pando's application, which lets users drag and drop files into a "package" which they can then email to friends.

Rather than containing the photo and video files themselves, Pando's package just contains information about the location of the files. The recipient gets a link to download Pando's software, which begins downloading the files as soon as it's installed.

Pando uses the same technology found in BitTorrent, a relatively new file-sharing system that's been gaining popularity among the geek set, but which still remains beyond the grasp of the average computer user, according to Samid.

"Our goal was to bring the power of BitTorrent to the mainstream user who just wants to email Mom some heavy photos and videos," he says. So far, the plan seems to be working. The company has more than 315,000 users, with 6,000 signing up every day. They share 15 terabytes of data on an average day.
Preventing piracy

To keep Pando from being used by music and movie pirates, Pando has restricted the number of people to whom you can send a Pando package, and limited the file size to one gigabyte, enough space to hold about 45 7-megapixel photos.

While Pando has tried to keep its application close to the email-attachment model, Perenety has modeled its Shooter application after Skype, the voice-over-Internet-protocol outfit which was bought by eBay (Research), says co-founder Xavier Casanova.

It may seem like an unlikely comparison, but Perenety, which is now conducting a limited test of Shooter, is emulating Skype's one-to-one connectivity and buddy-list features. Just as Skype connects two PCs directly for a call and tells you which people are available to talk, Perenety connects PCs directly for speedier file transfers and lets you know when your contacts share new files.

"We have developed this technology so that it is optimized for one-to-one file transfers and sharing," says Casanova. Every time a friend uploads new photos into Shooter, people who have previously received files from that person get an alert, just like you get when a buddy signs on to your instant-messaging network. Like Pando, it has a one-gigabyte file-size limit.

WiredReach's BoxCloud service, which has yet to launch publicly, also models itself after popular instant-messaging software. Unlike Pando and Perenety, it won't have limits on file size or the number of people you can share a file with.

Of the three startups vying to replace email, Pando has the biggest lead in users, even in its limited beta-test phase. That suggests that keeping the process of sharing large files as close as possible to the familiar experience of sending email attachments may be the smartest way to go.

One thing's clear: Unless we all agree to ditch our digital cameras and stop promising to send Mom pictures, this problem isn't going away anytime soon.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/01/tech...n=money_latest

Five Face Piracy Charges For 'Warez'

Alleged copyright violators hail from around the U.S.
Grant Gross

Five U.S. residents face criminal copyright charges for their alleged participation in the online "warez" file-trading community, the U.S. Department of Justice announced today.

The charges come out of an ongoing DOJ crackdown against international online piracy groups that distribute copyrighted movies, software, games and music on the Internet. The five defendants are alleged to be leading members of the "warez scene," groups of Internet users who illegally distribute copyrighted materials online.

Warez groups, using servers worldwide, are often the first distributors of copyrighted works online, before the works filter down to peer-to-peer and other public networks, the DOJ said.

Kevin Fuchs, 25, of West Amherst, N.Y., and Cuong Quoc Trang, 35, of Parker, Colo., were charged in an indictment with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and copyright infringement, the DOJ said.

Matthew Alderman, 24, of Ashland, Ore., was charged with criminal copyright infringement, and David Morvant, 35, of Thibodaux, La., and Michael Hays, 51, of Delafield, Wis., were charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement.

The charges are part of Operations FastLink and Site Down, the two largest international law enforcement efforts targeted at online distribution of copyrighted material, the DOJ said. The operations have resulted in more than 200 search warrants executed in 16 countries, hundreds of computers being confiscated and more than $100 million worth of copyrighted software, games, movies and music removed from download sites.

Countries participating in the U.S.-led operations included France, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Hungary, Israel, Spain, Australia, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium and Germany.

The charges are being prosecuted by the U.S. attorney's office for the Western District of North Carolina. The office charged eight other alleged warez leaders with copyright-related crimes in July.

Operation FastLink has resulted in 28 felony convictions so far. In Operation Site Down, 53 people have been charged and 23 convicted of felony offenses.
http://www.computerworld.com/securit...110929,00.html

CEO of Company That Owns Kazaa File-Sharing Network Appears In Sydney Court

The chief executive of the company that owns the Kazaa file-sharing network Friday denied hastily selling her multimillion dollar Sydney mansion and sending the proceeds to the tax haven of Vanuatu to make sure record company lawyers could not get their hands on it.

The denial capped more than four hours on the stand for Nikki Hemming at the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney for cross examination on two affidavits she has written detailing her assets ahead of a possible court order for damages against Kazaa's owners for authorizing widescale copyright breaches by users of the so-called peer-to-peer network.

Hemming's appearance marked the first time such a senior executive linked to Kazaa has taken the stand in a long-running legal battle between Australian record labels and Kazaa.

Last year, a federal court judge ruled that Kazaa's owners, including Hemming, did nothing to rein in widespread copyright infringements by Kazaa users. Lawyers for the owners have appealed and no decision has yet been handed down on the appeal.

If the appeal fails, the Australian recording industry has vowed to seek millions of dollars in damages.

Fearing that Hemming and other executives named in the case could send their assets overseas out of the court's reach, the Federal Court last year froze their assets. Friday's questioning appeared aimed at establishing whether Hemming was able to get some money offshore before her assets were frozen.

In a packed courtroom, record company lawyer Richard Cobden painstakingly outlined a complex web of companies and a trust linked to Kazaa in Australia and Vanuatu.

Hemming is chief executive officer of Sharman Networks, the Vanuatu-based company that owns the Kazaa software used by millions of people around the world to swap music and video files.

Hemming, wearing a black suit and white blouse, said Sharman bought the Kazaa file-sharing software in early 2002 for 600,000 euros (US$750,000) from a Dutch company, Kazaa B.V.

In February 2003, Hemming bought a 1.7 million Australian dollar house in Sydney, partly funded by a US$810,000 unsecured loan from a company in Vanuatu with an interest rate of 3.5 percent, well below Australian rates at the time.

In December 2004, with a new swimming pool she was having built still not finished, Hemming sold the house to John Myers, an accountant who worked for Sharman, for A$2.1 million (US$1.58 million) and paid back the loan to Vanuatu.

Cobden said to Hemming she appeared to have rushed through the sale because the Kazaa trial was close to ending "and you had formed a pessimistic view about your prospects in that trial."

Hemming, who earlier denied that the so-called loan was actually money controlled by Sharman in Vanuatu, replied: "That is also not true."

"The sale of the house had nothing to do with the case," she added.

In earlier testimony, Hemming told the court that a veil of secrecy around the trust she set up for Sharman in Vanuatu was useful to her when setting up Sharman.

"Confidentiality was something which enabled me to have a flexible arrangement when I set up the business," she said without elaborating.
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/intern...in035000c.html

Next Step In Pirating: Faking a Company
David Lague

BEIJING At first it seemed to be nothing more than a routine, if damaging, case of counterfeiting in a country where faking it has become an industry.

Reports filtering back to the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese electronics giant NEC in mid-2004 alerted managers that pirated keyboards and recordable CD and DVD discs bearing the company's brand were on sale in retail outlets in Beijing and Hong Kong.

Like hundreds, if not thousands, of manufacturers now locked in a war of attrition with intellectual property thieves in China, the company hired an investigator to track down the pirates.

After two years and thousands of hours of investigation in conjunction with law enforcement agencies in China, Taiwan and Japan, the company said it had uncovered something far more ambitious than clandestine workshops turning out inferior copies of NEC products. The pirates were faking the entire company.

Evidence seized in raids on 18 factories and warehouses in China and Taiwan over the past year showed that the counterfeiters had set up what amounted to a parallel NEC brand with links to a network of more than 50 electronics factories in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

In the name of NEC, the pirates copied NEC products, and went as far as developing their own range of consumer electronic products - everything from home entertainment centers to MP3 players. They also coordinated manufacturing and distribution, collecting all the proceeds.

The Japanese company even received complaints about products - which were of generally good quality - that they did not make or provide with warranties.

NEC said it was unable to estimate the total value of the pirated goods from these factories, but the company believed the organizers had "profited substantially" from the operation.

"These entities are part of a sophisticated ring, coordinated by two key entities based in Taiwan and Japan, which has attempted to completely assume the NEC brand," said Fujio Okada, the NEC senior vice president and legal division general manager, in written answers to questions.

"Many of these entities are familiar with each other and cooperate with each other to develop, manufacture and sell products utilizing the NEC brand."

NEC declined to identify the companies for legal reasons.

Officials from branch offices of the Chinese State Administration of Industry and Commerce in southern China confirmed that counterfeit goods carrying the NEC brand had been seized in raids on a number of factories and that investigations were continuing.

Some technology companies have been criticized for piecemeal and half- hearted attempts to protect their intellectual property, but Okada said NEC was prepared to take proactive measures to defend its brand.

NEC had not previously made public the piracy in order not to compromise its investigation.

NEC said it would continue collecting evidence to support further criminal complaints. It was also planning to start civil lawsuits against some factories while negotiating with others.

Steve Vickers, president of International Risk, a Hong Kong-based company that NEC hired to investigate the piracy, said documents and computer records seized by the police during the factory and warehouse raids had revealed the scope of the piracy.

These records showed that the counterfeiters carried NEC business cards, commissioned product research and development in the company's name and signed production and supply orders.

He said they also required factories to pay royalties for "licensed" products and issued official-looking warranty and service documents.

Some of the factories that were raided had erected bogus NEC signs and shipped their products packaged in authentic looking boxes and display cases.

NEC said about 50 products were counterfeited, including home entertainment systems, MP3 players, batteries, microphones and DVD players.

Many of these pirated items were not part of the genuine NEC product range.

The investigation also revealed that fake goods from these factories were on sale in Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

In some cases, they were being sold alongside legitimate NEC products in retail outlets.

Vickers, a former senior Hong Kong police officer, said he believed that the NEC case demonstrated how piracy is evolving from opportunistic and often shoddy copying of branded goods to highly coordinated operations.

"On the surface, it looked like a series of intellectual property infringements, but in reality a highly organized group has attempted to hijack the entire brand," he said. "It is not a simple case of a factory knocking off a branded product. Many of them have been given bogus paperwork that they say gives them the right to do it."

An official for a Chinese economic inspection team in Zhuhai in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, who would give his name only as Zeng, said the managers of one factory that had been raided insisted they had a license to manufacture NEC goods.

He said that Chinese officials were seeking clarification from NEC and that the investigation was continuing.

The counterfeiting attack on the NEC brand comes as the Chinese government is coming under intense international pressure to crack down on rampant intellectual property theft. The U.S. government and American businesses complain that the Chinese efforts to combat piracy have so far been ineffective.

Gregory Shea, president of the U.S. Information Technology Office in Beijing, which represents more than 6,000 technology companies, said it was clear that the top Chinese leaders understood that intellectual property rights contributed to economic growth.

"We commend that, but we do recognize nonetheless that the situation is not improving on the ground," he said. "It has not turned the corner."

In response to the losses suffered by Japanese companies, Tokyo has called on China to crack down on piracy.

Japan last year joined the United States in filing a formal request under World Trade Organization rules calling on Beijing to detail efforts it was making to enforce intellectual property rights.

But piracy experts say privately that strained Chinese-Japanese ties complicate Tokyo's efforts to support Japanese companies operating in China.

While intellectual property violations continue, there are clear signs that China is responding to international pressure.

In the lead-up to the visit of the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, to the United States this month, Beijing began a publicity campaign to draw attention to what it said was an intensified crackdown on intellectual property theft.

And, while Hu toured technology companies in the United States, the Chinese leader reinforced this message.

After a visit to the Microsoft headquarters in Seattle on April 18, Hu said the protection of intellectual property was crucial for China's future.

"It is necessary to create a favorable investment environment, good and fast development, and for China's own innovative capability," he said. "We take very seriously our promises to enforce our laws on this issue."

Senior Chinese officials acknowledge that trademark violations occur, but they argue that local manufacturers were sometimes duped into producing pirated goods.

At a media briefing in March, the Chinese deputy minister for customs, Gong Zheng, said many factories produced goods under license to be exported and sold under a company's brand.

"Its easy for them to be deceived or lured by foreign traders to manufacture and export infringing goods," he said.

Vickers agreed that Chinese factories were often just part of the problem.

"The factory in China sometimes appears to be the bad guy, but often the bad guy is someone behind the scenes and they are often not in China," he said.

The first phase in NEC's effort to disrupt the counterfeiters began early last year when evidence that the piracy was coordinated from Taiwan was handed over to authorities on the island.

Prosecutors in the southern city of Kaohsiung issued warrants for the local police to raid a warehouse and offices in the area where investigators seized 60 pallets of counterfeit goods, mostly audio products, carrying the NEC brand.

Evidence collected in these raids also implicated factories in mainland China, according to people familiar with the investigation in Taiwan.

Officials at the Kaohsiung District Court said the case was still under investigation.

Beginning in November, the Chinese economic authorities coordinated further raids on nine factories in the cities of Guangzhou, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and Shenzhen in Guangdong Province.

Vickers said many multinational companies were now facing similar challenges to NEC as piracy expanded and became better organized.

"The reality is that factories in China will produce what they are asked to produce," he said. "The challenge is finding out who placed the orders and who funded it."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/27/business/nec.php

Microsoft Settles Calif. Antitrust Suit For $70 Million
Michael Liedtke

Microsoft Corp. will pay $70 million to thousands of California government agencies in the latest legal settlement spurred by price-gouging allegations against the world's largest computer software maker.

The proposed truce covers a wide range of taxpayer-backed agencies — from local school districts to regional transportation systems — that bought Microsoft products dating back to 1995.

If the settlement gains court approval later this year, Microsoft will divide the $70 million among the eligible government agencies as they buy computers, printers and software, including brands that compete against Microsoft.

The proposed payments are similar to a $1.1 billion pool that Microsoft set up for California consumers and businesses in 2004 after settling a lawsuit alleging the software maker had abused its power in the computing industry to inflate prices.

Although Microsoft has consistently defended its prices as fair and reasonable, government regulators, customers and business rivals have long insisted that the software maker leveraged its Windows operating system — the brains of most personal computers — to build an unfair market advantage.

The backlash unleashed a tidal wave of lawsuits, including a closely watched antitrust case filed by the U.S. Justice Department. That showdown culminated in a 2002 settlement.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft spent billions resolving other suits brought by rivals like AOL Time Warner Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., as well as other government entities.

Led by the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the California government agencies filed their suit in 2004. The counties of Santa Clara, San Mateo, Los Angeles and Contra Costa also joined in the action.

In a statement Tuesday, Microsoft denied it did anything wrong. "We value our relationship with these cities and counties and are pleased to reach a settlement that allows us all to focus on the future," said Tom Burt, Microsoft's deputy general counsel.

San Francisco lawyer Richard Grossman, who represented the government agencies, said his clients were "delighted" with the settlement.

The agreement still requires the approval of U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore. The California agencies originally sued in San Francisco Superior Court, but the case was transferred to Maryland, where Motz is overseeing several other similar suits against Microsoft.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...f162555D21.DTL

Wal-mart's Wikipedia War
Richard Demsyn

For up to two years Wal-mart lobbyists have successfully waged a war against a fair viewpoint on Wikipedia's Wal-mart page[1]. Although the Wal-mart page was originally highly critical of Wal-mart, it has slowly shifted to a very positive perspective. Although Wikipedia maintains a 'Neutral Point of View' (NPOV) policy[2], the Wal-mart page is highly biased. Additionally, all criticism has, contrary to policy, practice, and the general opinion of those concerned, been moved to a Debates Over Wal-mart section[3]. Even that page has noticeable resistance to negative points of view about Wal-mart.

My query into Wal-mart and Wikipedia started on Friday, April 14. I went to the page to find information on Wal-mart's union issues in Quebec, which had been a large issue in the media here. I found just one small entry on a timeline, saying '2004: Wal-Mart employees in JonquiÃ¨re, Quebec, Canada vote in favour of becoming the first unionized Wal-Mart in North America. Five months later, Wal-Mart announces that it would close the store, citing poor sales.' The corresponding page, Debates over Wal-mart, has no mention of the issue, or even Quebec at all. I found it very curios that such an important and popular issue was barely discussed.

My first reaction was to think that Wal-mart, one of the largest and most powerful capitalist enterprises in the world, has lobbyists progressing the Wikipedia page into propaganda. Trying to be wary, I took some time to gather information and discuss the theory with others, and found nothing contrary to my original impression, and only evidence supporting it.

Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopaedia. It uses a model of information where anybody can contribute. Although this leads to some vandalism and some disinformation, almost always an accurate and knowledgeable viewpoint prevails. The project has brought thousands of intelligent people devoted to its cause. The model is effective enough that my own user page was once vandalized, and then fixed by another user a single minute later, without me knowing for another three months. Rarely has there been enough interest in spreading disinformation to cause a lengthy disruption to an article. We usually see that contained to very controversial political issues, such as the page for President George W. Bush, particularly around the 2004 election. We've also seen numerous edits by US congressional staff[4]. However, nothing I've seen before has been has been this bad: on an article so large, often visited, and been so successful so long after being discovered by the NPOV folk at Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia page Wal-mart was originally small and haphazard. Starting in February 2004, there was a sharp increase in edits to the page. In September, 2004, the edit number ballooned, and since then has continued to grow. There has been a lot of work by Wikipedia regulars to bring fairness and quality to the article, but an equal disruptive force has been caused by lobbyists. Now, the page will have over a dozen edits on any average day.

My own short experience with this article makes a fair example. After bringing up discussion on the topic in Wikipedia's generally IRC channel, a fellow user, Bogdangiusca, who had fought for a NPOV on the article as far back as May 1, 2005, added a totally disputed tag[5]. This tag would mean that anyone visiting the page would see a red block at the top indicating that 'The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article are disputed'. This tag was removed the next day. The person who did so then defaced Bogdangiusca's user page with a long paragraph demanding that Bogdangiusca stop any contribution to the Wal-mart page[6]. The user claimed to be an employee of Wal-mart and lamented, 'So why don’t you just keep to what you know and allow those that do have facts about walmart to create an accurate picture of walmart for the world.' This pattern has been repeated over and over again about the Wal-mart page. Many users struggling for a NPOV have had their pages defaced, and defacers have in the past been banned.

So who are the lobbyists, and what do they look like? Unfortunately it is very difficult to prove that any one user is corrupted, let alone paid for this by a particular company, especially with only a few days of research. Sorting through thousands of edits and user contribution pages is not an easy task[7]. A lot of these edits are done by anonymous users, just IPs to me. Some others actually have logins. Usually these accounts have very few edits other than on the Wal-mart page, and they have either blank user pages or simple statements. Sometimes they just edit out sentences that aren't favourable to Wal-mart. Sometimes they add more propaganda to the page. Sometimes they will follow an unfavourable mention with a revert, possibly back through several edits to a pro-Wal-mart addition.

The simple fact that there is a separate Debates over Wal-mart page is incriminating. This isn't an accepted Wikipedia policy. In other articles contrary opinions are still embedded, even if at times the page will link to secondary articles on smaller topics if they cannot be explained in full on the current page. Any reference articles will be read less than the main article, so despite a link on Wal-mart to Debates over Wal-mart, the debates page will be read less. Even then, it is currently introduced with the following view:

'From a financial standpoint, Wal-Mart is one of the most successful corporations ever; the company has generated a total return to shareholders greater than 180,000% since its initial public offering. Academic research, business leaders and trade publications praise Wal-Mart for benefiting consumers by lowering prices and increasing Overall productivity.'

Like many successful businesses, however, Wal-Mart is a target of much criticism. Critics, such as trade unions and environmental groups, state that the company's success derives from business practices harmful to employees, local communities, the economy and the environment.'

After all analysis, Wal-mart is clearly 'point of view'. The page is highly supportive of Wal-mart, and lobbyists will not allow anything contrary to last. It reads like a propaganda piece. It is unprecedented that such support would come from random, untainted users. The support is aggressive, unfair, distributed, and over an extended period of time. The only conclusion I can make is that Wal-mart has used its economic power to hire lobbyists who as part of their job use Wikipedia to spread disinformation for the benefit of Wal-mart. This stands as a powerful strike against the very integrity of Wikipedia.
http://www.whitedust.net/article/55/...Wikipedia_War/

Microsoft's China Card
Olga Kharif with Steve Hamm and Sarah Lacy

By investing heavily in local software outfits, Microsoft aims to counter piracy and expand its foothold in the Middle Kingdom

China's president Hu Jintao kicked off his recent U.S. visit not by checking in first at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., but by meeting Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. The social call may have paid off. On Apr. 26, the Redmond (Wash.)-based software giant announced plans to invest $900 million in Chinese software companies and hardware over the next five years. The aim is to reduce piracy rates and establish Windows as the dominant operating system in the region.

The deal represents Microsoft's biggest commitment to China to date. The company said in 2002 it would invest $750 million in Chinese companies and products over three years, a period the company and China have dubbed Phase I of Microsoft-China relations. Microsoft (MSFT ) is now upping the ante on investments. Microsoft, with China's National Development & Reform Commission, will also establish a development center to boost capabilities of Chinese software companies. In addition, Microsoft will train 10,000 Chinese software engineers.

These aren't mere goodwill gestures. Gates & Co. aim to reduce the rampant unauthorized sales of Windows at Chinese shops and bazaars. Microsoft also hopes the deal will result in wider use of its Windows operating system in China, where the PC market is growing at a double-digit pace, representing "the world's best opportunity [for PC software sales]," says Roger Kay, president of tech consultancy Endpoint Technologies Associates. Microsoft, looking to step up growth, clearly wants a slice of the pie.

PIRACY PEAKING. To now, Microsoft's investment efforts have made little headway in reducing piracy. The company should be booking about $1 billion on annual sales of some 20 million PCs in China, says Paul DeGroot, an analyst at consultancy Directions on Microsoft. Instead, sales there are about $100 million, he says. The PC makers don't pre-load Windows on their computers, and consumers install pirated copies of the operating system on their own. Software piracy has fallen a few percentage points in China in recent years, according to a 2005 survey by Business Software Alliance, an industry consortium fighting piracy. But it's still at an eye-popping 90%, and the decline has more to do with the country's growing prosperity than Microsoft's investments, DeGroot says. Now that they make more money, users can afford legal versions of Windows.

Microsoft tried to block Kai-Fu Lee, an executive in its Chinese operations, from joining competitor Google (GOOG ) last year. During court proceedings, Lee said Microsoft botched efforts in China by failing to make friends with the Chinese government early on. The software company may be making up for lost time. Some analysts say Microsoft could finally see returns in the next two years.

GOVERNMENT SUPPORT. The Chinese government appears to be making efforts to reduce piracy. On March 31, China announced it would require all new PCs to be shipped with pre-installed, legal operating systems. While many PC makers will likely opt for the cheaper (or free) Linux system, the policy could boost legal sales of Windows as well. And on Mar. 30, three Chinese government agencies began requiring that all PCs they buy come pre-loaded with Windows.

Partly due to the Chinese government's thaw, Microsoft is gaining traction with Chinese computer manufacturers. On Apr. 18, on the eve of Hu Jintao's arrival at Gates' house for dinner, Yang Yuanqing, chairman of Chinese PC maker Lenovo, signed an agreement with Microsoft to jointly market PCs in China.

Before then, last November, when the PC maker has agreed to pre-load Windows onto Lenovo-branded PCs, fewer than 10% of which came with Windows (the rest used Linux and DOS).

SOLID INVESTMENT. Today, 70% of Lenovo-branded PCs in China have Windows XP pre-installed. "It gave us a competitive advantage over other PC makers who weren't shipping Windows," says Yang. "We were the first to start doing this. It improved the image of the company." Lenovo acquired IBM's (IBM ) PC business last year. Now, more local PC makers are flocking to Microsoft. Recently, the company signed deals to bundle Windows onto PCs made by several other Chinese manufacturers. The financial impact of the Chinese deals on Microsoft is as yet unclear. But "any incremental [downward] change in the level of piracy is incremental revenues for Microsoft at [virtually] no incremental cost," says Peter Misek, an analyst with Cannacord Adams. In fact, some analysts, DeGroot among them, believe that Microsoft should be able to recoup its $900 million investment within two to three years. "The return on that investment is not certain," he says. "But it could pay off."

"BLIND EYE." Meantime, Microsoft can console itself that as Windows gains popularity in China (legal copies or no) consumers are less likely to opt for Linux, says Jim Murphy, research director at consultancy AMR. "The dilemma is, do they turn a blind eye now in order to have opportunities down the line?" he says. "The space between the rock and the hard place is getting tighter."

But Chinese consumers are getting used to the Windows interface and functions. Those who use pirated copies -- as their incomes rise -- could be enticed to pay for legitimate versions of Windows that have more features or fewer glitches, DeGroot says. Microsoft is clearly only at the beginning of a long road to overcoming piracy. But the right balance of statesmanship, investment and marketing are a step in the right direction.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...gn_id=bier_tca

New P2P Software Could Lead to ISP Abuse
Jennifer LeClaire

Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed software designed to enable people to share their high-speed wireless connections without sacrificing security or privacy. Researchers believe the software can improve Internet connectivity in residential areas at no additional cost.

A typical residential user accesses his broadband home connection about 12 to 15 hours per week, figured Haiyun Luo, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So, while the Internet connection is always on, most of the time it sits idle. Luo would like to see that idleness put to good use by benefiting other users. He and graduate student Nathanael Thompson may have come up with a way to do it.

"Significantly improved speed and the 'always on' feature of wireless routers have been driving the rapid spread of broadband Internet access in many residential areas," said Luo. "More than 56 percent of homes in the United States already have Internet access, and more than half of those homes are using WiFi wireless home networks."

Getting a PERM
Luo and Thompson have developed a software framework called PERM (Practical End-host collaborative Residential Multihoming) that intends to allow neighbors to pool their Internet access and, in doing so, improve both performance and resilience.

"PERM exploits the diversity of broadband Internet access in residential areas to improve connectivity in a managed way," Luo said. "Our design requires no support outside the user's wireless router, and is immediately deployable."

By pooling all available Internet connections, neighbors can enhance their Internet connectivity at no additional cost. That is, if neighbors are willing to share.

"PERM represents a paradigm shift in the Internet user community," Luo said. "Until now, most users have been unwilling to share their wireless connections for fear of losing security and privacy. We offer a solution that ensures mutual benefit, security and privacy."

The sharing of Internet connections is open only to registered users who, in exchange for using connections belonging to others, must offer the use of their own. This "peer-to-peer" sharing concept has enormous potential, with millions of possible nodes, Luo said.
ISP Abuse?

The issue with technology like PERM is not about whether it is secure, but whether it is legal, according to Predrag Filipovic, Ph.D., senior analyst, Multimedia and Wireless Networks, at The Diffusion Group. It opens up ISPs to abuse by folks who aren't paying for it, much like someone who uses his neighbor's water hose to water his yard.

"I can see this technology being applied on campus networks. When it comes to a peer-to-peer sharing in residential areas, I think some of the ISPs might have an issue with that because in densely populated neighborhoods instead of getting 50 subscribers they suddenly may only get five," Filipovic told TechNewsWorld. "There is a legal question here."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/50244.html

Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who plays Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on "Sesame Street," received the lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences on Friday. Here’s a profile of the performer from 2004.

35 Years as a Bird and a Grouch
Deirdre Wilson

Caroll Spinney never thought of himself as a singer, certainly not one who’d be crooning from the stage of the nation’s most famous concert hall.

But a career inside an 8-foot puppet covered in 4,000 yellow feathers takes you places. And for Spinney, one of the ultimate destinations was New York’s Carnegie Hall.

“I was asked to sing ‘People’ on stage with [composer] Jules Styne,” says Spinney, the puppeteer of two enduring Sesame Street characters, Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch.

“So there I was [as Big Bird] on stage. I’m reaching the top of the song and I could see the top of Carnegie Hall as I leaned back and sang, ‘People who need people,’” Spinney says, pausing to belt out the words in Big Bird’s unmistakable voice. “I thought, my God, look where I am! Look where Sesame Street has brought me!”

In the 35 years that Spinney has been with Sesame Street, his beloved characters have taken him many places – from appearances on the Emmy Awards show and Hollywood Squares to performances in Europe, Australia and China. As Big Bird, he has met every First Lady since Nancy Reagan and worked with celebrities such as Bob Hope, Flip Wilson and Rosie O’Donnell. Spinney has four Emmys, two Grammys, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Living Legend Award from the Library of Congress.

All of this figures into why Spinney has remained in the roles of Big Bird and Oscar for so long; he’s one of three original cast members still with the show, along with human characters Susan and Gordon. But he’s got a more visceral reason for spending 35 years on the Sesame Street set.

“I just can’t imagine walking away from Big Bird. He’s like my kid,” says Spinney, now 70. “I don’t feel I am him; I just can’t imagine not being with him.”

Humble Beginnings

Spinney has always been a puppeteer, performing in festivals and even working on Bozo’s Big Top, a popular kids’ TV show in the 1960s. At one puppet festival, he presented an innovative performance involving a film screen with moving backgrounds behind the live action of his puppets. Just before the show, Spinney learned that Muppets creator Jim Henson was in the audience.

In his autobiography, The Wisdom of Big Bird and The Dark Genius of Oscar the Grouch (Villard, 2003), Spinney describes that performance as a disaster – a bright stage light washed out the images on the screen behind his puppets. But Henson approached him after the show and told him he admired what he was trying to do. Henson invited him to New York to talk about the Muppets, and the rest is history. Spinney has played Big Bird and Oscar ever since.

Two Opposite Characters

Big Bird was initially cast as a clumsy, country-bumpkin character. But Spinney came to believe that children would relate better to Big Bird if the bird himself was a child. Henson agreed.

“He’s very realistic in a sense. Big Bird is pretty much a human child,” Spinney says, noting that, as a bird, he doesn’t have to be a particular race of child. He is simply childlike.

Oscar, on the other hand, is a grumpy, trash-loving, hermit-like monster (modeled after a New York cabbie Spinney had met) who has occasionally been miscast as very unkind by Sesame Street writers and producers.

“With Oscar, at times, I felt they got off base a bit,” Spinney says. “Once in a while, he was actually mean – and there’s a difference between being mean and being a grouch. He once made Telly (another Muppet) cry. He called Gordon ‘chrome dome.’ I told the producers I didn’t think he should do the name-calling stuff or make someone cry.

“The best explanation of why Oscar is on the show is that it takes all kinds to make the world,” Spinney adds. “He certainly goes against the grain of what it used to be with children’s shows – a pretty nice little world. But Oscar isn’t the keeper of the crypt, either. Don’t lose track of what he is: he’s a grouchy guy. And once in a while, he’ll say to Susan, ‘Uh, don’t tell anyone I said this, but – oh, this is hard – thanks!’”

More Ups Than Downs

Spinney’s career hasn’t been without discomfort, or even danger. He has come close to being seriously burned during accidents on the set. He has also fallen a few times as Big Bird because his view inside the giant puppet is limited. He operates primarily through the use of a tiny TV monitor inside the bird suit.

His job has also had a personal, emotional side, particularly since Spinney is also a father and a grandfather. One of his three children was once teased for having a dad who worked “on a baby, sissy show.” When the boy later appeared on Sesame Street riding a bicycle in the background, his peers excitedly told him they had seen him on the show. Spinney was amused that his son could retort, “Oh? I thought you didn’t watch that sissy show!”

His grandson, Wyatt, now 16, was 10 when Spinney revealed to him that he was, in fact, Big Bird. “He was crushed,” Spinney recalls. “He had a unique relationship with Big Bird where he would call me on the phone and say, ‘Hi Grandpa, is Big Bird there?’ and Big Bird would come to the phone. I actually regret telling him because I think it still bothers him.”

But Spinney describes his job as the best in the world and one that he is thankful for.

“I’d love to do another five years, which would make it 40 years on the show,” he says. “I don’t even want to limit it to that!” He’s also not bothered by the relative anonymity of being a puppeteer. “I love playing a role where no one sees you. You can be anything that’s on your arm.”
http://topics-az.parenthood.com/arti...rticle_id=6468

Keith Richards Hospitalized in New Zealand
AP

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards suffered a mild concussion while vacationing in Fiji and was flown to a New Zealand hospital for treatment, a band spokeswoman said Saturday.

Media reports said Richards fell out of a palm tree and remained hospitalized in Auckland.

Richards, 62, suffered a mild concussion while on holiday in Fiji earlier this week and was flown to New Zealand, band spokeswoman Fran Curtis said in a statement.

''Following treatment locally and as a precautionary measure, he flew to a hospital accompanied by his wife, Patti, for observation,'' Curtis said.

The statement did not elaborate on Richards' condition.

But media reports in Australian and New Zealand said Richards hurt his head after falling out of a palm tree at an exclusive Fiji resort and remained hospitalized in Auckland.

Newspapers in the Fairfax media group reported in their Sunday editions that Richards was flown to Auckland's Ascot Hospital on Thursday after the accident.

Steve Kirby, duty manager at the Ascot Hospital, would not comment on whether Richards was a patient there, citing the hospital's privacy policy.

The Fijilive.com news Web site reported that the accident was believed to have happened at Fiji's exclusive Wakaya Club resort.

Salesi Finau of the resort told The Associated Press that Richards and his wife recently stayed at the resort for about a week but would not say when they left.

Finau also refused to comment on the reports Richards had an accident.

''I am sorry, I do not have any comment on that,'' he said.

The Rolling Stones played a concert in Wellington on April 18 as part of their ''A Bigger Bang'' world tour.

According to the band's Web site, the Stones' next scheduled concert is at the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona, Spain, followed by 34 more dates across Europe.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...-Richards.html

Computer CARE Packages
Joe Nocera

IT used to be easy to poke fun at Nicholas Negroponte. The founding director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab — and for many years the marquee columnist for Wired magazine, which he also helped found — Mr. Negroponte was one of those people given to pronouncements so grand they bordered on the grandiose. The Financial Times once described him as being "the world's chief cyberevangelist" who liked to prophesy that the Internet would "bring world peace, destroy trade barriers and promote democracy." His 1995 book, "Being Digital," cemented his reputation as the Bernard-Henri Lévy of the digerati: even when he was right, he made your eyes roll.

In the late 1990's, though, Mr. Negroponte began ratcheting down the pontificating. He gave up his Wired column in 1998, and in 2000 he stepped down as the head of the Media Lab, though he remained at M.I.T. And a year and a half ago, he took a leave from the university to do something you just don't expect from a 63-year-old man who has long made his living taking the 30,000-foot view. He decided to roll up his sleeves and create a new computer.

Not just any new computer, either. Mr. Negroponte and the 10 or so technologists who have joined him are trying to design — and mass-produce — a computer that will cost a mere $100, a price so low that governments in developing nations will buy them in bulk and turn them over to children who live even in the poorest, most remote areas of the Third World. Someday, he hopes, there will be hundreds of millions of such machines all over the world, revolutionizing the way children learn. And as poor children gain knowledge that has long been out of their reach, they will help raise living standards all over the world.

Right now, Mr. Negroponte's nonprofit organization, One Laptop per Child, is testing prototypes, raising money, and talking to governments. It plans to start in seven countries, at a million laptops a country. Advanced Micro Devices is building the microprocessor for the laptop, and Quanta Computer has agreed to manufacture it.

Mr. Negroponte expects the laptop to be in production by March 2007, with an initial price around $135 that will drop as low as $50 by 2010. Whether or not this is realistic, it is unarguable that what Mr. Negroponte is trying to do is both really hard and really good.

You'd think the world would be standing up and cheering. And in some quarters, that is happening. "It is an inspirational effort and a very important step to take," said Calestous Juma, who teaches international development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

But not everybody is so complimentary. This time, though, those mocking Mr. Negroponte are among the most important people in technology. Bill Gates, for instance. When asked about the $100 laptop last month, the Microsoft chairman replied, "Geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type." Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of Intel, called the machine a "$100 gadget." This month, Mr. Negroponte lashed back at a trade show in Boston.

Although everyone is now trying to lower the temperature, the dispute speaks to some serious, underlying issues. What does a computer need to be truly useful? What makes the most sense in terms of bringing computing and connectivity to poor areas of the world? And how can computers best help children learn?

Let's dispense first with the crassest part of the dispute. The operating system for the $100 laptop is a version of Linux, the free open-source software. And yes, Microsoft would prefer that it run Windows. "I think it would be useful to have Windows in it," acknowledged Craig Mundie, one of Microsoft's three chief technical officers. He argues that because Windows is installed in most of the world's computers, there is a Windows "ecosystem" that includes tens of millions of people who know how to operate Windows machines, fix them and use them as teaching tools. (Could it also be possible that Microsoft is worried that putting 100 million Linux machines into the world might pose a threat to the Windows hegemony? Mr. Mundie was not about to go there.)

Mr. Negroponte, though, can sound downright evangelical when he talks about open-source software. All the machine's software will be open source, not just the operating system, because Mr. Negroponte believes that people should be able to get into the software and make it better, and that can be done only with open-source code. And he is not just talking about professional developers either. "We believe that the kids ought to be able to go in there and do their own code," he said. Part of Mr. Negroponte's vision is that even illiterate children will be able to use the machine virtually the moment they take it out of the box — and that, in time, they will adapt it to their own needs and desires. The Microsoft/Intel view is that what Mr. Negroponte is proposing is implausible—that kids who have never dealt with computers simply won't have the skills to be able to do much with a computer without some professional training.

Which leads to the second area of dispute. Behind the $100 laptop are some radical theories of learning that have been championed by Seymour Papert, a former M.I.T. professor and a close colleague of Mr. Negroponte. Mr. Papert is a critic of modern curriculums, and a leading proponent of using computers to, in effect, learn by doing. "The computer," he told me, "is a way to make teaching less formal and abstract and more experiential."

On some level, the $100 laptop is a stalking horse for Mr. Papert's ideas. Maybe a village that gets 50 laptops will have a good teacher — but maybe it won't. In Mr. Papert's view, that shouldn't matter all that much. With the right software, he believes, the machine itself will help kids transcend the limitations of their teachers and their environment.

But that is a notion a lot of people have trouble accepting. "When you ask them who is going to create the programs for this, they say, 'the kids,' " said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research. "You ask them who is going to fix the machines. They say, 'the kids.' Who is going to create the curriculum? 'The kids.' Some of this stuff is going to need adult supervision."

The third element in dispute has to do with what a computer really needs to be useful. The $100 laptop will have a great deal of what we think of as a modern computer, including word processing, Wi-Fi and more. It will indeed have some sort of crank — or maybe a pedal — to generate power; how else can it work in places that lack electricity? It will have a dual screen that will allow children to use it either as an e-book device or a normal computer. It will be able to network with other $100 laptops, so that if a village lacks Internet access, at least the 50 or 100 kids can communicate with each other.

But it will not be "fully loaded" as we know that term today. The Microsoft/Intel argument is that even poor children want real computers that do everything traditional computers do. The One Laptop per Child team, however, takes the view that much of what exists in a computer is bloat. Mr. Papert became irate when I mentioned that Mr. Barrett of Intel had called the $100 laptop a gadget. "That's a joke," he said. "For most people in the world, it is a better computer than they are selling because it is not bogged down with all the junk they put in computers."

Modern computers also cost a lot more than $100, which is why the big computer makers have generally argued that it makes more sense to set up Internet kiosks, or computer cafes, where people can share machines. By contrast, Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Papert insist that for learning purposes at least, it is critically important for children to have machines that they own, and which they can use all the time.

I must say, I find this latter argument pretty persuasive. Or course, I don't live in the developing world — but then neither does anyone else arguing over these issues. And that is what ultimately makes this fight both so depressing and so silly. It turns out that there are lots of efforts under way right now to get computers and Internet connectivity to the poor regions of the world. Advanced Micro Devices has a program called 50x15 — it hopes to have 50 percent of the world connected to the Internet by 2015. Microsoft has a bunch of programs. So does Intel. Next week, at a big conference in Austin, the two companies, along with Dell, will introduce a new low-cost notebook device that the three companies hope will be suitable — and desirable—in the developing world.

But who knows if that will be the answer? And that is the real point. Nobody has a clue at this point what will work and what won't. Mr. Negroponte's effort is important because it is so different — it is not wedded to modern computing business infrastructure. Mr. Negroponte thinks that will be a huge advantage. But it could just as easily be a crippling disadvantage.

There is only one way to find out: make the machine, start handing them out and see what happens. For now, the only thing his critics should be telling Mr. Negroponte is "Good luck."
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/29.../29nocera.html

Up to Her Eyes in Gore, and Loving It
Alex Williams

GROWING up, Chris Zelez was not like other girls. Yes, like some, she had an imaginary friend. Hers, however, was not named Jill or Susan, but Freddy Krueger, inspired by the razor-fingered killer in "A Nightmare on Elm Street." By the time she reached her teenage years she was decorating her bedroom with posters of Leatherface, the villain from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

So if any woman was ready to embrace the booming new subgenre of ultraviolent horror movies, it was Ms. Zelez, now 20, an editor for a video production company in Charlotte, N.C. Two weeks ago she rushed out to buy a DVD of "Hostel," the hit splatterfest in which older European men attack touring American college boys with power tools, on its release day. In 2004, she stood in line to see a midnight preview of the equally gory "Saw."

"A lot of us are coming up right now," Ms. Zelez said of female fans of the horror genre, which is helping revive ticket sales this year after a dismal 2005. "We're liking the same things guys are."

Ms. Zelez bristles at the cliché that women only go to scary movies as an excuse to cuddle with their boyfriends. "I have girlfriends that love gratuitous violence, blood and gore and people getting carved to pieces," she said.

She is right about one thing: The number of young women buying tickets to the bloody new wave of horror films is striking, and even Hollywood executives say they are surprised. "Saw II," in which a sadist imprisons victims in a house and poisons them with gas, drew more women than men under 25 — the target age group for horror movies.

Lionsgate, the studio behind the "Saw" series, said 32 percent of ticket-buyers for "Saw II" were women under 25, compared with 28 percent of men the same age. In another survey by the studio, more than two-thirds of teenage girls identified themselves as horror movie buffs, compared with only about half of teenage boys (who preferred comedies).

While female viewers have long been associated with a more ethereal, subtly creepy breed of horror films like the Dracula movies of the 1930's and "The Ring" more recently, the conventional Hollywood wisdom has been that "girls don't want to be grossed out," said Marc Weinstock, an executive vice president of marketing at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

But apparently they do. Sony's exit polls at "Silent Hill," the gory horror movie based on a video game and the top-grossing film in the country last weekend, indicated that women composed nearly half the audience.

"I go to see how gross and gory it can get; the story line is irrelevant," said Helen Gauh, 21, a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College, who showed up on Tuesday at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square theater on West 68th Street to see "Silent Hill."

The interest among young women in horror is linked in part to an evolution of the genre, with many of those movies growing more cerebral even as they have become more gruesome. Since the heyday of the slasher films of the late 1970's and early 80's, women's roles have evolved from hysterical, half-nude teenage victims to more complex and satisfying characters — the family protectors, feisty self defenders or sometimes the killers themselves.

A generation of young women has been reared in the firm belief that they can do anything, from winning a skateboard championship to becoming school president. Going to blood-soaked movies is one more club they can now feel free to join. "It makes me feel like a rebel among the girls," Ms. Gauh said.

To her, the tension-and-release cycle that accompanies cinematic terror brings about something like a gambler's high. "It's not that I'm a self-mutilator," she said, "but it's just a powerful rush when you can overcome some pain."

The violent extreme of new horror films, epitomized by "Hostel" and its planned sequel, "Hostel 2," has become a matter of hand-wringing among some film critics, beginning with the release of "Saw" in October 2004. "Saw" and its sequel have earned $250 million worldwide and "Saw III" is in production. Of the 25 top-grossing movies released so far this year, almost a quarter are horror films. David Edelstein, a critic for New York Magazine, equated some with "torture porn."

"High Tension," for example, is a gruesome French film about a killer in coveralls who butchers a family staying in a country house. It drew an audience of 28 percent women under 25, compared with 24 percent for men of the same age since its release in the United States last summer.

At least "High Tension" had strong women characters in prominent roles.

But in "Hostel" the women who are seen at all are usually topless. Still, it drew nearly as many young women as young men—32 percent compared with 36 percent.

"The perception would be that as you get into more hardcore gore — the 'Hostels' of the world — that the number of women would fall off," said Tim Palen, a president of marketing for Lionsgate. "But that's absolutely not the case."

He added that even as you get into what he called "gristle," women are hanging in there.

This was not always so.

John Carpenter, who helped start the last slasher film wave with "Halloween" in 1978, said that studios in those days did not track sophisticated demographic data for a genre it considered best suited to drive-ins and grindhouses. But the target audience then was almost entirely young and male. "In the old days, this was boy culture," Mr. Carpenter said. "For some reason over the years that's changed."

While some feminist scholars have tried to divine an empowering subtext in the fact that the lead girls in such movies, like Jamie Lee Curtis's character in "Halloween," usually triumphed — or at least survived — Mr. Carpenter said the girls functioned as little more than bait.

"The distributor said to me, 'Let's do a movie about a killer that stalks baby sitters,' " he said when asked why he settled on a strong female character as a protagonist for "Halloween." "There was really nothing more to it than that."

In contrast, female characters in neo-slasher films tend to be more three-dimensional and dynamic. "High Tension," for instance, explores the border between friendship and an erotic attraction between its two main female characters.

In modern slasher movies, "the women aren't as objectified as they are in old ones," in which the heroines were "blatantly sexualized," said Sierra Pasquale, a 21-year-old student at Hunter College.

"A lot of my guy friends are surprised when I go to see those movies," Ms. Pasquale added. "Because it's mostly men who are doing the slashing, so men see it as a dominating thing. But sometimes it's the women who figure it out, so we seem smarter in the end. It's 'Ha ha, we didn't die, you did.' "

Although studios may be writing in more interesting female characters, they often do little to tailor their marketing to women. Mr. Palen of Lionsgate said the studio was initially concerned that the male tenor of the first "Saw," about two men tormented by a male serial killer named Jigsaw, would alienate women. So the studio made an alternate television ad focused on the wife of the protagonist, a supporting part, in which she attempts to protect the couple's young daughter.

"It was an interesting dynamic, a mother bear protecting her cub, and we thought, 'That will be great for women,' " Mr. Palen said. But women didn't respond to the ad in test screenings, so the studio stuck with its original campaign built around blood and terror. Women saw the movie in substantial numbers.

"It's the adrenaline," said Sarah Stark, a movie theater manager in Lima, Ohio, explaining her longtime interest in gory movies. For her, she said, violent horror movies amount to something of a personal endurance test, a bit like white-water rafting — the sheer terror of which clears the mind and, briefly, seems to reduce all of life down to a single exhilarating moment.

The cheap-looking sets and special effects of traditional slasher movies have generally been replaced by an arty aesthetic. Sarah Morris, 23, a photo-agency researcher in Washington, said she appreciated how slasher movies "are much more visual now," at once fantastically campy and hypergritty. "You're trapped in a basement with coachroaches on the floor and there's dirt," she said. "I feel dirty when I watch them. I like that about them."

In interviews with professors, the working theory is that the greater the emotional complexity of the horror movie, the more attractive they are to women. In "Saw," the killer, who has a fatal disease, constructs elaborate psychological traps in a twisted effort at pushing his victims toward a new appreciation for their lives.

Or maybe the appeal is more visceral. Although critics like Roger Ebert once railed against early slasher movies as a backlash to feminism, some of the new movies are a different kind of revenge fantasy. The primary victim in "Saw" is a philandering husband. The main victims in "Hostel" are lecherous, beer-soaked frat boys. "I loved how the women used their bodies to deceive," Ms. Zelez said, referring to the women in "Hostel," who appear to be sexual playthings for the victims but actually lure the men to their deaths. As women, she asserted, "We use our bodies and get what we want. And they definitely got what they wanted."

Paula Schwartz contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/fa.../30horror.html

Microsoft Software Will Let Times Readers Download Paper
Katharine Q. Seelye

Microsoft and The New York Times unveiled software on Friday that would allow readers to download an electronic version of the newspaper and view it on a portable device.

With Microsoft's new Windows Vista software, to be available in January, virtually any newspaper, magazine or book can be formatted into an electronic version and read online or off. The software would allow The Times to replicate its look — fonts, typeface and layout — more closely than its Web site now does.

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, unveiled the prototype at the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Newspapers have been trying to develop a stronger online presence as readers and advertisers continue to migrate to the Internet. The new software is meant to make it easier to read an electronic version of a paper and allow readers to download multiple papers and magazines to take with them.

The Times said it would charge advertisers to appear on the new version of the newspaper, called Times Reader, but it had not decided whether to charge readers for the service. Microsoft would include the offering in the next version of its operating system.

For today's demonstration, The Times was downloaded onto small tablet computers, about the size of a hardcover book, which are already commercially available for $1,000 to $3,000. But this printlike version of the newspaper could also be downloaded onto a home computer or a laptop. The electronic paper is displayed in columns and it formats itself to fit any size screen.

Mr. Gates said he had long wanted to make easier what he called "on-screen reading" and he had reached out to The Times to help develop that ability.

Mr. Sulzberger said the software combined the portability of the print paper with the immediacy of the Internet. Readers can in effect turn the page electronically. There is also a gauge that tells them how much of the paper they have read and how much more is left.

Tom Bodkin, an assistant managing editor of The Times and its design director, demonstrated Times Reader to the audience. "You can page through the entire paper in a natural and intuitive way," Mr. Bodkin said. Mr. Gates said that starting in January, new computers would come equipped with the software that would allow access to such newly formatted newspapers. He said he expected that by then, other publications would have developed electronic versions closer to their own styles and typefaces.

There have been previous efforts to create digital content distribution systems. For example, Zinio Systems Inc. publishes Zinio Reader, that allows viewing various magazines in digital format, including Penthouse and Macworld magazine.

Roger F. Fidler, director of technology initiatives at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, has long been an advocate of digital mobile publishing. His group recently introduced eMprint, a hybrid digital publishing platform based on Adobe Reader software.

Microsoft's software will be available for testing in several weeks, as will Times Reader.

John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/te...y/29paper.html

Is Microsoft Preparing a Big Attack?
John Markoff

Microsoft reported strong third-quarter revenue growth on Thursday, but analysts said the company also telegraphed a significant increase in spending, an indication that it was preparing to take on its big online rivals, Google and Yahoo.

The company reported a 13 percent increase in sales for the quarter, to $10.9 billion, and a 16 percent rise in net income, to $2.98 billion, or 31 cents a share, from $2.56 billion, or 28 cents, in the period a year earlier.

The earnings were 2 cents a share below what analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call had forecast.

The chief financial officer for Microsoft, Chris Liddell, said: "Over all for the quarter, we are very happy with the continued market momentum we're seeing. Revenue is accelerating for the year."

Despite a bullish stance on revenue, Microsoft evidently surprised analysts by predicting significantly higher expenses in the next fiscal year. Its shares, which had gained 15 cents, to $27.25, in regular trading, fell on the expectation of higher expenses, dropping more than 6 percent after hours, to $25.50.

Executives also said they did not see any immediate increase in profit on the horizon even as Microsoft prepared for its largest release of new products in more than five years.

The company said once again that the update for its new operating system software, Windows Vista, would not be available until January.

For the first time, the company offered guidance on the coming year; its 2007 fiscal year starts in July.

Microsoft said revenue for 2007 would be $49.5 billion to $50.5 billion, with earnings expected to be $1.36 to $1.41 a share. Financial analysts were forecasting $1.53 a share. That guidance created some concern among securities analysts in a conference call with Mr. Liddell.

Richard G. Sherlund of Goldman Sachs, in a comment during the conference, said, "There is something really big here that we haven't put our fingers on."

Other analysts were more direct in their assessment.

"It looks like Microsoft is going to war with Google, and trying to get their product development back in track," said Eugene Munster of Piper Jaffray.

According to Mark Stahlman of Caris & Company, the fact that Microsoft plans to spend significantly more in 2007 was an indication of renewed aggressiveness in its competitive strategy and an indication that the company was returning to the kind of actions it exhibited before the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit in the mid- and late 1990's.

"It's pretty clear that Bill is running the company again," Mr. Stahlman said, referring to Bill Gates, "and they are going to remake the business. They are being much more combative and much more strategically managed."

After Microsoft released its report, Mr. Sherlund issued a research note saying it appeared that the company planned to spend $2.4 billion more than he had expected in the 2007 fiscal year. He pointed to the costs of building the new Windows and Office Live online services, both intended to reposition the company to compete against Google and Yahoo.

When confronted with that figure during the question-and-answer session with analysts Thursday, Mr. Liddell only partly disputed the conclusion of several of them that Microsoft had begun preparing to "go to war" with its online search rivals.

"I would characterize it as a broad-based approach," he said. "There are some big numbers there, that is certainly true."

Several other analysts noted that Microsoft's expenses appeared to be running away even before 2007, many of them focusing on what they called "margin compression."

"It looks like a mess," said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, "and the big issue is margins and expenses, the big issue is the bottom line. It makes it hard to get very excited about the company's near-term prospects."

During the conference call, Mr. Liddell was optimistic about progress in the introduction of the next-generation Xbox 360 video game player. He said that a significant part of the increased spending this year was related to a push Microsoft is making in an effort to capitalize on a delay in Sony's PlayStation 3.

Microsoft now says it will ship 5 million to 5.5 million of the new Xbox systems in 2006. Sales of Xbox rose 85 percent, to $1.06 billion, in the quarter.

The company also noted that its search ad revenue fell during the quarter as it tried to shift its online advertising away from a service provided by Yahoo to the newly developed MSN Ad Center system.

It also reported that losses widened in its home and entertainment division, the Mobile and Embedded Devices Group, and the MSN service.

Sales of Windows for PC's increased 7.5 percent, to $3.19 billion, in the quarter, while office sales rose 5 percent, to $2.95 billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/te...gy/28soft.html

Band of Activists in Europe Holds the Line in the Case Against Microsoft
James Kanter

Carlo Piana is part of a brigade of software activists and lawyers who formed a primary line of defense in court this week for the European Union in its antitrust dispute with Microsoft.

Two years ago, Mr. Piana, a lawyer from Milan with a passion for technology, awakened to the news that the European Union had fined Microsoft a record 497 million euros (more than $600 million) for abusing its dominant position in the software market by designing and marketing software in ways that excluded rivals from the market.

After Microsoft vowed to overturn the decision, Mr. Piana received a call from a friend who is a member of the Free Software Foundation Europe, which supports making code more accessible to the public.

"He was worried because Microsoft was especially targeting free software," said Mr. Piana, who had already done some free software work for his friend. "I said to him, 'O.K., I'll help you out. I guess I'm the most expert person you know.' "

As it turns out, Mr. Piana and his colleagues from the Free Software Foundation are among the most prominent supporters of the European Union who officially remain in the antitrust case.

Many titans of the software industry backed European regulators initially, but Sun Microsystems settled with Microsoft for $1.6 billion in April 2004, while Novell settled in November 2004 for $536 million. RealNetworks dropped out in October 2005 after settling for $761 million.

The settlements left a group of computer programmers and activists, united under the banner of the foundation, with a bigger-than-expected role in supporting the union's goal of loosening Microsoft's grip on the software industry.

On Friday, 13 judges at the second-highest tribunal in Europe, the Court of First Instance, wrapped up five days of testimony that could determine whether the ruling will stand and whether Microsoft must open up its Windows operating system to greater competition.

The parties could appeal any verdict to the European Court of Justice, the highest European Union tribunal.

After a grueling fourth day of testimony on Thursday evening, Microsoft's chief lawyer, Brad Smith, led his team of lawyers out of the courtroom and down the polished granite corridors to their luxury hotel across the street to prepare their final testimony behind closed doors.

Just a few meters away, huddled in the haze of the smoking area in the court's cafe, was a diverse group including Mr. Piana and Andrew Tridgell, the Australian developer of software called Samba, who had enlivened the courtroom that afternoon.

"Tridge is something unexpected and something the judges don't often see," Mr. Piana said, using the nickname for Mr. Tridgell, who speaks with the earnestness of a Boy Scout. "I don't want a hired gun, I want a real person," Mr. Piana added.

It remains to be seen whether the European judges, who are famously hard to read from their questioning in court, will be swayed by the likes of Mr. Tridgell or Mr. Piana.

Bo Vesterdorf, the Danish president of the court, and John Cooke, the Irish judge who will lead in drafting the decision, are not expected to issue a verdict until next year.

In testimony this week, judges doled out their share of painful questions to both sides, exposing holes in the union's case as well as forcing Microsoft to make concessions.

On Friday, Microsoft argued that the record fine imposed by the commission should be vacated or reduced, and each side reiterated its arguments that its approach to the software industry was more favorable for the future of innovation.

But Mr. Tridgell's contribution may prove important, not for the concrete evidence he gave, but because of the way he characterized the world of software development and Microsoft's role in it. In one exchange, Judge Cooke asked Mr. Tridgell if he had ever tested Samba software to determine whether it operated smoothly with rivals' systems.

Mr. Tridgell's reply seemed to illustrate the problem posed by Microsoft to the rest of the software industry more effectively than all the legal and technical explanations offered by the European Union during the rest of the weeklong hearing.

Once a year, Mr. Tridgell said, programmers from rival companies gather for a "plugfest," where they connect computers together to see how their programs interoperate.

"We work around the clock for a week," he told a rapt courtroom. "We torture our machines in the pursuit of interoperability."

"'Can you do this test with Microsoft?" Judge Cooke asked.

"Yes, but they don't turn up," Mr. Tridgell said.

Later, Mr. Tridgell explained that for the last six years Microsoft has boycotted the event: "They used to come. It used to be held in Seattle, close to Microsoft's headquarters."

Microsoft said the technologies demanded by Samba were available for license but that Samba was at odds with industry norms.

"While Microsoft respects Samba's technical expertise, it does not share its approach to intellectual property rights or the value of software technology," Ian Forrester, a lawyer for Microsoft, told the court.

Sitting with the Free Software Foundation Europe on Thursday evening, and closely following Mr. Tridgell's thoughts on the day's testimony, were representatives of I.B.M. and Oracle, major Microsoft competitors. Neither I.B.M. nor Oracle finances the foundation, according to a Free Software Foundation spokesman, Joachim Jakobs.

I.B.M. and Oracle, however, are members of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, or E.C.I.S., a trade group that lodged a new European Union antitrust complaint against Microsoft this year.

Mr. Tridgell "was a witness sent from heaven," said Thomas Vinje, a lawyer for the E.C.I.S., who testified in support of the commission's decision this week. The decisions by Sun, Novell and RealNetworks to settle had been "a loss to the court," Mr. Vinje added.

Paul Meller contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/bu...ss/29soft.html

Rockers Sue Over Download Royalties
Charles Duhigg

Two of the bigger rock bands of the past are suing over the future of their music.

In a lawsuit filed Thursday in New York, the Allman Brothers Band and Cheap Trick allege that they and other groups are being shortchanged by Sony Music, a division of music giant Sony BMG, as digital music downloads explode. The suit seeks class-action status.

Both bands contend that when Sony Music sells downloads of their songs through such services as iTunes, it amounts to the licensing of their music, not its distribution, entitling them to more generous royalties. Currently, the lawsuit says, Sony Music accounts for such sales as "physical phonorecords," deducting a 20% fee for packaging even though downloads are electronic.

The suit also alleges that Sony Music deducts 15% of revenue for "breakage" as it would with a CD or cassette.

As a result, the suit contends, bands should receive 30 cents of the 70 cents Sony Music collects when a digital song is sold. Instead, they receive only 4.5 cents, the bands allege.

"Sony Music is presently engaged in a widespread attempt to underpay its recording artists," band lawyer Brian Caplan said. "With the technological advancements in the music industry, where many people download songs to their iPods and other portable devices, it is essential that artists receive the royalty income to which they are entitled."

Sony BMG declined to comment.

The Allman Brothers had such hits as "Ramblin' Man" and "Whipping Post." Cheap Trick's hits included "I Want You to Want Me" and "Dream Police."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...ck=1&cset=true

New Microsoft Browser Raises Google's Hackles
Steve Lohr

With a $10 billion advertising market at stake, Google, the fast-rising Internet star, is raising objections to the way that it says Microsoft, the incumbent powerhouse of computing, is wielding control over Internet searching in its new Web browser.

Google, which only recently began beefing up its lobbying efforts in Washington, says it expressed concerns about competition in the Web search business in recent talks with the Justice Department and the European Commission, both of which have brought previous antitrust actions against Microsoft.

The new browser includes a search box in the upper-right corner that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft's MSN search service. Google contends that this puts Microsoft in a position to unfairly grab Web traffic and advertising dollars from its competitors.

The move, Google claims, limits consumer choice and is reminiscent of the tactics that got Microsoft into antitrust trouble in the late 1990's.

"The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. "We don't think it's right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose."

Microsoft replies that Google is misreading its intentions and actions. It says the default settings in the browser, Internet Explorer 7, are easy to change. And it says the product was designed with consumers and many partners in mind — even though it might not be to the liking of Google, the leading search engine.

"Whatever behavior happened in the past, the guiding principle we had is that the user is in control," said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer group.

Companies often talk with antitrust officials, and the talks do not imply that an investigation is imminent. But they do indicate that Google is pursuing every option in its escalating rivalry with Microsoft, which has already led to some public battles.

Last December, Google outbid Microsoft to remain the primary search service on America Online, paying $1 billion and taking a 5 percent stake in AOL. Last year, Microsoft sued Google to stop a star computer scientist and manager at Microsoft, Kai-Fu Lee, from working on search technology at Google. The suit was settled, and Mr. Lee runs Google's operations in China.

The browser that set off the latest dispute has been in development for some time, but Microsoft first made it available to the public for downloading last week in a test version. It is the first new release of Microsoft's browser in five years. A final version is expected to be released this summer and will be included in Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, which is scheduled for release next January.

The focus of Google's concern is a slender box in the corner of the browser window that allows users to start a search directly instead of first going to the Web site of a search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN. Typing a query and hitting "Enter" immediately brings up a page of results from a designated search engine.

That slice of on-screen real estate has the potential to be enormously valuable, and Microsoft is the landlord. Internet Explorer 7 is the first Microsoft browser to have a built-in search box, while other browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari have had them for some time. Google estimates that the boxes, when available, are the starting point for 30 to 50 percent of a user's searches, making them a crucial gateway to the lucrative and fast-growing market for advertisements that appear next to search results.

Microsoft has lost some ground in the browser market in the last year, mainly to Firefox, which is a Google ally. But Microsoft still holds more than 80 percent of the market. And Internet Explorer 7 is expected to be extremely popular because it is an improvement over Microsoft's previous browser, and because Microsoft will promote downloads of it and include it in Windows Vista.

That gives Microsoft the potential to use the browser to steer substantial traffic, and business, to MSN and away from rivals. MSN handled 11 percent of searches in the United States in March, down slightly from a year earlier, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, a market research firm. That put it well behind Google, which had a 49 percent share, and Yahoo, with 22 percent.

Microsoft insists it has no intention of deploying its browser as a weapon in the search wars. But Google suspects otherwise.

In meetings beginning last year, Google told Microsoft of its objections to the company's plans to set MSN as the default search engine in Internet Explorer 7, according to Ms. Mayer of Google. Yahoo raised similar objections in a meeting with Microsoft last year, according to a Yahoo employee who was briefed on the conversation. Yahoo declined to comment last week beyond a statement: "We would be concerned about any company's attempts to limit user choice or change user preferences without their knowledge, and believe others would share that concern."

With its objections unresolved, Google took the matter to antitrust authorities in Europe and the United States during the last month. It is not clear what, if anything, will come of the talks or how far Google is willing to push the issue.

In Europe, where Microsoft is challenging an antitrust decision against the company for its past behavior, the European Commission has already made inquiries about Microsoft's plans for Vista. Though it is now distributing Internet Explorer 7 separately, Microsoft has long maintained that its browser is part of its Windows operating system.

Google has informed the European antitrust authorities of its worry that "Microsoft's approach to setting search defaults in Internet Explorer 7 benefits Microsoft while taking away choice from users," said Steve Langdon, a spokesman for Google.

Google would not say specifically what it has discussed with American antitrust officials. "We have spoken to the Justice Department generally about our business and the importance of preserving competition in the search market," Mr. Langdon said.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

The best way to handle the search box, Google asserts, would be to give users a choice when they first start up Internet Explorer 7. It says that could be done by asking the user to either type in the name of their favorite search engine or choose from a handful of the most popular services, using a simple drop-down menu next to the search box.

The Firefox and Opera browsers come with Google set as the default, but Ms. Mayer said Google would support unfettered choice on those as well.

Microsoft replies that giving users an open-ended choice could add complexity and confusion to the browser set-up process, while offering a few options would be arbitrarily limiting.

Instead, those wanting to pick a new search-box option in the new browser need to click through a menu with options like "Get Search Providers," which links to a Web page with six search engines including Google and 16 "topic search" sites, from Amazon to MTV to Wal-Mart.

Mr. Hachamovitch, who led Microsoft's browser team, said MSN was not always the default search in Internet Explorer 7. When downloaded, the new browser inherits the settings from the old Microsoft browser, version 6. But the search default in that program was based on a feature called AutoSearch that Google says was not widely used.

Mr. Hachamovitch said Microsoft's user research and early reviews indicate that it is easy to change the default setting. "People seem to be O.K. with what we're doing," he said.

Google counters that claim with a study it sponsored that was conducted by Tec-Ed, a research firm. It found that only a third of users could master the four-click process to change the default.

Whether Microsoft's treatment of the search box will have an impact on the search market is uncertain. From an antitrust perspective, harm to competition is the litmus test, not just swinging a sharp elbow or two. There are many ways people get to search engines other than through a search box — for example, by typing google.com in the browser or making it their home page.

"Assume that everything Google says is true; the question then is whether Microsoft's conduct is really going to have a serious effect on Google," said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. "Obviously, Google thinks that it will."

Google is now a rich, powerful company in its own right, far larger than the browser pioneer Netscape Communications was when Microsoft set out to dominate the market it had created in the 1990's. In 2001, after a lengthy trial, a federal appeals court held that Microsoft had repeatedly violated antitrust laws as it tried to stifle the challenge from Netscape. Later, Microsoft reached a settlement with the Justice Department that freed personal computer makers from some restrictions Microsoft had placed on their use of software and services that compete with its own products.

When Internet Explorer 7 begins to be loaded on new machines next year, computer makers like Dell and Hewlett-Packard will be free to determine what search engines and other sites they feature in the browser's Web guide and search box.

That promises to be valuable screen real estate indeed, especially the coveted spot as the preferred search engine, which the computer makers are likely to sell to the highest bidder. Google and Yahoo have deep pockets, but no one can match Microsoft's spending power. "People will be bidding aggressively to get in that space," said Mr. Hachamovitch of Microsoft. "And that's a good thing."

John Markoff contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/te...rtner=homepage

A Small Step at Starbucks From Mocha to Movies
Sharon Waxman

With barely one movie under its belt, Starbucks is moving aggressively toward expanding its involvement in the entertainment business, seeking movies and books to promote in the hope of duplicating the success it has had with music.

The retail coffee giant — which used its stores to promote "Akeelah and the Bee," a Lionsgate movie that opened this weekend — is to announce Monday that it has signed an agreement with the William Morris Agency to find more movie and book projects to market. The aim is to have one book in Starbucks stores this year, and at least two or three movies to promote and sell on DVD next year, with more projects in years to come.

In the meantime, the company's small entertainment staff will move from Seattle, where Starbucks is based, to Santa Monica, Calif., this year to be closer to the heart of the entertainment industry.

"Akeelah and the Bee" is an inspirational tale about an African-American girl in Los Angeles who competes in a spelling bee. Starbucks is promoting the movie in places like the sleeves of its coffee cups, and the "Akeelah" soundtrack is on sale at the stores. The DVD of the movie will be on sale at Starbucks this fall.

Howard D. Schultz, the company's chairman, said that in the wake of promoting "Akeelah," it had been deluged with material from film distributors who hope to be Starbucks' next movie partner. It became clear, he said, that the company needed more expertise in handling that work. "We're not prepared in terms of our core business" to respond to such approaches "in a way that is timely," Mr. Schultz said from Seattle, explaining the plan to work with William Morris.

He said it was not Starbucks' goal to become an entertainment-business investor. "We have no intention of financing movies, or being traditional investors in movie projects," he said, although the company's promotion of "Akeelah" gave it an undisclosed equity stake in that film.

Instead, Mr. Schultz said, it will selectively link the Starbucks brand with certain kinds of movies and books in the belief that Starbucks customers trust the company, in essence, to choose their entertainment for them.

"We're looking for quality, and substance," he said. "We want to see our name associated with the kind of music, literature and movies that people will say, 'I'm glad Starbucks brought this to the marketplace.' " He gave "Crash" as an example of the kind of movie that Starbucks might promote. The film, which was about racial tension and also was from Lionsgate, was a sleeper hit at the box office and went on to win an Oscar for best picture this year.

The company has already done this successfully with music, becoming a tastemaker in an industry still struggling with piracy and depressed sales. Starbucks sold 3.5 million CD's in the 2005 fiscal year, promoting artists like Coldplay and Bob Dylan and introducing the group Antigone Rising and the singer-songwriter Sonya Kitchell. (The company does not break out revenue figures for its CD's.)

Starbucks had its biggest success with a Ray Charles album in 2004, "Genius Loves Company," which sold 775,000 copies and went on to win eight Grammys.

Hollywood can only hope for this kind of success at a time when new technology is encroaching on traditional film distribution models. While this year's box-office total has so far pulled ahead of last year's disastrous statistics, industry experts are still puzzling over how to adapt to changing consumer habits in a world of Internet, cellphone and iPod entertainment.

In this environment, Starbucks provides a potentially important new point of sale, and could have the kind of impact on movies — narrow, but profound — that Oprah Winfrey has had on publishing with her book club.

In the case of "Akeelah and the Bee," the box-office revenue from opening weekend did not indicate that the Starbucks promotion, which also included whimsical vocabulary plastered across store windows, had immediately led to a hit.

The movie took in $6.25 million over the weekend at 2,195 theaters, an average of just $2,847 a screen, according to Exhibitor Relations, which tracks box-office sales. It was No. 8 among movies for the weekend, behind offerings like the Robin Williams comedy "RV"; the teenage drama "Stick It"; and the harrowing Sept. 11 drama "United 93."

"This was an interesting experiment," said Paul Dergarabedian, the president of Exhibitor Relations. "The Starbucks tie-in didn't hurt, but with the movie opening at No. 8, I don't know if it really helped."

He noted that signs at Starbucks stores might have been too subtle in some cases for customers to associate them with the movie. And other industry analysts suggested that the boost from Starbucks could give the movie longer legs at the box office than most releases.

Asked last week if he thought the movie would do well, Mr. Schultz responded: "I don't know what 'well' is. We won't use the box office as our only criteria for success here."

Starbucks had been looking for a partner in movie promotion for about a year before one of its executives came across "Akeelah and the Bee," Mr. Schultz said. It was not until the movie was mostly complete, though, that a deal was struck to give Starbucks an equity stake — including an on-screen credit as one of its "presenters" — in exchange for the promotion.

Lionsgate executives could not be reached for comment over the weekend.

Nicole Miller, a research analyst with ThinkEquity Partners in New York, said of Starbucks: "This is the third evolution they're in — it's the entertainment evolution, finding a way to grow Starbucks outside the four walls of the store. The reason it works is they're a trusted brand. They have six million people a day in their stores, and those people trust Starbucks and what Starbucks is selling to them. That's very powerful."

Mr. Schultz said he was also considering self-publishing books for Starbucks stores. "I want to bring books to the marketplace that perhaps can't be found," he said, citing "The Kite Runner," a novel about an Afghan boy that won a huge readership through word of mouth, as an example of the sort of content he would seek. "There's no reason to believe we can't be a self-publisher."

The depth of Starbucks' future involvement in entertainment ventures will depend at least in part on the company's experiences in dealing with Hollywood, said Jim Wiatt, the chief executive of William Morris.

"Depending on how the process goes," he said, "and how they enjoy this process, and how much impact they want to make, they may want to end up functioning as a real distributor."

Mr. Schultz emphasized that not only was Starbucks aiming to extend the reach of its brand, but it was also trying to achieve something more ephemeral: enhancing the experience of being in Starbucks stores.

"It's more than just coffee, it's human connection," he said. "In terms of content, the linkage is tied to that aspiration. We want to add texture to the brand, and value to the experience."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/bu...starbucks.html

The Rise and Fall of Revolution
Laura M. Holson

For more than a year, Joe Roth has been hearing the Hollywood gossips predict the demise of his six-year-old movie studio, Revolution Studios. Now that they are right, he wants to set the record straight.

His version goes something like this: In 2000, Mr. Roth, who ran not one but two major Hollywood studios, announced with fanfare that he would start an independent studio that would create quality movies with modest budgets. He brought in investors, most notably Sony Pictures Entertainment, to share the cost.

But in 2003, Revolution abandoned its strategy, and budgets ballooned while quality suffered. Six of the 10 movies it released lost money. The next year, Mr. Roth and his wife divorced, a family trauma complicated by her being a major Revolution stakeholder. There were more losses in 2005, making it tough for the studio to recover.

The story, though, has a plot twist. While critics maligned many of Revolution's movies — everything from the raunchy comedy "Tomcats" to the colossal bomb "Gigli" — Mr. Roth said the studio would actually turn a profit and was in discussions with financiers to begin paying off investors as early as this summer. Revolution estimated that 22 of the 36 films it had already released would be profitable once they finished their run on DVD and television. That number would rise to 27 films if the future value of the library grows as Revolution has predicted.

"The time for the company is up," Mr. Roth, 57, explained in a recent interview in his office in Santa Monica, Calif., as he fiddled with the cane that he is using after having hip-replacement surgery. "I am no longer necessary, and I don't like feeling as if I'm not necessary anymore. I've made enough money. Why do I want to keep walking up that hill?"

But to many people both inside and outside Hollywood — some of whom envied Mr. Roth's ability to make any movie he wanted — it is a hard fall for Revolution, which failed to live up to its promise.

Once Revolution closes its doors in October 2007, Mr. Roth will join Sony Pictures as a producer, making one or two movies a year. And his longtime friend and colleague, the actress Julia Roberts, will join him, he said.

When Mr. Roth started Revolution in 2000, after serving as chairman at both 20th Century Fox and Walt Disney Studios, Hollywood was flush with money. Fox agreed to invest $25 million for a 2.5 percent stake in Revolution, and Starz Encore invested $150 million for a 15 percent stake. But by far Revolution's most important partner was Sony Pictures.

Sony paid $75 million to acquire a 7.5 percent stake. As part of the deal, it agreed to put up 42.5 percent of the production budget for Revolution's movies, as well as 100 percent of the marketing money. In return, Sony would earn a 12.5 percent movie distribution fee. Mr. Roth, for his part, agreed to lower the cost of making movies to about $40 million a film, $10 million less than the industry average. And he retained ownership of Revolution's library, agreeing to make at least 36 films.

Few producers could demand such generous terms and get them. But Sony's Columbia Pictures division was struggling then and needed movies to fill its slate. In 2000, Sony ranked No. 7 in domestic market share, bringing in $667 million at the domestic box office with hits like "Charlie's Angels." But it also had misses like "Hanging Up."

Revolution's first movie in 2001 was "Tomcats," a smutty comedy that earned a small profit. It was panned by critics, and even former Revolution executives agree the movie set the wrong tone. "People had this big vision for Joe beyond being commercially successful," said Rob Moore, a friend and former partner of Mr. Roth's who is now a top executive at Paramount Pictures.

With no movies of his own developed yet, Mr. Roth said, he had little choice but to pick up fare like "Tomcats" from another studio, although Revolution also produced the Academy Award-winning "Black Hawk Down" that year.

Mr. Moore said: "People reacted to 'Tomcats' with derision, saying, 'You had creative freedom and this is what you made?' It was as if 'Black Hawk Down' didn't exist."

Revolution continued to chalk up hits, including "America's Sweethearts" (which Mr. Roth directed and which starred Ms. Roberts) and "The Animal," a cheaply made Rob Schneider comedy.

As a result, Mr. Roth's profile within Sony grew. In 2001, Sir Howard Stringer, then chairman of Sony's domestic entertainment arm and now chief executive of the parent company, praised Mr. Roth in a cover story about Revolution in Forbes magazine.

"He wants to make quality pictures, but not sink the studio," Sir Howard said then. Mr. Roth said Sir Howard even broached the subject of Mr. Roth running Sony Pictures when John Calley, then the studio chief, retired.

In 2002, though, Sony revived, partly because of a shift toward making franchise movies like "Spider-Man." And its newfound prosperity strained its relationship with Revolution. Several former Sony and Revolution executives said tension grew as the studios were forced to share coveted dates on Sony's increasingly crowded release schedule. "With the success of 'Spider-Man,' there was more of a rivalry than a collaboration," said Mr. Moore. "It was like, 'Look how well we are doing now.' "

Amy Pascal, chairwoman of Sony's motion picture group, would not address whether there was tension, but she did say that she had worked with Mr. Roth for 20 years and they had been through a lot. "The test of that is, he is going to make his home here at Sony," Ms. Pascal said.

Mr. Roth, for his part, said, "I never felt discriminated against. I was happy. There was not outright animosity."

Then came 2003, a historic year for Revolution, but not for the right reasons as Revolution strayed from its lower-cost strategy. The first disappointment that year was "Tears of the Sun," starring Bruce Willis, whom Mr. Roth brought with him to Revolution. The movie cost about $70 million to make and brought in $43.4 million at the domestic box office. That was followed by "Hollywood Homicide," a buddy cop story starring Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett that made $30 million domestically but cost about $75 million to make.

But the movie Revolution may be best remembered for is "Gigli," the $60 million dark comedy starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez that brought in only $5.6 million domestically. Mr. Roth said he had agreed to give the director, Martin Brest, final-cut authority — something few studios give — meaning Mr. Roth could not make changes without the director agreeing.

When Mr. Roth demanded that Mr. Brest cut the film after an early and poorly received screening, Mr. Roth recalled, the director balked. Mr. Brest said he resisted making changes but ultimately reshot scenes and altered the story to accommodate the studio. "I was kicking and screaming," he said.

The movie, its name and everyone involved were universally panned.

Mr. Roth reversed course after "Gigli." Budgets for movies were cut back to less than $40 million. Movie stars and directors were given less generous profit participation. And directors were not given final-cut authority again.

While the losses were hard on Revolution, they were even tougher on Sony, which covered nearly half of the production budgets and all of the marketing costs. Those losses would not be recouped, although Mr. Roth said Sony would get back its principal investment.

Not surprising to many in Hollywood, Mr. Roth was not named to replace Mr. Calley at Sony when the studio chief resigned.

Mr. Roth said he spent much of 2004 trying to forget 2003. He produced the Academy Awards. He agreed to direct the racial drama "Freedomland." And he announced a flurry of new movie and television production deals. "I couldn't be busy enough," said Mr. Roth. "I was trying to get control over events I couldn't get control over."

Revolution's movies that year fared better than they had in 2003. And in the summer of 2004, Mr. Roth and his colleagues gathered for dinner at the Buffalo Club in Santa Monica to discuss whether they wanted to stay together with Sony when Revolution's deal ended in 2006.

"It was too soon to talk to Sony," said Mr. Roth. "Besides, I was going through my own changes."

Mr. Roth was getting a divorce from his wife of more than two decades, Donna Arkoff Roth. That complicated Revolution's financial situation because Ms. Roth shared her husband's 62 percent stake in the company. So, Mr. Roth said, his lawyer negotiated an agreement that permitted Ms. Roth to share in the profit of 36 Revolution films. (That agreement did not include the 11 films yet to be released.)

That fall, too, Mr. Roth had a frank talk with Sony executives, who were concerned about his growing development schedule. If Mr. Roth had stuck to the original 36-film plan, he said, he would have fallen short of the initial rate of return he had projected to woo investors. So he sought to make additional movies, which his deal allowed.

But Sony, which co-financed the films, did not want the extra ones, preferring to spend money on its own instead. Mr. Roth said the two sides agreed then that he would not develop any new projects beyond the ones already agreed upon.

Mr. Roth cannot pinpoint when he decided to shutter Revolution, but it was clear he would never receive the same deal he brokered with Sony in 2000. So, by early 2005, he encouraged top executives to seek new jobs. And by the end the year, almost all of those who had gone to Revolution with Mr. Roth had left. The staff dwindled to 35 from 53.

And the performance of the movies for that year? There were more disappointments than hits, including the sequel to "XXX" — Revolution's biggest money-loser — and the forgettable "Man of the House." (The first "XXX" made more than $140 million at the box office in 2002.)

Mr. Roth said he expected to sell Revolution's 47-film library after the last movie was released in October 2007. And he predicted that investors, including Sony, would receive a healthy rate of return on their initial investment, though financial analysts say the number is difficult to determine until the last movies are released.

Last week, as Mr. Roth mulled his new venture at Sony, he was introspective. He talked about the movies that he had made that other studios would not. "I love orphans," he said. One of those is "Rocky Balboa," the sixth film in a 30-year-old franchise, which is to be released in the fall. In it, a 59-year-old Sylvester Stallone stars as a boxer past his prime who returns to the ring for one last shot at being the champ.

"This is our story," Mr. Roth said he told a friend. "Everyone is entitled to a third act."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/bu...evolution.html

New Subscribers Help Comcast More Than Triple Its Profit
Ken Belson

The Comcast Corporation, the country's largest cable television provider, said yesterday that profit more than tripled in the first quarter, driven by a better-than-expected increase in new subscribers and strong demand for its broadband and phone services.

The gain was a sign that a growing number of consumers are interested in buying bundles of services from a single provider. Cable and phone companies have been promoting such packages to generate more revenue and to retain customers because consumers who buy them are less likely to switch providers.

Compared with Cablevision and Time Warner Cable, Comcast was slow to introduce its digital phone service, the newest piece of its bundle. But in the first quarter, the company signed up 211,000 phone customers, more than it added in all of 2005.

The company also added 47,000 cable television customers, almost three times the number that analysts had expected.

In the quarter, Comcast earned $466 million, or 22 cents a share, compared with $143 million, or 6 cents a share, a year earlier. Sales rose 10 percent, to $5.9 billion, from $5.4 billion.

Both profit and sales figures were more than analysts had forecast, helping lift Comcast's stock by $1.25, or 4.3 percent, to $30.45, its biggest one-day gain in percentage terms in nearly three years.

Investors dumped cable stocks last year on concern that phone companies and others starting to sell their own video services would erode the cable industry's dominance in the pay television market.

Those fears may be receding. So far this year, Comcast's stock has risen 17.5 percent.

"It's been a long dry spell in the eyes of some investors, but there's a recognition that the industry is on the offensive, not the defensive," said Brian L. Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast.

Mr. Roberts noted that Comcast added 437,000 new customers for its high-speed data service, 15.6 percent more than in the first quarter of last year. Comcast, like AT&T, Verizon and other providers, has been persuading more consumers to give up their slower dial-up connections.

With their bundle of products, cable companies are also likely to steal customers from satellite television providers even as Verizon and other Bell companies win over more cable subscribers.

"Satellite companies are going to get hurt," said Robin Diedrich, who covers Comcast for Edward Jones, a brokerage firm in St. Louis. "Cable isn't going to see as much erosion from satellite, but now you have phone companies pushing their own video product."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/bu...28comcast.html

Surf Securely, Carrying Privacy in Your Pocket
Eric A. Taub

In today's terrorism-conscious world, personal privacy seems to be diminishing. But a specialized flash drive from Stealth Ideas can ensure that your Web travels, at least, remain secret.

The StealthSurfer II ID Protect, an upgrade of a previous product, combines several programs to let users navigate the Web anonymously and create e-mail that cannot be read by others. The programs come loaded on a flash drive, available from the company's Web site (www.stealthsurfer.com) in capacities from 256 megabytes ($99) to 2 gigabytes ($279). Plug the flash drive into a PC's U.S.B. port, and all files created when Web surfing are stored on the drive, not on the computer's hard disk.

Programs include the Firefox browser; Anonymizer, to mask the user's Internet protocol address; RoboForm, a program that prevents keystrokes from being recorded; and Thunderbird, an e-mail program.

Whether at home, a public Wi-Fi location or an Internet cafe, privacy is protected — as long as you don't forget to take the flash drive with you when you leave.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/te...27privacy.html

In Internet Age, Writers Face Frontier Justice
Tom Zeller Jr.

WRITING last Monday at SepiaMutiny.com, a Web log dedicated to the Southeast Asian diaspora, a user called RC declared that "there is no scientific way to compare works of literature."

This observation was prompted by news, published a day earlier in The Harvard Crimson, suggesting that the budding novelist Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard sophomore, was actually a plagiarist who had served up large, sometimes verbatim helpings of two young-adult novels by Megan McCafferty — "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings" — in her lucrative first yarn, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life."

Just where science fits into the weeklong fracas that followed is an open question. The news broke the old-fashioned way: in a newspaper. And the expanding scope of the scandal — first 12 passages were questioned, then 29, then 40 — was driven by findings from Ms. McCafferty's publishers as much as anything else.

But certainly technology — and the relentless, sometimes merciless social interaction it has enabled in the digital age — played a part in forcing Ms. Viswanathan's publisher, Little, Brown, to recall the spoiled product by week's end. For days, the author's name was one of the most searched terms at the blog search engine Technorati, while commentators at forums from Metafilter to Amazon.com hashed over details revealed in the mainstream media, or offered up new discoveries and insights of their own:

"Viswanathan might have plagiarism issues with more than McCafferty's books," wrote Janak Ramakrishnan, another blogger at Sepia Mutiny. Mr. Ramakrishnan had noticed a similarity between pious aphorisms scribbled onto posters by a character in Ms. Viswanathan's book ("If from drink you get your thrill, take precaution, write your will" and "All the dangerous drug abusers end up safe as total losers") and passages from the 1990 book "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" by Salman Rushdie. A chapter titled "The Mail Coach" in Mr. Rushdie's book depicts a series of rhyming road signs, including two that read, "If from speed you get your thrill, take precaution, make your will" and "All the dangerous overtakers end up safe at the undertaker's."

To be fair, of course, rhyming road-safety signs are common along India's expressways, so Mr. Rushdie was himself borrowing on a theme. But like everything else, even this minute similarity — homage? remix? rip-off? — became part of the ceaseless compare-and-contrast debate.

Indeed, whatever Ms. Viswanathan's culpability (she maintained, by week's end, that all similarities to Ms. McCafferty's books were unintentional), one might hope the episode would be the final object lesson for would-be plagiarists who still think that their indiscretions can escape scrutiny.

In the age of the Internet, literary exegesis (whether driven by scandal or not) is no longer undertaken solely by pale critics or plodding lawyers speaking only to each other, but by a global hive, humming everywhere at once, and linked to the wiki. And if you are big enough to matter (as any writer would hope to be), one misstep, one mistake, can incite a horde of analysts, each with a global publishing medium in the living room and, it sometimes seems, limitless amounts of time.

Frontier justice? Mob rule? Perhaps.

But last week, not just petty gadflies fueled by schadenfreude and bloodlust (though there was that), but also armchair defense attorneys and the merely curious were discussing the books — as well as whether Ms. Viswanathan's status as a) immigrant, b) minority, c) child of privilege or d) hottie — played a role in her treatment.

Many online commentators detected an underlying racism, for instance, in even good-natured rants — perhaps typified by Gawker's cheeky (and occasionally misinterpreted) comment on Tuesday: "Isn't it kind of awesome to see an overachieving Indian kid finally do something wrong?"

But others pointed to the fact that Ms. Viswanathan had only one week earlier told The Newark Star-Ledger that "nothing I read gave me the inspiration" for the novel, but now, under scrutiny, suddenly recalled adoring Ms. McCafferty's books and claimed to have unconsciously channeled them. Given that, her critics charged, she was being treated better than other fabulists of late.

"If Viswanathan weren't young, attractive and a student at the best brand name in higher education, wouldn't she be James Frey II?" Jane Genova, a marketing consultant in Connecticut, wrote on her blog (janegenova.com) on Thursday. "You bet," she continued. "The pile-on would have been fast and massive."

But what if she had been deaf and blind?

That was a question raised in a discussion at Metafilter, where Andrew Shalit, in a defense of Ms. Viswanathan's claim of unconscious copying, pointed to the Helen Keller archives at the Web site for the American Foundation for the Blind.

There, in her autobiography "The Story of My Life," Ms. Keller describes how, at age 12, she wrote a story — "The Frost King" — that created her ownpublishing scandal.

"Mr. Anagnos was delighted with 'The Frost King,' and published it in one of the Perkins Institution reports," Ms. Keller wrote (Chapter 14 at afb.org/mylife). "This was the pinnacle of my happiness, from which I was in a little while dashed to earth. I had been in Boston only a short time when it was discovered that a story similar to 'The Frost King,' called 'The Frost Fairies' by Miss Margaret T. Canby, had appeared before I was born in a book called 'Birdie and His Friends.' The two stories were so much alike in thought and language that it was evident Miss Canby's story had been read to me, and that mine was — a plagiarism."

It was surmised that Ms. Keller must have heard Ms. Canby's story read to her as a child and unconsciously retold the story years later as her own, an event that left her in dread of trying to write anything original again.

Back at Metafilter, Keith M. Ellis wondered if Ms. Keller would have received a fair shake in the rush to judgment that is now de rigueur in the Internet age.

"It seems to me we give zero consideration to the possibility that it might be plagiarism, but unintentional," Mr. Ellis wrote, adding: "If we changed the name and obscured the disability-indicating details, would we still be willing to consider innocence?"

A piercing question, that — though so, too, is whether Ms. Viswanathan's case warrants a comparison to Ms. Keller's. And as mercenaries stampeded to eBay to peddle copies of Ms. Viswanathan's suddenly scarce book (a first edition was selling for $80 on Friday), the hope for any larger lessons in the "Opal" episode began to dim. Yet here, too, the Internet presented something of a solution.

Purveyors of "The MehtaMorphasis Award" (snipurl.com/Mehtaward) were offering $75 for the most eloquently crafted moral to a week of charged debate surrounding the frothy, ephemeral novel.

Among the submissions:

"The controversy may deservedly be far more interesting than the story itself."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/bu...ia/01link.html

Guidelines for Radio Tags Aim to Protect Buyer Privacy
Barnaby J. Feder

Some of the opponents in the debate over the potential privacy abuses of identification and tracking systems using tiny radio tags have come together to draft best-practices guidelines that are to be released today at a technology trade show in Las Vegas.

Radio tagging technology, called RFID for radio frequency identification, is already widely used in wireless toll collection systems and to control access to buildings, track livestock and manage industrial assets. It is also rapidly spreading into libraries, hospitals and systems that track consumer goods through the retail supply chain. Radio tags, which are based on microchips, carry more information than bar codes, and large numbers of them can be scanned at the same time.

Among other things, the guidelines say that consumers should be notified when goods have radio tags, which can be invisibly buried in labels, packaging or the goods themselves. The guidelines also say that it should be clear to consumers how to disable disposable forms of the tags and that it should be easy to do so once items with such tags have been purchased. Businesses are called on to notify consumers about how information gathered from the tags will be used.

The guidelines were the work of a group of businesses and consumer advocates. Among the participants who are expected to endorse the guidelines are Procter & Gamble, I.B.M., Microsoft, Visa USA and the National Consumers League.

"This is a really good start," said Susan Grant, vice president for public policy at the National Consumers League, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington.

However, some participants in the drafting are not endorsing the result, including the National Retail Federation, the nation's largest retailing trade group, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that was the most vocal privacy advocate.

"We are calling it an interim draft for a reason," said Paula J. Bruening, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a policy organization in Washington that orchestrated the effort. "There's a clear sense the guidelines will have to be reconsidered in the future."

A survey last year found that 7 percent of 89 retailers and 11 percent of 120 consumer products manufacturers had delayed or scaled back RFID investments because of privacy concerns, according to Christine Overby, who follows the technology for Forrester Research, a market research company based in Cambridge, Mass.

The technology got a major boost two years ago when Wal-Mart endorsed a standard developed by an industry consortium and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for tagging consumer goods, and said that it would begin requiring suppliers to tag cartons and pallets shipped to it. That standard, called E.P.C. (for electronic product code), is now administered by EPCglobal, which is based in Brussels. EPCglobal has issued its own privacy guidelines.

Maureen Riehl, a lawyer with the National Retail Federation, said that experience with the E.P.C. guidelines was one reason her group was not endorsing the broader guidelines to be released today. Legislators in New Hampshire are using the E.P.C. guidelines as a basis for a proposed law that retailers there say could be costly and unnecessarily alarming for consumers, she said.

Lee Tien, senior staff lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that the new guidelines were a valuable "first step" but that they gave industry too much "wiggle room."

He also noted that the guidelines ignored government use of RFID and privacy concerns for employees in business-to-business dealings. Mr. Tien said that he had warned his fellow participants at the outset that it was highly unlikely his group would endorse the end result.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/te...gy/01rfid.html

A Touch of Gold to Keep Treasured Discs From Degrading
Dan Mitchell

There is nothing worse than popping in a disc loaded with treasured memories, or even just a favorite movie or sound recording, only to find that the data has disappeared because the disc has deteriorated.

The new Kodak Preservation DVD-R and CD-R products are made to preserve data for 100 years on the DVD-R and 300 years on the CD-R. KMP Media, which is manufacturing the discs under license from Kodak, says they are made with a reflective layer of 24-karat gold, which prevents the tarnish and oxidation that occur with common silver discs.

The discs were tested using accelerated aging techniques, according to KMP. A scratch-resistant coating on the discs is designed to prevent physical damage from heat, light and rough handling, while a long-life dye is used in the actual data-storage layer.

The just-released discs are available on many Web sites, and major retailers are beginning to stock them, said Steven L. Mizelle, KMP's president. The 700-megabyte CD-R's cost $4 to $5, and the 4.7-gigabyte DVD-R's are about $1 more, he said.

While such high-end storage products can help preserve data for long periods, they are no guarantee against data loss. Mr. Mizelle recommends keeping hard-drive copies of everything, if possible. "Redundancy is your friend," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/te...gy/27disc.html

Macs No Longer Immune To Viruses, Experts Say

Apple's growing market share, new chips said making it more of a target
AP

Benjamin Daines was browsing the Web when he clicked on a series of links that promised pictures of an unreleased update to his computer’s operating system.

Instead, a window opened on the screen and strange commands ran as if the machine was under the control of someone — or something — else. Daines was the victim of a computer virus.

Such headaches are hardly unusual on PCs running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system. Daines, however, was using a Mac — an Apple Computer Inc. machine often touted as being immune to such risks.

He and at least one other person who clicked on the links were infected by what security experts call the first-ever virus for Mac OS X, the operating system that has shipped with every Mac sold since 2001 and has survived virtually unscathed from the onslaught of malware unleashed on the Internet in recent years.

“It just shows people that no matter what kind of computer you use you are still open to some level of attack,” said Daines, a 29-year-old British chemical engineer who once considered Macs invulnerable to such attacks.

Apple’s iconic status, growing market share and adoption of same microprocessors used in machines running Windows are making Macs a bigger target, some experts warn.

Apple’s most recent wake-up call came last week, as a Southern California researcher reported seven new vulnerabilities. Tom Ferris said malicious Web sites can exploit the holes without a user’s knowledge, potentially allowing a criminal to execute code remotely and gain access to passwords and other sensitive information.

Ferris said he warned Apple of the vulnerabilities in January and February and that the company has yet to patch the holes, prompting him to compare the Cupertino-based computer maker to Microsoft three years ago, when the world’s largest software company was criticized for being slow to respond to weaknesses in its products.

(MSNBC.com is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

“They didn’t know how to deal with security, and I think Apple is in the same situation now,” said Ferris, himself a Mac user.

Apple officials point to the company’s virtually unvarnished security track record and disputed claims that Mac OS X is more susceptible to attack now than in the past.

Apple plans to patch the holes reported by Ferris in the next automatic update of Mac OS X, and there have been no reports of them being exploited, spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said. She disagreed that the vulnerabilities make it possible for a criminal to run code on a targeted machine.

In Daines’ infection, a bug in the virus’ code prevented it from doing much damage. Still, several of his operating system files were deleted, several new files were created and several applications, including a program for recording audio, were crippled.

Behind the scenes, the virus also managed to hijack his instant messaging program so the rogue file was blasted to 10 people on his buddy list.

“A lot of Mac users are in denial and have blinders on that say, ‘Nothing is ever going to get to us,”’ said Neil Fryer, a computer security consultant who works for an international financial institution in Britain. “I can’t say I agree with them.”

Fryer, also a Mac user, said he has begun taking additional precautions over the past year to make sure he doesn’t fall victim to an attack. He spends more time than in the past scrutinizing his security logs for signs of intruders, and he uses a firewall and additional security applications, just as he would with a Windows-based machine.

Among the other signs Macs are a growing target:
The SANS Institute, a computer-security organization in Bethesda, Md., added Mac OS X to its 2005 list of the top-20 Internet vulnerabilities. It was the first time the Mac has been included since the experts started compiling the list in 2000.
This week, SANS updated the list to warn against flaws in Safari, the Mac Web browser, which the group said criminals were able to attack before Apple could fix it.
The number of discovered Mac vulnerabilities has soared in recent years, with 81 found last year, up from 46 in 2004 and 27 in 2003, according to the Open Source Vulnerability Database, which is maintained by a nonprofit group that tracks security vulnerabilities on many different hardware and software platforms.
Less than a week after Daines was attacked in mid-February, a 25-year-old computer security researcher released three benign Mac-based worms to prove a serious vulnerability in Mac OS X could be exploited. Apple asked the man, Kevin Finisterre, to hold off publishing the code until it could patch the flaw.

The Mac’s vulnerability could also increase as Apple transitions to a product line that uses microprocessors made by Intel Corp., security experts said.

With new Macs running the same processor that powers Windows-based machines, far more people will know how to exploit weaknesses in Apple machines than in the past, when they ran on the PowerPC chips made by IBM Corp. and Motorola Corp. spinoff Freescale Semiconductor Inc.

“They have eliminated their genetic diversity,” said independent security consultant Rodney Thayer. “The fear is that we’re going to run into a new class of attacks.”

Bud Tribble, Apple’s senior vice president of software technology, disagreed.

“All the things we’ve been doing to make Mac OS X secure continue to be relevant on Intel,” he said.

Mac OS X, he said, is designed to be Internet safe out of the box, without the need for firewalls or additional security software. He praised Mac OS X for making it easy for users to automatically install security patches.

He noted that the operating system was derived from FreeBSD, open source software that was built from the ground up to provide security for computers networked together. Since its origins in the early 1990s, the Unix-based FreeBSD has continually been battle-tested by college students and computer security specialists.

“The bottom line is we still feel more comfortable using a Mac than a (Windows) PC,” said Alan Paller, director of research for SANS.

But as Daines can attest, there are no guarantees.

“We’re all sort of waiting with bated breath to see if any problem will happen and the jury is still out,” said Thayer, the independent security consultant. “I don’t think you’ll find a consensus.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12537279/

An Evening with BitTorrent
Thomas Mennecke

BitTorrent as an organization, incorporated in the state of California, managed to swing from one end of the popular opinion spectrum to the other in a matter weeks. Precipitated by Bram Cohen’s deal with the MPAA, in which unauthorized material would be removed from his content search engine, public opinion subsequently degraded. BitTorrent’s reputation faired little better in the later months, as Bram Cohen’s views on certain issues met with widespread opposition from the community. With a floundering public opinion and an apparent disconnect with the community, is BitTorrent, Inc. becoming the George W. Bush of the file-sharing world?

No stranger to the opinions of the file-sharing community, Slyck.com met with Ashwin Navin, President of BitTorrent, Inc., in New York City. In town for a panel discussion in Tribeca along with director Steven Soderbergh, Todd Wagner of 2929 Entertainment and Dean Garfield of MPAA, BitTorrent, Inc.’s participation stressed that what most of us already know – online movie distribution is coming – if not already here. Afterwards, Ashwin opened up about BitTorrent, BitTorrent Inc., and the misconceptions people have about the force behind the largest Internet revolution since the World Wide Web.

“I sometimes lose the will to live after reading Slyck.com,” Ashwin joked. “The community can be brutal.”

The brutality Ashwin speaks of is the discontent expressed not only within the Slyck.com forums, but the prevalent attitude throughout the file-sharing community. Once held high on the file-sharing pedestal amongst heroes such as Ares Galaxy, FrostWire and the now defunct “Audio Galaxy”, words of praise have turned into scorn, as “traitor” and “greed” are now used to describe BitTorrent, Inc.

These words are often used by disenfranchised consumers and file-shares who often equate any dealings with the entertainment industry as treasonous. It didn’t help BitTorrent’s public relations when in November 2005, Bram Cohen announced a deal with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America.) The understanding between the two left the door open for future distribution arrangements, while guaranteeing BitTorrent.com’s search engine would abide by any takedown requests.

However these criticisms aren’t dismissed by Ashwin or BitTorrent, Inc. Ashwin readily accepts them not only as valid, but also as an opportunity to address and correct many of the notions about his company.

“It’s easy to come to that conclusion [about BitTorrent] when you see scary press releases from MPAA or RIAA that vilify us as consumers and customers of their product,” Ashwin said. “There are people within these organizations, within record labels, within movie studios, within the trade associations that question those tactics as well. So…by coming to [that] conclusion [about BitTorrent] isn’t an unreasonable thing to do. The content industry is on the verge of embracing these technologies. In the past the lawyers in these businesses governed the decision making with respect to peer to peer (P2P) and in the coming months the business people and the decision makers outside of the legal organization are going to weigh in and decide how they want to work with P2P developers in general.”

Yet an understanding of the community’s concerns and progressively rectifying them are two different things. Many in the BitTorrent community have found it necessary to rely on alternative development resources to meet their file-sharing needs – especially end to end encryption, a result of traffic shaping and bandwidth throttling. It’s the practice of some reactionary ISPs (Internet Service Provider) to allocate a limited amount of bandwidth to the BitTorrent application, resulting in snail’s pace download and upload speed.

But BitTorrent, Inc. can’t be reactionary as well, Ashwin argues, as it’s forced to wear more than one hat in the digital distribution world.

“An all out war with the ISPs would result in a loss for BitTorrent, and a loss for the entire community.”

Rather than code their way around the ISPs, BitTorrent, Inc. is seeking a diplomatic solution with the ISPs. Giving ISPs a reason to accept BitTorrent by articulating its legitimate potential is critical in allowing this protocol to survive.

“We spent an extraordinary amount of time face to face with the largest ISPs in the world who now see anywhere between a third and up to 70% of all their traffic in the BT protocol. [We’re] trying to convince them there’s a better way to manage the BitTorrent protocol then to limit it and to shape it. We’ve been strong advocates of the caching solution in the next version of the (Main Line) BitTorrent client, what we are calling the Allegro release. There’ll be a protocol which allows ISPs to cache BitTorrent content which is a great thing for users. It improves the user experience for downloading with BitTorrent no matter what client it is as long as it’s implemented the Cache Discovery Protocol and it also offers ISPs a cost effective way to allow BT to exist on their networks.

"A lot of ISPs did not even know there was a caching solution for the BT protocol, and as we’re taking it upon ourselves to educate them on behalf of our users and all the other developers of the protocol to implement a user friendly way to manage the cost.”

Appealing to ISPs interests and demonstrating its business potential has also been influential in allowing BitTorrent’s existence. Pairing with CacheLogic and British broadband provider NTL, BitTorrent recently announced a movie distribution deal on the ISPs 100 MB NextGen network. Testing of the distribution platform have already begun, and will serve as a litmus test for other ISPs.

The general theme of the meeting between Slyck.com and Ashwin was that of legitimacy. It ties into the BitTorrent, Inc’s deal with the MPAA, its stand on many of the issues facing the file-sharing community, and its position with the ISPs. By working with the entertainment industry and the ISPs, the future of BitTorrent is brighter for not just the business oriented, but for all parties. If BitTorrent were allowed to develop without any type of structure, it would be “easy to dismiss BitTorrent as a piracy protocol. It really has a much bigger role in the world and it’s important that there’s an organization that people can see, hear and touch.”

Part the organization Ashwin describes is establishing BitTorrent.org as a resource that developers, programmers and the community can interact and determine BitTorrent’s course. A divided BitTorrent house, one in which several divergents of the original protocol establish themselves throughout the Internet, could have dire consequences for the overall prosperity and health of information sharing.

“The number one priority for all for us as developers is to maintain the interoperability of the protocol. A forked protocol becomes difficult for ISPs to work with and to cache. All we require is better communication and understanding amongst all of us developers to set a direction for the protocol and to involve in a constructive way or to expose that discussion to the ISPs so that they don’t feel blind sided by the direction of our development. BitTorrent.org [is designed] for the purpose of creating a communication mechanism for all of us to hopefully constructively debate different directions, different extensions, the protocol can take. This includes things like encryption, cache discovery; a few of the new extensions that we’ve developed are things like Get Pieces Fast (resolves the sluggishness experienced while looking for peers) which will have dramatic performance improvements to the BT protocol.”

In other words, try to imagine a world in where BitTorrent became forked with several variants. Instead of trying to accommodate one protocol, ISPs could potentially be confronted with dozens. ISPs are showing marginal tolerance of one BitTorrent protocol, but confronted with several would likely lead to all-out rejection. BitTorrent users in the end would loose and wind up with unilateral bandwidth throttling. In this respect, Ashwin states bringing legitimacy and unity to the BitTorrent protocol is vital for the community and its widespread userbase.

Judging BitTorrent, Inc. in person and judging BitTorrent, Inc. from behind a computer screen are polar opposites. It’s easy to simply dictate that BitTorrent, Inc. is in it for the money, for the business, for the capitalist opportunity, however most of the discussion ultimately centered on the BitTorrent community and what’s best for the people who have driven it to the success it is today.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1172

JackSpratts · 04-05-06, 02:15 PM

Apple Betty

10.5 "Leopard" To Employ A System-Level, Encrypted Bittorrent Client And A Sharing-Reward System?

According to some of our oldest and most reliable sources within Apple's software development sector, Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" will include a system-level "BitTorrent" filesharing client that can be user-customized to 'donate' upstream Internet bandwidth for things like pushing Software Update packages to Leopard users, delivering iTunes Store content, and just about any purpose to which Apple puts its bandwidth.

The code in question was only recently developed, as part of a proposal that would probably not be part of the "Leopard Preview" delivered to third-party developers....but rather would be added to the operating system just prior to the "beta" stage that will follow later in the year.

Although implementing the code to secure the data traffic and break it up into pieces so small that individual users who enabled Sharing-Reward accounts would be unable to make any use of the data themselves is actually the easy part, getting Apple Legal and the executive suites to sign off on the concept will be a much larger challenge.

A somewhat similar p2p-based banwidth-sharing option was brought up during the 10.4 Tiger development cycle and dismissed out-of-hand because there were no good incentives for users to enter the shadowy world of peer-to-peer networking just to save Apple a few dollars. Now a group of developers at Apple think they have solved the most fundamental issues and want to bring the rest of the company on board.

Rewards would include credit at the iTunes Store and the Apple Store as well as other affililated offers like free airtime minutes for Apple's forthcoming "iPhone" and the like.

Uploads would use a unique port from other types of BitTorrent traffic so that network administrators can see it as separate and handle it accordingly.

Based on some rough math estimated for the proposal, the team pushing this concept believes they could cut Apple's bandwidth costs by hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars per year and by always finding the closest peer-sharing hosts, the system would also save terabytes of Internet backbone bandwidth that is now used for Software Updates, QuickTime Movie Trailers, and iTunes Store downloads among other things.

This would likely be part of a larger Apple initiative to build-in more of the functionality that customers use everyday -- like P2P -- and bend it to Apple's own purposes while helping to legitimize (not to mention monetize!) those applications.

Along with this and potentially other BitTorrent-like bits of P2P functionality in Leopard, Apple is reportedly planning to build-in Quality of Service (QoS) code in the OS X 10.5 networking layer to prevent this and other advanced, bandwidth-intensive, two-way communications from slowing download speeds.

Under consideration is a self-adapting ruleset similar to that employed by a company called Ubicom under its "StreamEngine" brand -- a QoS system that automatically examines network traffic and decides which protocols are the most time-sensitive, then priorizites those protocols while buffering other data in a high-performance memory cache. Such adaptive code is normally too resource-intensive for software QoS and is usually relegated to hardware QoS devices like Hawking Technologies' "Broadband Booster," but with Apple rapidly moving to multiprocessor platforms like Intel's 'Core' architecture, the real-world performance penalty is expected to be negligible.

Of course, users will have the option of not enabling the Reward-Sharing system (it will almost certainly be off by default, to prevent legal snarls arising from customer displeasure at the "theft" of bandwidth without their knowledge) and of disabling the Adaptive Quality-of-Service option....but together they have the potential to make the digital lifestyle easier for both Apple and its customers with no discernible penalty under most conditions.

Although the legal, logistical and "vision" challenges to the Sharing-Reward concept are substantial and there is every possibility that this proposal will again be turned down, we think it's an excellent idea and we hope that the Executive Suites can see their way to bringing it to fruition.
http://macosrumors.com/20060429A.php

BitComet – The last File-Sharing Hero?
Thomas Mennecke

Shareaza hasn’t released a new version since October of 2005. eMule had a token update in March, however the eDonkey variant has remained virtually unchanged for at least a year. FrostWire, a fork of the Gnutella client Limewire last updated in February. Ares has been idle since January, while BearShare remains in hibernation.

This trademark slow pace of development has become an increasing standard in the file-sharing world, as many of the top applications progress at an excruciatingly slow pace. File-sharers have become accustomed to such slow development, as WinMX fans often waited years before seeing a subsequent version. Yet during file-sharing’s golden age, progress occurred with greater fever and new, independent networks arose frequently.

If we could transcend today’s file-sharing landscape to 2003, it would be virtually unrecognizable. In three years time, the P2P landscape has changed from being dominated by FastTrack to BitTorrent controlled. No longer is file-sharing preformed solely in a self-contained environment such as Kazaa or WinMX. When these applications were king, all the file-trader needed was to fire up their favorite application, and search for the file desired.

To a growing extent, this is no longer the case as using self contained P2P applications to find a desired file is becoming less of a viable option. Networks like FastTrack have become clogged with corrupt and polluted files, forcing the growth of verified hash link sites. Such hash sites provide the end user with verified links to various materials in the file-sharing world, near guaranteeing a successful match to the file desired. Although several half-hearted attempts to integrate this concept into FastTrack, it ultimately flourished on the more resourceful and advanced BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 networks. Verified sites eventually merged with indexing sites, which provide searchable gateways to the BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 networks.

New P2P network development – the actually community behind the applications – also appears to have stagnated. During the earlier days there never appeared to be a shortage of new P2P or file-sharing networks, as new communities appeared to spring up overnight. What we have today, Ares Galaxy, Gnutella, BitTorrent, FastTrack, eDonkey2000, DirectConnect, is essentially the same stockpile that existed three years ago. FileTopia provided some hope of breaking out of this mold with the purported release of 4.0; however no reportable progress can be documented since last year.

Another move witnessed by the file-sharing community is the transgression of file-sharing and P2P applications towards authorized distribution. Morpheus, Kazaa, eDonkey, even applications placed high on the ivory tower such as Azureus and µTorrent, have implemented some form of authorized distribution deal.

The pace of development has slowed, the number of new networks has diminished, and those actually still in development release upgrades at a considerably less frequent pace. The cause of this slowdown can be attributed to any number of reasons; perhaps most obvious has been the entertainment industry’s crackdown on commercial developers. This crackdown has a far less impact on open source developers, but the widespread and less organized nature of this type of software development leaves the file-sharing world with a considerably slower pace of development.

In fact, file-sharing technology has arguable retrograded. Usenet, one of the oldest Internet mediums (circa 1979 technology), has quickly become one of the top methods for obtaining material online – a concept almost unthinkable only a few years back. BitTorrent progress has limped along, but remains relatively unchanged since its release. The only significant advance to the file-sharing community since 2005 has been the implementation of the DHT (Distributed Hash Table) layer to BitTorrent, Ares Galaxy, and perhaps one day, LimeWire. Yet LimeWire, like its commercial brethren, has been quiet since the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) distributed cease and desist letters to at least a half dozen developers on September 13, 2005.

Although development and new releases may have slowed, the demand for entertainment remains at an all time high. This demand has been supplemented by iTunes to some minor extent; however few file-sharing applications bear any resemblance to the past. Has the file-sharing world simply become complacent in the existing stock of P2P/file-shairng software, networks and communities?

This may be true for a wide margin of P2P and file-sharing software, but there are exceptions. The exception happens to be one of the more controversial file-sharing applications; BitComet. A client residing on BitTorrent, BitComet has managed to defy conventional file-sharing wisdom by keeping up with a feverish level of development. In fact, developer RnySmile has released three updates to BitComet in April – a pace virtually unheard up in the current P2P era. In fact, no P2P or file-sharing application has a comparable release rate.

BitComet is certainly not the last file-sharing application standing. Azureus and µTorrent have kept up a respectable pace, and both have introduced novel concepts and contributions in the furtherance of file-sharing technology. So is BitComet the last man standing, the one file-sharing application left to hold the line, the last hero of the file-sharing world? There’s no easy answer to that question, as many individuals have helped shape the landscape of file-sharing. Many accredit Alberto Treves’ defiance as one of the greater acts of file-sharing heroism, while others feel FrostWire is P2P’s final frontier.

Perhaps the file-sharing world has simply consolidated under BitTorrent. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and right now there doesn’t appear to be a need for the next quantum leap in file-sharing.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1170

Largest Solar Park in the World Opens in Germany
Christine Lepisto

The ribbon was cut on the World's largest continguous solar plant on 27th April 2006 in Germany. Construction on the 40 million euro (US$48 million) photovoltaic installation started August 2005. This plant demonstrates new standards in cost-efficiency for solar power. Using the master-slave inverter concept developed by Shell, the plant delivers the optimized energy output. Also, flexible installation technology--such as the use of either aluminum, wood or steel racks depending on material prices and the foundation on either concrete or piles--optimizes the costs. And if solar is viable in Germany, just imagine the efficiencies possible where the sun really shines!

Pocking receives an average of 1121 KWh/m2-year. 62,500 modules in 6 parallel linked units deliver power from earth's closest star to the houses of 3300 Germans via energy company E.on. That's a total of about 16,5 km (10 miles) of solar panels mounted on a former military grounds at Pocking, near Passau in Bavaria. The installation saves 10,000 tons of CO2 yearly--the equivalent of 1,000 hectares of woodlands.

Solar plants are the new skyscrapers. Last year Shell opened the formerly "world's largest" solar power plant near Leipzig, producing only 5 MW. The Shell solar plant in Pocking will soon be overtaken by the GE-Powerlight plant in Portugal at 11 MW, brought to you yesterday in TreeHugger. Hot on their heels is a 15 MW plant in South Korea, 100 MW in Israel. The current leader in announced capacity appears to be a 116 MW solar station in Portugal to be built by a consortium of German companies.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006...st_solar_p.php

Can Techie Oust Orrin Hatch?
Eliot Van Buskirk

Technology policy rarely makes for compelling campaign theater -- and rarer still moves the body politic -- but I can't help rooting for Pete Ashdown.

In a political mismatch of almost biblical proportions, the tech-savvy Democrat is running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch.

Hatch is a popular incumbent who has polled over 62 percent in past elections. Apparently, Utahans couldn't care less about the Republican senator's slavish endorsement of entertainment industry-backed bills that would, without understatement, create the equivalent of a copyright police state.

Hatch has terrorized techies from his Washington perch by sponsoring the much-loathed DMCA. He's on record saying it'd be a good idea to let entertainment companies remotely destroy the computers of those they suspect of copyright infringement. And he's a co-sponsor of the Induce Act, a moribund bill that aimed to hold tech companies responsible for creating devices that could be used to pirate digital content.

Ashdown is a political novice with impeccable tech credentials. He founded the first independent ISP in Utah, used to DJ raves, and uses a collaborative wiki for his campaign.

This has all the makings of a classic Old West showdown between Hatch -- seemingly beholden to the entertainment companies who contribute to his campaigns -- and Ashdown, who hopes to fight anti-tech policies and help Congress understand the internet from the point of view of someone who has been there.

Guess which one I chose to interview.

Wired News: You mentioned that you'd been to the Wired offices before. How did that come about?

Pete Ashdown: I have a friendship with Brian Behlendorf, who helped set up Wired's first venture on the internet, Hot Wired (now Wired News). He was also in charge of Organic and continues to be a member of the Apache Foundation -- a founding member of the Apache Foundation for that matter. And I initially knew him (from) the internet rave scene, because a lot of the early rave scene was connected through e-mail lists and the All Rave newsgroup, and of course there was a big concentration of that in San Francisco. So I came out to San Francisco frequently during that time.

WN: When I asked you if you had time for an interview, you referred me to your online calendar. I was thinking that this openness is admirable, when so many public figures seem to want to be anything but public, and I also saw that you have a MySpace page. What would you say the upsides and downsides of your open approach to this campaign have been?

Ashdown: Well I feel transparency is a big part of my campaign. That is needed in Washington. And what I see in Washington is certainly we have a lot of scandal (in which) the Democrats try and blame on the Republicans, but I view it as a larger scandal of money and politics. And what I see in Washington is the Democrats stomping around, and they stand up and sign these ethics declarations for the television cameras, and then they say, "We need more restrictions on lobbyists," but they really don't lead by example. And it's a really simple thing to make your office transparent. And when somebody takes on the mantle of public service, they lose the privacy that is in regards to that job.

Now certainly their personal privacy should still be respected, but when they are doing something in relation to making legislation, or meeting with individuals, that should be open and transparent. And it's easy to do. I mean, what I've done is elaborate in comparison to what Google calendar allows you to do. And so for these people to make the excuse that they can't do it, I don't believe it. I believe that they want to preserve the status quo. They want to keep the American people in the dark. And you know, there's also concern about safety. If people know where I'm gonna be next Friday, a sniper could come and kill me. Well, publish the calendar retroactively. I think people would still appreciate knowing what's going on and who you're meeting with.

In regards to the broader question of how MySpace and being open and transparent ha(ve) benefited me in this campaign, people are finding it refreshing. People are finding it remarkable that a candidate is taking this kind of approach and advocating this in government because it's so rarely seen. On the drawbacks, I really haven't seen a lot. You know, they may come later when the opposition tries to attack me, but I really feel that in my own business being transparent has been my policy and providing internet service in that we document the good along with the bad. And we put that out for all of our customers to see, and even our non-customers can go to the XMission website and see what the history of XMission is in regards to success and failure.

And my competition looks at that and says, "How in the world can you do that? Because it makes you look terrible." Conversely, my customers look at that and they say, "Thank you so much for keeping me informed about what's going on, because I know the cause of the problem when it happens."

WN: My column mainly focuses on digital music, so I have to ask, what do you see as the right balance between consumers' and corporations' rights when it comes to digital music, in terms of fair use and what should be allowed? How do you think that line should be drawn?

Ashdown: Well it's interesting you say individual and corporation, because there's a third party here, it's the artist. And I think the artist's rights should be held over the corporation rights. I believe that the internet presents a great opportunity for artists to make more on their work than what they were formerly doing with the corporate distribution system. And I think the writing is on the wall for that corporate distribution system, and that's the kind of backlash we're seeing from them in regards to lawsuits and restrictive legislation. So I absolutely believe the artists need to be rewarded for their work, should be rewarded for their work, and that the internet presents them an opportunity to do that in a more direct fashion.

So I support their rights, but I also support the rights of the consumer. I support the rights of the consumer when it's in regards to fair use. If I buy some media I should be able to do whatever I wish with that media inside the domain of my own home, outside of sharing it with somebody else commercially. That is, if I play it in the car for somebody else should I have to charge them a use fee? I don't think so. But if I'm out selling their music and the artist is getting no benefit from that, then that's an obvious violation.

I'm against the idea of DRM because it restricts the individual. It punishes the individual, (restricts) the innocent from being able to do what they wish with the property they've purchased. And if people say, "Well, the pricing for this is so low that we can only sell it to a certain kind of use," well, raise the price! You know, that's what the market's all about. If you want to raise the price so I have no DRM on my music, I may pay an extra 25 cents, or whatever you decide to do to get that music without the DRM encumberment.

WN: Have you seen evidence as more and more people go online and buy iPods, that Utahans might be realizing that Orrin Hatch may not represent their best interests as citizens or consumers? I mean, there are all these stories everywhere, everybody's getting online…. Do you think that's something that people are going to vote with?

Ashdown: I don't think it's a primary issue in Utah, although we have a very strong technology base and that receives a lot of support, at least verbal support from the technology base in Utah. I don't think most people are concerned about fair use as a primary issue. They're more concerned about the energy policy in this country, and how it affects them at the pump, and how it affects their security worldwide. They're concerned about health care, and they're concerned about jobs. They're concerned about the future of this country economically. So I think that is low on the list.

But I have been making an appeal to not only people in Utah, but people nationwide in regards to technology, that it is important that we have representation in Congress that understands technology beyond where the power button is on the computer, because these laws that are being made by a senator in Utah or a senator somewhere else affect everybody nationwide. We all have an interest in getting people into Congress that understand these things robustly. I get a lot of e-mail from people outside of Utah saying, "Man, you're, you're a great candidate. I wish I could live in Utah to vote for you," or "I wish you were a candidate in my state." Well there is a way you can vote for me, and that's sending financial support.

WN: So speaking of people in Congress and how much they understand about the internet, where do you stand on the whole "net neutrality" issue? What do you make of that? Do you think that the internet is fragile, like Larry Lessig says, and (that) it only exists because of careful planning, or is it kind of a naturally occurring thing that will just survive no matter what the rules are?

Ashdown: I tend to take more of the latter viewpoint. I've been doing XMission since 1993, which makes it one of the oldest internet companies in the country. And what I have seen is, you know, back in 1993 the internet was controlled by the National Science Foundation. And when they turned it over to private enterprise there was this idea that they would set up neutral peering points for entities to come together and exchange traffic. Now I'm in some of those peering points, and what I have seen, they're far from neutral, (and) that this idea of net neutrality has been long lost, in that if I try and exchange traffic with, say, a carrier on the level of MCI, they're going to put down all sorts of crazy requirements that there's no way a small provider of my size can meet. So I am forced to go another route to get into their network.

Now the thing is that the bureaucrats and the executives of these big telcos don't seem to realize is that they have as much need to reach my network as I have a need to reach theirs, even more so when you have an entity like Google. You have this guy just stomping around from SBC, I forget his name, but he's saying, "Google should be paying me money to traverse my network." Well, he receives as much benefit from having the connectivity to Google as Google receives and vice versa, in return. So if he decides to lower Google's traffic because they're not paying his extortion fee, his customers are going to react to that. "Why can't I get to Google? Why is it slow?" And so I think that this kind of balances out in the end.

I tend more to take an anti-regulation standpoint on the internet, and (though) it is very easy to say, "We don't want the government censoring the internet," it becomes a much more complex issue when we're talking about net neutrality. "Well we should have the government confirm that neutrality, and guarantee it." But does that mean that I can't prioritize video traffic and voice traffic in my own network, (which) is obviously needed, that has to be more of a real-time situation? You know, for a long time I prioritized gaming traffic, because that's what my customers desire.

So I tend to think that the government getting involved with more regulation on the internet is a bad thing. And so some of these calls for enforced net neutrality I don't support, because I believe that these situations will work themselves out in the end with the market that we have. Now you have the other question of, well, if you're a smaller player, if you're not a Google, if you're a mom and pop shop and you're on the rise, is your traffic going to be discounted in the face of these other entities that are able to pay for good traffic, say an eBay. And I argue again that there is enough customer draw on these major networks to say, "Hey, I can't get to this small entity; what's wrong with your network? What is breaking with your network?" that the customers of these large telcos are forced into net neutrality on their own.

WN: So the availability of alternate ISPs, especially smaller or independent ISPs, is going to act as a pressure valve on this whole situation then?

Ashdown:I believe so. But also independent entities, like some of the free wireless groups that are springing up. There's a great democracy that comes through the technology of the internet that really anyone can provide it. If you wanted to buy a connection from somebody and then send wireless out to your entire neighborhood, that's in the realm of possibility for individuals to do. It's not the same case when you're talking about satellite TV or broadcast TV. So this is a very unique medium that enables democracy and supports democracy and spreads by democracy.

WN: I have one more, very easy question: What software and hardware do you personally use to listen to digital music?

Ashdown: Well, on my desktop I'm a big fan of Ubuntu, not only in my campaign office -- I use Ubuntu exclusively, Ubuntu/Linux. I use Ubuntu throughout my office at X Mission. We do have a need for a few Windows desktops for running some of the accounting software we need, but that's for the secretary. We try and put Ubuntu/Linux on everything, and of course our servers (run Linux).

When it comes to music hardware, I have an iPod, 40-gig iPod, and I rip all my own music. I prefer when I buy music to go out and buy the CD, bring it home, rip the contents off it, archive the CD. Having been a DJ in the past, I just recently completed ripping my entire collection of CDs, which was over 2,000 CDs.

WN: Well, thank you so much for your time, and I can tell you if I were in Utah, I'd be voting for you.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,70761-0.html

BlackBerry’s Legal Déjà Vu
Andrew Ross Sorkin

Do not bother hitting the “reload” button or clearing the cache in your Web browser — it will not help. Tuesday’s hauntingly familiar headlines about a patent-infringement lawsuit against BlackBerry maker Research in Motion are, in fact, new.

The lawsuit, filed by software company Visto, seeks to shut down the popular (and, for some, near-addictive) BlackBerry wireless e-mail service less than two months after a similar suit from patent holding company NTP was settled. Research in Motion agreed to pay NTP $612.5 million to resolve that earlier case, averting the possibility that its service would be shut down by court order.

For those who thought NTP’s lawsuit lacked merit, the large settlement raised concerns about what are known derogatively as “patent trolls” — investment companies that acquire intellectual property and then sue businesses that use similar technology. In recent months, Research in Motion chairman James Balsillie has been urging United States lawmakers to reform the nation’s patent law immediately so that similar legal troubles will not afflict another company.

There is an important difference between the NTP suit and the latest suit against Research in Motion. Unlike NTP, an entity that lacked business operations, Visto actually competes with Research in Motion, as Forbes.com points out. This relationship, and the following quote from a Visto executive to The New York Times, suggest that Visto may see a BlackBerry shutdown as its ultimate goal:

“We’re not seeking a royalty, we’re seeking an injunction,” Visto’s co-founder and senior vice president, Daniel Méndez, said. “Unlike NTP, we are a company with 400 employees and a viable business to protect. That’s what we’re trying to do with these actions.”

Meanwhile, Visto is just coming off of a legal victory in a case against Seven Networks, another wireless e-mail software maker. On Friday, a Texas jury ruled in favor of Visto in the lawsuit and awarded it $3.6 million.

R.I.M. said in a statement Monday that it was not infringing Visto’s patents, which it considers invalid, and was considering suing Visto for infringing on its BlackBerry patents. Its shares fell 4.7 percent to $73.03 Monday on the Nasdaq.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=2549

French DRM Law Gutted
Nate Anderson

It didn't take long for the new French DRM legislation to get spoiled in committee, and you can't blame French consumers for expecting canard à l'orange and being served some very dodgy escargot instead.

The legislation in question originally contained consumer-friendly provisions that would force technology companies to make their DRM schemes interoperable. This would have a potent effect on the dominance of Apple and iTunes, of course, since the Cupertino company has so far proved unwilling to license its Fairplay technology to anyone else. The non-interoperable nature of Fairplay has been crucial to the success of Apple's online music store, which has leveraged the popularity of the iPod to become the biggest seller of digital downloads on the Internet.

No one was surprised when the proposed French law was trashed by Apple as "state-sponsored piracy." There was even speculation that Apple might leave France altogether rather than risk opening its Fairplay system.

It looks like the French will still get to keep their iTunes Music Store, though, since the original bill was recently gutted in committee. Most of the consumer-friendly provisions in the legislation have since been removed or rewritten. To see how this worked, consider the following examples:

Previously, "information needed for interoperability" covered "technical documentation and programming interfaces needed to obtain a copy in an open standard of the copyrighted work, along with its legal information." Now this has been changed to "technical documentation and programming interfaces needed to obtain a protected copy of a copyrighted work." But a "protected" version of the work can't be played back in a different player, which means interoperability won't be attained with this clause.
Previously, the only condition for receiving information needed for interoperability was to meet the cost of logistics of delivering the information. Now, anyone wanting to build a player will have to take a license on "reasonable and non discriminatory conditions, and an appropriate fee." When using information attained under such a license, you will have to "respect the efficiency and integrity of the technical measure."
DRM publishers can demand the retraction of publication of the source-code for interoperable, independent software, if it can prove that the source-code is "harmful to the security and the efficiency of the DRM."

The new changes will be voted on soon, but they already have some French consumer groups up in arms. As anyone who has ever relied on RATP to get to work knows, the French are very, very gifted in the art of the strike, and stopdrm.info has called for one in the Place de la Bastille on May 7. Will anyone show up? Perhaps. 22 percent of under-25 workers are unemployed, and they're willing to take to the streets. If they're as concerned about DRM as about having jobs for life, the rally could be huge.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060501-6715.html

Government Report Takes Other Nations To Task On Piracy
Peter Pollack

The office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) has released its annual "Special 301" review of intellectual property rights, which looks at the state of IP infringement in 87 nations around the globe. As might be expected, a number of countries have made it to the 2006 Priority Watch List, including perennial favorites Russia and China. Additionally, specific foreign markets—both physical and virtual—have been labeled as "notorious" by USTR, in large part due to excessive media and software piracy.

Topping out the roll call of problematic countries in the report is China—one of only two nations important enough to be listed out of alphabetical order and the only one worthy of multiple pages (10 to be exact). The general theme is that China has made progress protecting intellectual property in recent years, but not nearly enough. Troubles mentioned include the fact that much of the Chinese counterfeiting and piracy black market is centered in the capital city of Beijing (right up the street from the American embassy), and that a large amount of Chinese intellectual property enforcement seems to be centered on European brands, with American nameplates taking a back seat.

China does not provide American copyright materials, inventions, brands, and trade secrets the intellectual property protection and enforcement to which they are entitled. China therefore remains a top intellectual property enforcement priority. [...] Faced with only limited progress by China in addressing certain deficiencies in IPR protection and enforcement, the United States will step up consideration of its [World Trade Organization] WTO dispute settlement options.

China—along with everyone else—fell short of USTR's worst rating of Priority Foreign Country, but the US government is clearly keeping the option open for dragging it before the WTO—an organization many feel the nation should never have been allowed to join.

The other notable black hat nation is Russia, which has not yet entered the WTO. Some in the US government have advocated tying WTO membership approval to that nation cleaning up its act. Apparently, piracy is so rampant in Russia that a large amount of infringing material is produced in government-owned facilities, and media industry reps have repeatedly asked the USTR to grant Russia the worst possible rating. That appears to be impossible for the time being, as by its own rules the USTR "may not designate a country as a Priority Foreign Country if it is entering into good faith negotiations or making significant progress in bilateral or multilateral negotiations to provide adequate and effective protection of IPR."

Ars readers may be interested to note that one of the markets mentioned by name in the report is Allofmp3.com, the Russian music download site that continues to exist due to a legal loophole despite several years worth of attempts to shut it down. USTR rounds out its inventory of electronic bad-boy markets in other nations with Baidu—a Chinese search engine which offers links to music files for downloading and streaming, and Kuro—a Taiwanese peer-to-peer network. Although each of these sites has been the target of legal action in its home country, the efforts have apparently not been enough to stave off the ire of the USTR.

There's no doubt that US companies do lose money to overseas piracy, and it is likely that losses due to filesharing pale in comparison to the underground markets that exist in other countries. The joke has been made that only one legitimate copy of Windows was ever sold in China, and although that is clearly an exaggeration, it's a very real issue, as evidenced by the meeting recently held between the president of China and officials from Microsoft.

When all is said and done, enforcement of anti-piracy laws in other countries is the result of a wide range of factors, up to and including diplomacy, economics, self-interest, and occasionally even ethics. It will be a long term process to find a balance that works to everyone's satisfaction, and it's even possible that some of the basic business models need adjustment. Whether or not the problems are ever solved to anyone's satisfaction is a question for the Magic 8-Ball, which currently reads, "Reply hazy - try again."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060501-6712.html

A Studio Chief's Jailhouse Visits to a Detective Raise Questions
David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner

Two days before Christmas 2004, as Hollywood's A-listers were jetting to places like Aspen and Kona, Ron Meyer, the president of Universal Studios, made a trip to a decidedly less glamorous destination.

Mr. Meyer got in his Range Rover and drove more than 120 miles north from his home here to Taft, Calif., to visit Anthony Pellicano, the imprisoned private investigator.

Mr. Pellicano was in the 14th month of a three-year sentence for possession of explosives, but federal prosecutors in Los Angeles were digging into a mountain of evidence seized from his office that they say pointed to a gigantic eavesdropping enterprise.

While Mr. Pellicano's client list included some of the movie business's most influential players — as well as some of their angry ex-spouses — the only heavy hitter known to have visited Mr. Pellicano behind bars was Mr. Meyer.

Nowhere in the long-running investigation of Mr. Pellicano, who pleaded not guilty to wiretapping and conspiracy charges, has Mr. Meyer's name been associated with even a whiff of impropriety. But the relationship between the detective and the studio chief holds a lesson about doing business in Hollywood, where loyalty holds an exalted value, and where an executive who expects to survive at the top must be able to understand the industry's seamy underworld for what it is, without tumbling into it.

Mr. Meyer bridled at being asked by reporters about his relationship with Mr. Pellicano.

"I'm offended that my friendship would be questioned," he said on Saturday. "I like him the way anybody would like a friend. He's never given me any reason to feel differently about him. I'm not his judge, and all these charges against him haven't been proven. The only way I can judge anybody is how they treat me, and Anthony's never given me a reason to think of him as anything but a friend, and frankly, a stand-up guy."

Yet Mr. Meyer's visits raised questions with the government, and he wound up explaining them to the F.B.I. and a grand jury, evidence and interviews with agents show. Investigators asked Mr. Meyer about a debt Mr. Pellicano tried to collect for him, as well as his relationship with Michael S. Ovitz, his former business partner and co-founder of the Creative Artists Agency, and about a conversation in which Mr. Meyer urged Mr. Pellicano to "drop a dime on" Mr. Ovitz.

In an interview with two F.B.I. agents on March 31, 2004, Mr. Meyer said that he had met Mr. Pellicano through his wife, Kelly, who briefly worked as a typist in the detective's office a decade and a half earlier. After their marriage in 1992, Mr. Meyer told the agents, Mr. Pellicano often sent cards and gifts.

Mr. Meyer described Mr. Pellicano as a friend, but not a close friend, the agents wrote in a summary of the interview that was seen by The New York Times. The two men ate lunch together about four times a year, sometimes shooting pool, but were never guests in each other's homes.

Yet Mr. Pellicano never spoke to him about wiretapping, Mr. Meyer told the agents.

Mr. Meyer acknowledged to the F.B.I. that he had once retained Mr. Pellicano to collect a debt from a neighbor. In 1997, Mr. Meyer lent $300,000 to Bilal Baroody, a businessman with homes in Malibu and Spain. When the loan came due a year later, Mr. Baroody was gone and did not return Mr. Meyer's calls.

According to the F.B.I., Mr. Meyer later mentioned this to Mr. Pellicano, who offered to collect the debt, saying he had "guys in Spain." Mr. Meyer assumed Mr. Pellicano would find him and "pester" him, but Mr. Pellicano "never discussed the methods he would employ." Mr. Meyer wrote a check for Mr. Pellicano's $25,000 retainer, and also offered to split with him any money collected.

On March 15, 1999, prosecutors have charged, Mr. Pellicano had a police source illegally run a criminal background check on Mr. Baroody, who could not be reached for this article. Mr. Baroody was also in a dispute at the time with the late Edward Masry, a lawyer who used Mr. Pellicano's services.

Mr. Meyer told the F.B.I. that he heard nothing more of Mr. Baroody until June 2002, when he received a letter in which his former neighbor promised to repay the debt someday.

Around 2000, Mr. Pellicano asked Mr. Meyer for a personal loan of $100,000, citing "business and family problems." Mr. Meyer agreed, without putting anything in writing. Mr. Pellicano later offered a "good-faith payment," Mr. Meyer told the agents, but said he had not yet resolved his problems. Mr. Meyer told him not to bother.

And in early 2003 — after Mr. Pellicano's arrest but before his incarceration — Mr. Meyer told the F.B.I. that he was asked by Bert Fields, a lawyer and a friend, to give money to a trust for Mr. Pellicano's family. Mr. Fields, who often used Mr. Pellicano's services, has acknowledged being a subject of the wiretapping investigation, but has not been charged with anything and has said he was never aware of any wrongdoing.

Mr. Meyer agreed to help, envisioning gifts of $20,000 a year for two years, he told the F.B.I., but heard no more about it. Several months later, he raised the subject with Mr. Pellicano, who said he doubted anyone would be willing to help him. But Mr. Meyer offered to call potential donors, with the idea of raising $100,000 to $120,000, he told the agents.

Mr. Meyer told the F.B.I. that he contacted several people suggested by Mr. Pellicano, but the effort — a version of which is reported in the June issue of Vanity Fair — collapsed when only one other man made a donation, and Mr. Pellicano insisted that the money be returned.

The F.B.I. questioned Mr. Meyer closely about Mr. Pellicano's relationship with Mr. Ovitz, who was Mr. Meyer's partner at Creative Artists until 1995, when the two went separate ways in a bitter breakup.

For his part, Mr. Ovitz has told F.B.I. agents that in March 2002 Mr. Pellicano had alerted him to "a problem brewing" with Mr. Meyer, and offered to solve it "for a price." A month or two later, Mr. Ovitz asked Mr. Pellicano to get embarrassing information about Mr. Meyer, the agents' notes say.

Mr. Ovitz's lawyers deny that he hired Mr. Pellicano to get information on Mr. Meyer. As for the "problem brewing" exchange, an Ovitz lawyer, James H. Ellis, questioned the date and context in the F.B.I. account. Rather, Mr. Ellis said, sometime in 2002 Mr. Pellicano offered to heal the Ovitz-Meyer personal rift; Mr. Ovitz responded by saying there was "no amount of money he wouldn't pay" if that occurred.

In Mr. Meyer's account to the F.B.I., Mr. Pellicano asked Mr. Meyer in early 2002 whether taking Mr. Ovitz as a client would affect his relationship with Mr. Meyer. Mr. Meyer said Mr. Pellicano was free to work for Mr. Ovitz, but assailed Mr. Ovitz's integrity, saying that "Ovitz was capable of anything," Mr. Meyer told the F.B.I.

Mr. Meyer told the grand jury that months later, Mr. Pellicano intimated that he had come to the same conclusions about Mr. Ovitz.

Mr. Meyer also visited Mr. Pellicano behind bars three times — once at the San Bernardino County Jail and twice at Taft — according to evidence reviewed by The Times and confirmed by Mr. Meyer on Saturday. The first of those visits occurred shortly before Mr. Meyer's March 2004 F.B.I. interview.

When the F.B.I. agents asked Mr. Meyer why "a man such as himself" would drive so far to see Mr. Pellicano, Mr. Meyer said it was to keep a promise.

During the San Bernardino visit, Mr. Meyer told the agents, Mr. Pellicano's legal problems did not come up. Since they "had something in common with Ovitz," Mr. Meyer said, he brought up recent news reports about Mr. Ovitz's difficult tenure as president of the Walt Disney Company. Mr. Pellicano said things and made facial expressions that led Mr. Meyer "to conclude that Ovitz was somehow connected to Pellicano's legal problems," the F.B.I. wrote.

Apprised of this jailhouse encounter, Mr. Ellis, the Ovitz lawyer, said: "You've got to be kidding. Mr. Pellicano's legal woes appear to involve the unlawful possession of powerful explosives and the alleged wiretapping of dozens of individuals over several years, never once directed by or known to Mr. Ovitz. No facial expressions or hand gestures could possibly change that."

In a subsequent telephone conversation, Mr. Meyer urged Mr. Pellicano to "drop a dime" on Mr. Ovitz, according to a person close to the investigation who refused to be identified to avoid angering prosecutors. Mr. Meyer was asked about that remark before the grand jury, where a tape of the conversation was played. Mr. Meyer, the person said, testified that he told the detective that Mr. Ovitz would not have hesitated to turn on Mr. Pellicano if the roles were reversed.

In June 2004, Mr. Meyer visited Mr. Pellicano again, this time at Taft, the minimum-security federal prison where he had been transferred to finish out his sentence. He returned for a last known visit on Dec. 23 of that year.

Asked by reporters to explain his repeat visits to Mr. Pellicano behind bars, Mr. Meyer said: "I visited him because he's my friend, and I don't have anything to hide. I know the truth, and I don't care what anybody thinks.

"I feel no need to apologize for being his friend," he added. "And when he's able to have visitors, I'll go visit him again."

Correction: May 2, 2006

Because of an editing error, an article in Business Day on Monday about the friendship between Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios, and Anthony Pellicano, the private detective accused of wiretapping and conspiracy, referred imprecisely to the sources on which the article was based. It was based on government evidence, including written summaries of interviews by F.B.I. agents with witnesses in the case, not on interviews with F.B.I. agents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/bu...pellicano.html

Microsoft May Delay Windows Vista again – Gartner

Microsoft Corp.'s long- awaited release of the upgrade to its flagship Windows operating system will likely be delayed again by at least three months, research group Gartner Inc. said on Tuesday.

The research note, released to clients on Monday, said the new Windows Vista operating system is too complex to be able to meet Microsoft's targeted November release for volume license customers and January launch for retail consumers.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company disagreed with the Gartner report and it was still on track to meet its launch dates.

Vista is the first major overhaul of its operating system, which sits on 90 percent of the world's computers and accounts for nearly a third of Microsoft's total revenue, since Microsoft rolled out Windows XP nearly five years ago.

Microsoft originally targeted a 2005 launch for the new Windows, then pushed the release out to 2006 before announcing in March that Vista would again be delayed to improve the product's quality.

Gartner targets a Windows Vista release in the April-June quarter of 2007, nine to 12 months after Microsoft conducts a second major test, or "beta," release for Vista during the current quarter.

"Microsoft still wants to get it out as soon as possible, but slipping from January to March is nowhere near as bad as slipping from shipping before the holidays to after the holidays," a group of Gartner analysts wrote in the report.

Gartner said Windows XP took five months to go from a second test release to the start of production, but the magnitude of technological improvement in Vista is closer to Windows 2000, which took 16 months between the second test and production.

Once production starts, it usually takes between six- to eight-weeks for PC manufacturers to load the operating system onto new computers, Gartner said.

Microsoft shares were down 22 cents at $24.07 in afternoon trading on Nasdaq.
http://today.reuters.com/business/ne...yID=nN02271704

A Big Question Unanswered by a Tiny PC
David Pogue

ACCORDING to legend, they teach you in journalism school to remember the five W's: who, what, when, where and why.

This week, Microsoft unveiled a new kind of computer called the Ultra Mobile PC — and has good answers to four of those questions.

WHO Microsoft designed the hardware concept and wrote the software for it, just as it has in past years with palmtops, cellphones and media centers. So far, companies like Samsung, Asus and TabletKiosk have signed on to make and sell Ultra Mobile PC's.

WHAT Earlier this spring, "what" was exactly what Microsoft wanted people to buzz about. In an Apple-esque attempt to use suspense as a marketing tool, Microsoft dropped hints about a mysterious project called Origami and doled out weekly videos with cryptic captions ("...do you know me? ... and how i can change your life?"). Origami — the Ultra Mobile PC — turns out to be a very small touch-screen PC. Microsoft recommends a seven-inch touch screen, two-pound weight, wireless networking and, of course, Windows XP.

At 9 by 5.5 by 1 inches, the resulting machine is either one of the world's tiniest Windows laptops — so tiny there's no keyboard, trackpad or CD drive — or a palmtop that's so huge, you need two hands to operate it.

Samsung's Q1 is the first Ultra Mobile PC. It's a shiny black plastic-clad slab that costs $1,100 — twice the price of similarly configured laptops. It bears two U.S.B. connectors, an Ethernet jack, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless antennas, a Compact Flash slot (for a camera's memory card) and a video output for a projector or external monitor.

Inside, there's a 40-gigabyte hard drive, 512 megabytes of memory and a 900-megahertz Celeron processor. If that sounds slow, you're right; this is probably the slowest computer you've used in years. Just turning on the Q1 takes over two minutes (40 seconds from hibernate mode).

Standard screen resolution on the Ultra Mobile PC is an oddball 800 by 480 pixels. Those are such peculiar dimensions, in fact, that many of Windows's own dialogue boxes don't fit. Even when they're up against the top of the screen, they extend past the screen's bottom edge — so important buttons like OK, Print and Cancel are unclickable. In software, this is what's known as a Big Oops.

In such situations, a workaround is available. You can press a button to choose one of two higher screen resolutions: 800 by 600 pixels or 1024 by 600. This is not some kind of Harry Potter magic that creates new pixels from the air; the screen still has only 800 by 480 actual pixels. Instead, these modes are simulations, created through software trickery and resulting in slight distortion and text blurriness.

NOW, holding an Ultra Mobile PC in your hands is very cool and exciting for the first 30 seconds, and it certainly turns heads. Unfortunately, your next instinct is to try doing something on this computer — and that's when you discover that there's no keyboard, mouse or trackpad.

The trackpad problem is survivable, thanks in part to the touch screen. If something on the screen is big enough, you can just tap it with your finger. That's the idea behind the Program Launcher, a great-

looking, animated Windows XP overlay that offers big, fat, customizable category buttons (Connect, Listen, Play and so on) that help to organize big, fat program buttons (Internet Explorer, Media Player and so on).

When the targets aren't so big — the tiny system tray icons, for example — you can tap the screen with the flimsy plastic stylus.

You can also move the cursor by pushing against a textured, eight-

directional nubbin with your left thumb — while pressing a button labeled Menu with your right thumb. And you can "click the mouse" by pressing the Change Resolution button while also pressing the Menu button.

Unfortunately, even if you master these nonsensical button combinations, the nubbin doesn't let you control the speed of cursor movement or change direction in midmove. You're better off with the stylus.

The missing keyboard is a tougher nut to crack. Microsoft faced this challenge once before, when it created the Tablet PC (a touch-screen laptop design). And because it runs the Tablet PC version of Windows XP, the Ultra Mobile PC inherits the same tools. For example, there's an on-screen keyboard; a handwriting-recognition window that offers excellent accuracy but makes editing brutally frustrating; rudimentary speech recognition; and Windows Journal, a free-form note-taking program that lets you delete, search and move your handwritten phrases.

(In its vertical orientation — you can rotate the screen image — you might expect that the Samsung would make an exceptional match for Windows Journal, but it's actually unusable this way. The screen isn't smart enough to know what's touching it — so if you rest any part of your hand on the glass, you get a crazy zagging line of "ink.")

As an alternative, Microsoft offers a new on-screen keyboard called Dial Keys. It depicts the right and left halves of a split keyboard at the lower corners of the screen, arrayed in concentric arcs that match your thumbs' reach.

It's a cute conceit. Unfortunately, not only do these huge quarter-circles obscure your document, but of course you can't feel the keys. Picking away with your thumbs is marginally easier than tapping the rectangular on-screen keyboard, but still slow and awkward; for example, you have to change modes for access to numbers and other basic symbols.

Stylus, cursor-control nubbin, two on-screen keyboards, handwriting recognition, mouse-click button combinations — what a lot of workarounds! And how unnecessary; the mouse and keyboard solved the problems of text input and cursor control decades ago. It's as though Microsoft invented a car with an opaque windshield — and then devised camera and periscope attachments so you can see where you're going.

WHEN The Samsung is available now, and its successors will arrive in time for the holidays. But nothing in this first crop is anything like what Bill Gates envisioned a year ago: a one-pound machine with all-day battery life and a price tag of $500 to $800. That dream, Microsoft admits, is years away.

WHERE Since it's so hard to enter text, few will try to do e-mail, programming, word processing or spreadsheet work on this computer.

An Ultra Mobile PC is handy, though, at boardroom presentations. You can hook it up to a projector and tap through PowerPoint without having to endure the hardships of bringing a laptop.

Airplane tray tables come to mind, too. Music, photo and video playback are all easy to operate with just your fingers, and the Samsung has both stereo speakers and a flip-out stand that props the thing up.

Keep in mind, though, that the battery lasts only about three hours. Worse, there's no built-in DVD drive. You can buy movies from the Internet, but you'll need one of Samsung's external drives anyway ($220, or $300 for a superthin one); without it, you'll have no easy way to install software.

WHY This, of course, is the great unanswered question.

Does the Ultra Mobile PC exist because regular laptops are too bulky? No, because you can get a full-blown laptop that's about the same size. For example, the Fujitsu Lifebook P7120 is only slightly larger and more expensive — but gives you a keyboard, trackpad, much bigger screen, faster processor and built-in CD/DVD drive. (Even the tiny Oqo, a Windows computer small enough for a coat pocket, has a physical BlackBerry-style keyboard.)

Does the Ultra Mobile PC exist because a touch screen might be useful in niche industries like insurance investigations and package delivery? Maybe. But the speed and flexibility of a Tablet PC would make much more sense — and cost hundreds of dollars less.

Microsoft deserves some credit for trying to shake up the status quo. It's sad, therefore, that the Ultra Mobile PC feels so wrong. It aims to bridge the size gulf between a palmtop and a laptop, but winds up inheriting the worst aspects of each. Like a palmtop, it feels claustrophobic, clumsy for text input and, with its exposed touch screen, vulnerable. Like a laptop, it's expensive, has short battery life and requires two hands to operate.

In short, the lesson missed by the Ultra Mobile PC's creators doesn't come from journalism school; it comes from the School of Common Sense.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/te...ace&ei=5087%0A

Net Neutrality Missing From Sweeping Telecom Bill
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Senate took the first serious step on Monday toward rewriting the nation's telecommunications laws, a move that raises politically sensitive questions about digital copyright and Net neutrality and that could take years to complete.

Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, released a 135-page draft bill (click here for PDF) that represents the most sweeping rewrite in a decade of laws dealing with video, satellite and broadband communications.

Stevens said in a statement that the legislation grew out of more than a dozen hearings and drew on proposals from other senators as well. "It attempts to strike a balance between competing industries, consumer groups and local government," the Alaska Republican said.

Absent from the legislation are any regulations related to "Net neutrality," also known as network neutrality, that companies such as Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo, Intel and Microsoft have been lobbying for during the past few months. Instead of handing the Federal Communications Commission extensive powers to police violations--an idea defeated in a House of Representatives committee vote last week--the FCC would merely be required to prepare annual reports on any problems.

Included in the massive proposal is, however, one requirement sure to please the recording industry: authorization for the FCC to start the process of outlawing digital over-the-air radio and digital satellite receivers sold today that permit users to record broadcasts. Those would be supplanted with receivers that will treat as copy-protected anything with an "audio broadcast flag" in the future.

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, called it "a necessary and appropriate focus on an issue critical to record labels, songwriters, publishers, artists and many others in the music community." The RIAA is worried about newer receivers, such as the Sirius S50, that it says let Americans assemble a personal music library without paying for it.
Telecom reform or not?

Here are some parts of Sen. Ted Stevens' proposal to rewrite U.S. telecommunications laws:

Audio broadcast flag
Devices would be banned based on "consensus" of FCC-created review board, which has a year to do this.

Broadband taxes
Taxes would be imposed on VoIP and broadband providers.

Child pornography
FCC would be asked to come up with rules banning child porn on local video services.

Municipal broadband
Cities and states could set up their own networks, with some restrictions.

Net neutrality
No new powers for FCC; it would publish a report instead.

Video broadcast flag
Some over-the-air receivers likely would be banned within six months, but regulations allow some fair use.

VoIP providers
Companies offering Internet phone services would increasingly be regulated and taxed as traditional phone companies.

Stevens did seem, however, to bow to pressure from technology groups and the consumer electronics industry when devising related regulations to copy-protect digital video. His legislation would order the FCC to ban digital TV tuners, such as ElGato's EyeTV 500, that let users record over-the-air broadcasts and save them without copy protection.

But the bill does say that Americans should enjoy the right to share recorded broadcast TV over their home networks, make "short excerpts" available over the Internet, and that news programming generally should not be flagged. Those sections are likely to draw opposition from the Motion Picture Association of America and its allies; one source close to Hollywood told CNET News.com on Monday that "the movie industry has real problems with the broadcast flag language as it appears in the bill."

A bill's long journey
If history is any indication, it's unlikely that Stevens' proposal will be enacted until next year at the earliest.

Because 2006 is an election year, work on Capitol Hill is likely to drop off as November approaches, and the House leadership may not see eye-to-eye with Stevens. For instance, at a House hearing in November, some politicians suggested that it was premature to enshrine a broadcast flag requirement in federal law.

Enacting the 1996 Telecommunications Act--the last major law in this area--was anything but a rapid process. Then-Sen. James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat, first introduced an amendment that would become the Communications Decency Act in July 1994.

"These measures will help assure that the information superhighway does not turn into a red light district," Exon said at the time. "It will help protect children from being exposed to obscene, lewd, or indecent messages."

Exon later glued his proposal onto the Telecommunications Act, which was introduced in the Senate in March 1995 and sponsored by Stevens' predecessor, Democratic Sen. Larry Pressler. But negotiations between the House and Senate dragged on for months, and President Clinton didn't sign the measure until February 1996. The dozens of contentious topics that Stevens chose to address are likely to complicate negotiations this time around as well.

Net neutrality, for instance, has become a rallying cry recently for Internet and software firms and liberal advocacy groups (and even one or two conservative ones) that say strict FCC regulations are necessary to protect the Internet. Net neutrality refers to the idea of the federal government preventing broadband providers from favoring some Web sites or video streams' connection speeds over others.

Large telephone and cable companies have argued against the need to put such principles into law, saying they're not interested in blocking sites or services but deserve the right to charge extra for such a "fast lane" to make their investments in bandwidth-hogging services and new technologies economically viable. Broadband providers have spent billions of dollars to run fiber or faster links to American homes and businesses.

Another contentious topic is whether municipal governments should be competing with private companies by running their own broadband networks. This bill would authorize it--and zap state laws, including one in Pennsylvania that have restricted such activity. (A bill introduced in the House last year takes the opposite approach and bans all such municipal networks.)
Ted Stevens

Under Stevens' proposal, called the Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act, municipalities would face some restrictions designed to prevent discrimination by public-sector enterprises against private-sector ones. Governments would be forced, for instance, to post public notice of any projects they planned to undertake and to have an open bidding process if they planned to bring on any private corporations as partners. That provision borrows from a broadly pro-business broadband bill introduced last summer by Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican.

Raising broadband taxes
Also, if Stevens' legislation passes, a broader swath of Americans would be taxed for the Universal Service Fund, a controversy-plagued, multibillion-dollar pool of money that's currently used to subsidize telecommunications services in rural and other high-cost areas, schools and libraries.

Critics--including Stevens, a self-avowed USF proponent--have charged that the fund has steadily been dwindling because traditional services, such as long-distance, are taking in less money, while unanticipated voice technologies, such as voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, are not expressly required to pay up. (A number of the larger VoIP providers, including Vonage, have said they already pay into the fund.)

The Stevens-Inouye proposal would require all companies providing a "communications service" to pay into the fund, which most likely would translate into another line item on customer bills. The bill defines "communications service" as a telecommunications service, a broadband service offering transmission speeds of at least 200 kilobits per second in one direction, and an IP-enabled voice service that connects to the public-switch telephone network. That means services like the voice-chat feature on AOL Instant Messenger would not be subject to the tax.

It would be up to the FCC to decide how to levy the fees. It could choose, for instance, to charge an USF fee to each phone number or IP address or to continue the current model, in which companies contribute a fixed portion of their revenues to the fund.

Like a proposal introduced last week by Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, a Republican on Steven's committee, the new bill would also create a separate "broadband service for unserved areas" account within the USF that would allow up to $500 million of support each year for such ventures.

"The overarching theme of the bill we introduce today is deployment of broadband nationwide," Stevens said in a statement upon introducing the bill.

The approach, however, does not enjoy unanimous support. Free-market thinkers and their sympathizers, including Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, tend to argue that because of evidence that broadband prices are on the decline, the fund should be capped or even phased out entirely.

The bill also revisits freeing up bands on the broadcast television spectrum for various purposes, including more affordable broadband deployments. It sets forth requirements for a consumer education campaign related to the digital television transition, which Congress approved late last year. That measure requires broadcasters to vacate the analog spectrum by Feb. 17, 2009, so that it can be turned over to public safety workers and auctioned off for new wireless services.

Like a number of its predecessors, the bill also proposes allowing unused channels, or "white spaces," on the broadcast television bands to be snapped up for unlicensed wireless ventures.

Consumer advocates say the properties of that chunk of the radio spectrum would enable cheaper and easier setup of broadband networks. The broadcasting lobby has railed against the idea, fearing interference with their stations' reception. The new bill would require the FCC to vet such concerns and to set rules aimed at staving off such conflicts.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6067153.html

More Professors Ban Laptops In Class
Kathy Matheson

As the professor lectured on the law, the student wore a poker face. But that was probably because, under the guise of taking notes on his laptop, the student actually was playing poker - online, using the school's wireless Internet connection. The scenario is not uncommon in today's college classrooms, and some instructors want it stopped. So they have done the unthinkable - banned laptops.

The move caused an uproar at the University of Memphis, where law professor June Entman nixed the computers in March because she felt they were turning her students into stenographers and inhibiting classroom debate.

Students rebelled by filing a complaint with the American Bar Association, although the organization dismissed it.

At the University of Pennsylvania, law professor Charles Mooney banned laptops from his classes two years ago for similar reasons.

Around that time, said Mooney, he was serving as an expert witness in a lawsuit. During a break in his deposition, he recalled asking the stenographer if she found the case interesting. She replied that she didn't remember anything she had taken down, Mooney said.

"I thought, 'That's what my students are doing,'" he said.

The ban led to "a lot of grumbling," Mooney said. Some students even dropped the class.

But as an experiment, the professor permitted laptops this past year to compare the difference in students' performance. His conclusion: Don't allow laptops.

Penn law student Karen Yeh, 23, said a laptop prohibition in one of her classes this past year was unnecessary. The embarrassing possibility of being unable to answer a question posed by the professor was reason enough for students to pay attention.

"Nobody would've been surfing the Net," Yeh said. "You're just too scared to get called on."

But some students said online distractions are really no different from pre-laptop days, when they might do a crossword puzzle in class.

Ryan McKenzie, a third-year Penn law student, said so much of students' knowledge is gleaned outside the classroom that in-class distractions don't detract from learning.

"The class is only a small part of the whole experience," said McKenzie, 29. "It's much more independent study."

Paul Engelking, a chemistry professor at the University of Oregon, said he was disturbed to find students gambling online while they were purportedly working on an in-class assignment.

Yet even students who are diligently taking notes with their laptops are missing out on social interaction and jokes the teachers make, he said.

"There isn't even eye contact going on in the classroom," said Engelking.

One remedy instructors have, he said, is to establish penalties for Web surfing, codify them in a course syllabus, and then enforce them.

But even that leaves a lot to be desired, Engelking said.

"I'm not completely thrilled about being a policeman in my own lecture hall," he said. "I've got enough things to do."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

All hear this

'Skypecasts' Allow 100-Person Conferencing
Peter Svensson

Skype, eBay Inc.'s Internet telephone subsidiary, is extending its reach with "Skypecasts" - free audio conferences for up to 100 participants.

Skype is used mainly for person-to-person calling but also has a conferencing feature for up to 10 people, who can all speak at the same time. A Skypecast, however, will be moderated by a host who controls when someone can speak.

The service launches Wednesday in an "early preview" form, said Skype's vice president of global marketing, Saul Klein.

Users will be able to find Skypecasts on the Skype Web site, where all the conferences will be listed publicly.

Skype envisions Skypecasts as a way for people to discuss shared interests and hobbies. Six Apart Ltd., the parent of blogging and networking services TypePad, Movable Type and LiveJournal, plans to promote Skypecasts as a way of expanding online communities, Klein said.

The term "Skypecast" could cause some confusion among bloggers - it has been used to describe a recording of an interview conducted via Skype, then distributed as a "podcast."

Skype is also releasing a new beta, or trial version, of its main application that includes the option to send text messages to cell phones for a small fee.

Other new features:

- Contacts in Microsoft Outlook can be called directly from Skype.

- Groups of contacts can be shared among users.

- Users will be able to pay for services like calls to landline phones without leaving the application. In the previous version of the software, users went to Skype's Web site to pay.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

Time Warner Profit Climbs Almost 60 pct.
Seth Sutel

Media conglomerate Time Warner Inc. reported Wednesday that its first-quarter profit climbed nearly 60 percent, driven by growth in its cable TV division and gains from the sale of its book group and other assets.

The New York-based company, whose holdings include Warner Bros., the Time Inc. magazine publisher, CNN and HBO, earned $1.46 billion, or 32 cents a share, in the first three months of the year, up from $915 million, or 19 cents per share, in the same period a year ago.

Revenues rose 1 percent to $10.46 billion from $10.36 billion a year ago.

Excluding unusual gains and other one-time effects in both periods as well as the results from its book group, which it has agreed to sell to the French media and defense conglomerate Lagardere SCA, earnings rose 32 percent to $1.2 billion from $908 million in the same period a year ago.

On that basis, earnings per share rose to 26 cents from 19 cents, well ahead of the estimate of the 20 cents expected by analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

The biggest gains among Time Warner's far-flung properties came in its cable TV division, where operating income rose 25 percent on a 15 percent gain in revenues.

Time Warner Cable added 82,000 basic cable subscribers in the quarter, and the company also reported gains in signing up customers for premium services including digital video, high-speed Internet, digital video recorders and digital phone service.

The gains in cable as well as in TV and movie production and cable networks offset declines at AOL and in magazine publishing.

AOL continued to lose subscribers, shedding 835,000 in the quarter for a total of 18.6 million, as it remakes itself into an advertising-driven Internet company. AOL's operating income fell 14 percent as declines in subscription revenues more than offset gains in advertising.

Time Inc.'s earnings fell 12 percent in the quarter on weaker results at its overseas magazines as well as $12 million in restructuring charges as it revamped its corporate hierarchy. The sale of Time Warner Book Group, which was announced in February, resulted in a gain of $206 million.

The company also recorded one-time gains in the quarter from the sale of other assets, including a $20 million profit from the sale of two aircraft and gains from investments in a telecom company and Canal Satellite Digital.

Time Warner said it had repurchased $8 billion of its own stock - or 10 percent of its outstanding shares - under its current share buyback program, and expects to complete the full $20 billion buyback by the end of 2007.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

Profit Falls as Sales Rise at Verizon
Ken Belson

Verizon Communications said yesterday that its profit dipped 7.1 percent in the first quarter as it absorbed the costs of integrating MCI and building a fiber optic network designed to deliver television to homes.

Sales, however, jumped because the mobile phone division, Verizon Wireless, continued to outperform its rivals and because demand was strong for broadband lines.

Verizon, the nation's second-largest phone company, after AT&T, earned $1.63 billion, or 56 cents a share, compared with $1.76 billion, or 63 cents a share, in the quarter a year ago. Excluding one-time costs, Verizon earned 60 cents a share, a penny more than financial analysts had expected.

Verizon said its integration of MCI, which it purchased in January, was ahead of schedule. The company expects to save $550 million in costs this year as a result of the merger. Verizon also said it had eliminated one-third of the 3,500 jobs that it planned to cut at MCI this year.

Revenue grew 25.1 percent, to $22.7 billion, compared with the $18.2 billion in sales Verizon generated in the first quarter of 2005.

Verizon said it operated 48 million phone lines at the end of March, 3.6 million fewer than at the end of the first quarter last year. But the company said the number of broadband subscribers jumped 47.1 percent in the first quarter compared with the period last year.

As in past quarters, the biggest contribution to growth came from Verizon Wireless. The company added 1.7 million new subscribers and sales grew 18.8 percent in the quarter. Like other wireless carriers, Verizon Wireless has been trying to persuade customers to use more data services to offset a slowdown in the amount of money generated from voice calls.

Monthly average spending per customer for wireless data services rose to $5.58, up 79 percent from the quarter last year. The company said it had 6.2 million subscribers for its high-speed mobile phone service.

Ivan G. Seidenberg, Verizon's chief executive, repeated that his company was interested in buying the 45 percent of Verizon Wireless owned by the British company Vodafone, but that Vodafone must decide when it wants to sell its stake.

Financial analysts, however, continue to voice concerns about Verizon's ambitious plans to install fiber optic cable to millions of homes by the end of the decade. The company's new network now passes 3.6 million homes and Verizon hopes to reach 6 million homes by the end of the year. The costs of connecting homes to the network remain high, though, and the number of customers buying services is relatively small.

The costs of building the fiber network shaved 6 cents a share off Verizon's earnings in the quarter.

Verizon is spending far more to build a new network than AT&T, which is extending its fiber optic cables to within 3,000 feet of homes and using existing copper cables to cover the remaining distance.

Despite the higher cost, Doreen A. Toben, Verizon's chief financial officer, said investors were starting to understand that her company's network would be more versatile than AT&T's and thus worth the extra cost.

"We've spent a lot of time getting bashed" because AT&T's network is cheaper than Verizon's, she said. But now "analysts seem to be taking a longer-term view."

Yesterday, Verizon's shares fell 15 cents, or 0.46 percent, to $32.64.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/te...y/03place.html

Microsoft Teams Up With Hollywood to Offer Original Web Shows
Lorne Manly

Nearly 10 years after wholeheartedly but prematurely embracing original entertainment programming on the Web, Microsoft is re-entering the fray. But instead of attempting to contort itself into a media company by hiring scores of relatively unknown writers and producers and go it virtually alone, this time Microsoft has chosen to team up with some high-profile Hollywood talent.

The first deal for its MSN Originals initiative is an alliance with Ben Silverman, one of the prime movers behind importing the reality show craze to the United States and the producer of shows like "The Office" and "The Biggest Loser" on NBC.

The one-year, multimillion-dollar deal calls for the creation of 10 Web pilots for MSN, each tailored to one or more strengths of the Web. Four shows have already been given the go-ahead, including a short-form comedy that can be described, in classic high-concept Hollywood style, as "The Office" meets "Reno 911" meets "Airplane," doled out in two-and-a-half minute bits starting this fall. Adding to the sitcom verisimilitude: Tom Arnold is close to signing on to star as the lovably flawed pilot for a commuter airline.

Another show, "Under the Influence," plans to pair a musician with one of his or her inspirations ("Unplugged" meets "Crossroads"), have them engage in a musical give-and-take, and then allow the audience to delve more deeply into the lives and music of other important figures in the musicians' lives.

Other approved pilots are "Face Off," an interactive "Crossfire" with a pop-culture slant, and the tentatively titled "Chef to the Rescue," which will allow people whipping up meals to get specific advice from a celebrity chef.

To harness the Web's attributes, many of the shows and applications will wrap around them community offshoots, commerce opportunities and the ability to dig deeper for related segments or information. Product placement, a specialty of Mr. Silverman, will also be an integral part of the programming.

And in a final twist, Mr. Silverman's Reveille, the independent production company he founded and runs, will be able to turn any of the Web shows into television series. Microsoft will have a financial stake in any resulting show. "We are all about building brands that can go across mediums," Mr. Silverman said.

Microsoft's move comes as it is looking to jazz up its MSN portal, one part of its accelerating competition with Google, Yahoo and AOL. Ultimately Microsoft executives want to lure more Web users to MSN, keep them there longer than they have stayed in the past and sell plenty of advertising to marketers wishing to woo them.

The deal is expected to be announced today at the MSN Strategic Account Summit, a Microsoft-convened gathering of marketing, technology and entertainment executives in Redmond, Wash.

Microsoft's previous foray into original Web content was not particularly auspicious. In 1996 and 1997 the company poured about a $100 million into shows like "475 Madison" (a dark comedy about a New York advertising agency) and "Project: Watchfire" (a serious look at U.F.O.'s) and mini-sites like Mungo Park (an outdoor adventure project) and the movie-obsessed Cinemania.

In November 1996, when MSN announced its transition from a proprietary service to a Web supersite, it unveiled a lineup of more than two dozen shows for what its executives — borrowing from the language of television — called a new season. In the ensuing months it found itself mimicking another tradition of the television business when it canceled almost all of the shows.

Within a few years Microsoft had dumped nearly all of the original entertainment programming for more practical, utilitarian services. "Perhaps we invested too much too quickly in content before the audience was there and the bandwidth was there," said Gayle Troberman, the director of branded entertainment and experiences for MSN.

Faster connections and the audience's embrace of Web video have persuaded Microsoft executives to intensify their original programming ambitions. But Microsoft executives have also learned to play to the company's strength: its collection of large numbers of Web users, thanks largely to the power of its Web browser and its ability to steer people to MSN.

While continuing to license content from existing media and entertainment companies (like clips of NBC shows or the streaming of new shows before they make their debuts on network television) and beefing up its user-generated content platform, MSN is adding a third pillar to its content strategy.

"We're going to partner with the experts," the new generation of content creators for the broadband experience, said Rob Bennett, general manager of entertainment and video services for MSN.

"We're not going to go build a massive studio in Santa Monica and go give someone a Handycam," Mr. Bennett added, in a playful dig at Yahoo's media efforts. (Yahoo recently scaled back its ambitious plans to produce television-style programming for the Web site, shifting more to user-generated content as well as repurposed fare from media and entertainment companies.)

Mr. Silverman and his staff — and the connections to talent they bring — are the attraction for MSN. Mr. Silverman's longtime relationship with Mr. Arnold, for example, helped interest the actor in the concept for the Web sitcom, tentatively titled "Airplane." And for "Face Off," Reveille is working with Woody Thompson, a co-creator of "Pop-Up Video," the VH1 creation in the 1990's that spurred a generation of wisecrackers to ironically and affectionately deconstruct the detritus of popular culture.

"We told Woody, 'The same way you took on the static music video, you should be attacking this new medium,' " Mr. Silverman said.

MSN meanwhile has the distribution to get these new shows in front of millions of people, quickly. And MSN has plenty of knowledge about what their audience flocks to. Entertainment, for example, represents about half of the searches on MSN, according to Mr. Silverman. Knowing that tidbit helped Reveille decide to make the most-searched entertainment-related query become the topic for the debate of the day for "Face Off."

MSN and Reveille executives understand that Web users want content they can snack on, and then — when the mood strikes and spare time materializes — immerse themselves in offshoots. That characteristic causes Mr. Silverman to rave about the possibilities of creating programming for the Web.

"It's creativity without walls," Mr. Silverman said. "You're never in one room."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/arts/03micr.html

Microsoft and Google Set to Wage Arms Race
Steve Lohr and Saul Hansell

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, described Google in an interview late last year as a worthy adversary, a company to test Microsoft's mettle. "This is hypercompetition, make no mistake," Mr. Gates observed.

The rivalry between the companies is growing more combative, and with good reason: the outcome is likely to shape the future of competition in computing and the way people use information technology.

A measure of how seriously Microsoft takes the challenge came last Thursday when it announced that its spending would rise sharply next year, about $2 billion higher than previous estimates. Much of the extra money, analysts say, is going to meet the threat from companies offering advertising-supported Internet services and software, led by Google.

"Microsoft doesn't have to kill Google, but it has to narrow the gap," said Richard Sherlund, an analyst at Goldman Sachs & Company. "It has to be in the same ZIP code."

To succeed, Microsoft has to make strong inroads into Internet services and software, where Google is a leader. "It's clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk," Ray Ozzie, a chief technical officer, warned in an e-mail memo to Microsoft employees last year.

Microsoft enters that battle from a stronghold: its lucrative, powerful business in personal computer software. Google has asserted that Microsoft's next Web browser typically steers users to Microsoft's search service, limiting consumer choice and potentially hurting Google, the leading Internet search engine.

Microsoft says Google's objections are mistaken, and that its new browser, Internet Explorer 7, increases a user's search options.

But Google has advantages of its own, and the Internet services business is very different from the desktop software industry.

The Internet model is one that offers search, e-mail, calendar, contacts and even word processing as services accessible remotely with a PC or hand-held device with a Web browser. Typically, Google invents a new service or feature, makes it a free Web-based service, and only later figures out how to make money on it from advertising of some kind.

That ad-supported software, distributed as a Web service, is a threat to Microsoft's model of selling licensed desktop software, at least in the consumer market. Corporations have so far shown less interest in ad-supported software as an Internet service.

To smaller software companies, Google's strategy appears to have the same competitive impact as Microsoft's tried-and-true practice of bundling more software programs and features into its Windows operating system.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, a Web newsletter, said that in some niches of the software business, Google is casting the same sort of shadow over Silicon Valley that Microsoft once did.

"You've got people who don't even feel they can launch a product for fear that Google will get in," Mr. Sullivan said.

Google, he said, has acquired companies and then made their products free, roiling the markets in which they compete. Google has introduced free versions of the graphics software made by SketchUp and of the Internet analytics service from Urchin, two companies that it bought.

And Google won a bid to offer wireless Internet service in San Francisco at no charge, hoping to make money by selling local advertising. If this model proves to be successful, it could cut into the business of other Internet providers and wireless phone companies.

Now Google is starting to move directly into Microsoft's core market. It recently acquired Writely, a Web-based word processor.

How far Google can eat into Microsoft's software franchise is uncertain. But Microsoft fears that Google could become a kind of operating system of the Internet in the same way that Windows is the dominant operating system of personal computing.

For its part, Google wants to avoid becoming the "next Netscape," a reference to the early leader in the browser market that Microsoft eventually thwarted.

"A lot of the people who are at the center of Google had done hand-to-hand combat with Microsoft in the 90's, and I don't think they have forgotten," observed John Battelle, the editor of SearchBlog, a Web log on search technology.

The group includes Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive and former executive of Sun Microsystems; Omid Kordestani, its senior vice president for sales and a former Netscape executive; and John Doerr, a Google director and venture capitalist who was a prime backer of Netscape, Sun Microsystems and other Microsoft rivals.

"They are very worried," Mr. Battelle said, "about Microsoft leveraging their I.E. monopoly," referring to Microsoft's commanding share of the browser market, which Microsoft includes in Windows.

The fears of both companies may well be exaggerated. For Microsoft, the PC promises to remain a powerful business and technology franchise for years to come. And Google should benefit from the fact that Microsoft, after a federal antitrust judgment against it and a settlement with the government, is more restrained in its tactics and behavior than it once was.

A major expense of their escalating battle lies in the very nature of the Internet services realm: the digital engine rooms and power plants that must be built to support it. Google does not disclose technical details, but estimates of the number of computer servers in its data centers range up to a million.

Last month, when reporting its quarterly earnings, Google reported a doubling in its rate of capital investment, mainly in computer servers, network equipment and space for data centers, and said it would spend at least $1.5 billion over the next year.

As Google grows, so does its need to store and handle more Web site information, video and e-mail content on its servers. "Those machines are full," Mr. Schmidt, the chief executive, said in an interview last month. "We have a huge machine crisis."

To catch up, Microsoft is also stepping up capital spending as it invests aggressively to build data centers worldwide. "It is becoming more capital intensive," said Mr. Sherlund of Goldman Sachs. "But the company has a bulging cash position and no debt. That's not a constraint for Microsoft."

However deep their pockets and established their names, the two companies will mainly compete on one point. "In the long run," Mr. Battelle said, "it's about whether you have the best service."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/te.../02google.html

All of a Sudden, Old Fashioned Wind-Up Energy Makes Sense

Mechanical clocks have existed since the 1300's and early last century, direct wind-up power was the only way to start your car - but only in the last decade has the seemingly obvious connection between wind-up energy generation and power reliant modern devices been made. British inventor Trevor Baylis saw the benefits of developing a wind-up radio for third world countries in 1991- his direct inspiration was to help combat the spread of AIDS by providing a means to transmit vital information about the disease to areas where no electricity was available - and the idea was first commercialised in 1996 when Freeplay released its wind-up radio.

Baylis's prototype wind-up radio operated by means of a coiled spring which powered a generator through a series of gears and played for 14 minutes after being wound for 30 seconds, but the latest models incorporate rechargeable batteries which allow the radio to be charged at any time - not only when its in use. The Freeplay Energy range also includes combination torch/radios, a short wave version and systems that incorporate solar power, batteries, or AC/DC adaptors as well as wind-up energy. The latest radios deliver around 50 minutes of operating time when fully wound which takes 60 turns.

Freeplay Energy has sold over three million units since its beginnings, and over 150,000 of these have gone to countries in the developing world - most of these through the assistance of government and aid agencies - and although the units are still relatively expensive there is a continuing push to make this technology count where it's needed most.

Sony and Phillps have entered the wind-up radio market and Motorola have teamed up with Freeplay to develop a wind-up mobile phone charger that offers 5 minutes of talk time for 45 seconds of winding. The product is designed to work with all Motorola phones and will be available in the US later this year. There are no plans for an Australian release as yet.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg for wind-up energy - mobile phones, MP3s, laptops and scores of other devices become far more energy efficient as well as critical to our daily lives. Products based on the Motorola Freecharge concept are already beginning to emerge from elsewhere and British company Atkin Design and Development have produced a next generation 'wind-up battery' that uses a supercapacitor instead of a rechargeable lithium battery. When this innovation was adapted to the wind-up radio, Atkin Design in conjunction with Sony produced a unit that plays for 90 minutes after one minute of winding.

The Freeplay range is available in Australia through Multi-powered products (www.multipoweredproducts.com.au) and the basic radio unit costs AUS$104.50
http://www.gizmag.com/go/1263/

If it only had a crank

Intel to Offer Its Own Plan for Global Internet Access
John Markoff

Aiming to help close the so-called digital divide, the Intel Corporation plans to announce a design for a sub-$400 educational laptop and a five-year, $1 billion program to train teachers and to extend wireless digital Internet access worldwide.

The moves are intended to bolster Intel's reach into new markets, but may also have an effect on the American market for computers in education.

The program is to be announced on Tuesday at the World Congress on Information Technology, a conference in Austin, Tex., where Intel's chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, will elaborate on it in a speech on Wednesday.

The initiative, called World Ahead, comes as Intel, the No. 1 chip maker, is embarking on what it says will be a $1 billion revamping program in the face of declining market share and a lagging share price. It will roughly double what Intel is spending annually on training and technology support in places lagging in digital development, Mr. Otellini said in a telephone interview on Monday.

The company plans to support the computer training of 10 million teachers around the world. It has already financed the training of three million, he said.

He distinguished Intel's efforts from other campaigns with similar aims by saying Intel would focus on full-featured computer systems with enough power and memory to run Microsoft software.

Intel's rival chip maker, Advanced Micro Devices, has backed the concept of reaching half of the world's population with inexpensive personal computers by 2015, and Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been designing a sub-$100 notebook computer for educational use in developing nations.

Those machines have either been designed to run open-source software or a subset of the complete version of Microsoft's standard desktop software.

The issue has been a highly charged one, both for political and business reasons.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Mr. Negroponte publicly debated the issue with Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, and his chief technology officer, Craig J. Mundie, who suggested that a better alternative to an ultralow-cost computer might be a combination phone and personal organizer that can be fitted with an inexpensive display and a keyboard.

On Monday, Mr. Otellini appeared to be making a point of defending the utility of the Intel-Microsoft desktop standard.

"We don't think you cross the digital divide with old technology," he said. "It doesn't need exotic technology and it runs real applications."

The new Intel design, to be called Eduwise, will include software for the classroom. Makers of the computer are to be named later.

Mr. Otellini dismissed the possibility that the emergence of such low-cost computers might cannibalize existing markets, saying that low-end portable computers were already close to these prices in the United States.

Mr. Negroponte, whose machine will have a handle, a hand crank and an innovative display screen, is in discussions with Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand and South Africa to purchase millions of the notebooks.

He said that the Intel program was a step forward, but that focusing efforts on training teachers had serious drawbacks.

"Anything is better than nothing," he said, "but teacher training is the slowest way to improve global education and reaches very few rural, remote teachers in very poor places."

He argued that a more radical and more efficient approach was to equip children with technology. Intel has already announced several PC design initiatives for specific regions, including a desktop computer for the Indian market and another for Mexico. The Mexican machine is based on a partnership with Telmex, the Mexican communications company and involves a subsidy for a broadband Internet connection. The machine is priced about 20 percent below the consumer market price for a similar machine.

In addition to training and access to computing, Intel's focus will be on Internet connections. The company has already financed 175 experimental wireless networks using Wi-Max, a longer-distance version of the Wi-Fi networking standard.

Intel executives have said they believe that Wi-Max deployments will leapfrog stages of development in the nonindustrialized world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/te...gy/02chip.html

IM Worm Raises Bar By Using P2P For Herder Comm Channel
Gregg Keizer

Security companies alerted users Tuesday of a worm that spreads via instant messaging, plants a bot on hijacked PCs, and poses a special challenge to researchers hoping to trace the bot back to its controller.

Dubbed "Nagache.a" by the likes of McAfee and Symantec, the worm propagates through AIM (America Online Instant Messaging) and MSN Messenger, as well as via email and network shares. It will also install in a drive-by download - a secret installation invisible to the user - if the PC isn't patched against a pair of 2004 vulnerabilities in Windows.

In turn, Nagache.a installs a bot - a controlling component - that communicates to its handler, sometimes called a "herder," on TCP port 8.

However, unlike most bots, which are run by their herders through IRC, this bot is controlled via a peer-to-peer network that includes the infected machines. The traffic between the compromised computers and the herder is also encrypted, or at least not readable, said an analyst with the Internet Storm Center.

Other advisories said that the bot had raised the malware bar.

"The command and control channel that is used is unique, as the bot appears to connect to infected peers instead of a static list," said Websense in its online alert. "A peer-to-peer command and control channel makes it more difficult to block commands issued to the bot and the traffic over this channel uses obfuscation in an attempt to bypass intrusion detection systems."

Although AOL has blocked several of the IP addresses hard-coded in the worm to prevent the ensuing bot from communicating with its herder, "numerous other peers have been identified" the Internet Storm Center said in an update Tuesday. "It no longer makes sense to post a list of IPs. The best defense would to be to monitor activity in your flows for tcp/8, update anti-virus, and/or use the Snort signature to detect this activity."
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.a...&src=site-marq

Music-Sharing Programs Targeted
Jessica Langdon

Peer-to-peer programs like LimeWire and Kazaa found themselves in the federal spotlight as music companies filed suits against hundreds of people - including a woman at Sheppard Air Force Base - alleging they downloaded and distributed music illegally.

Peer-to-peer programs allow users to share music and other media files, and the recording companies and artists don't get paid for those exchanges.

Companies that hold titles to several copyrighted recordings - from "Falling Away from Me" by Korn to "Panama" by Van Halen - named Mallory Young, whose address is listed at Sheppard Air Force Base, as a defendant.

Young was one of 235 named defendants in suits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America on April 21.

The suit against Young seeks an injunction prohibiting her from downloading or distributing materials that belong to the plaintiffs' companies - which hold exclusive rights - unless she has direct permission and license to do so.

It would also require her to destroy any unauthorized downloads or copies of those recordings.

When delving into potential lawsuits, online investigators from RIAA use the same methods anyone else would to search peer-to-peer networks for copyrighted materials, and they confirm the files are copyrighted, a fact sheet explains.

At that point, the investigators don't know the users' identities - they know only the Internet addresses - and RIAA members file "John Doe" lawsuits until they can track down names.

Internet service providers supply the names, and suits are then filed with named defendants.

RIAA, which represents recording companies, takes the "songlifting" issue seriously, its president said.

"The theft of music continues to hurt our industry as a whole from songwriters losing their jobs to record stores closing their doors," a news release quoted RIAA President Cary Sherman,

Music theft "directly affects our ability to invest in the next generation of music," Sherman said. "Record companies are offering fans an extraordinary digital music experience, but the growth of the digital music market will suffer if we allow this theft to go unchecked."

Lawsuits were filed in federal district courts in Wichita Falls and other Texas cities as well as across the country on April 21.
http://www.timesrecordnews.com/trn/l...672025,00.html

Milestones: First person to ever to appear on TV dies

Vale: The Mother of Television

As extraordinary as it may seem, one of the people who created the first television died last week when Elma G. "Pem" Farnsworth, author of the Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on the Invisible Frontier and wife of Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television, died in Bountiful, Utah at the age of 98. Pem married Philo Taylor Farnsworth in 1926. She was on her husband's lab team, handling technical drawings for his experiments with transmitting pictures through the air and was present on September 7, 1927, in San Francisco when his invention of electronic television was first demonstrated successfully. Pem was the first person ever to appear on television and is often referred to as "The Mother of Television." Her technical drawings of those early experiments are part of the permanent collection in the Smithsonian Institute. A devout Mormon, she derived her greatest satisfaction in encouraging young people, saying "if you believe you can do it, anything is possible."

After Philo's death in 1971, "Pem" dedicated herself to preserving his legacy, keeping his name in its rightful place among great scientists and inventors of the 20th Century.

She penned her autobiography Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on the Invisible Frontier in 1990.

Thanks to her efforts Philo was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame, is represented in statuary hall in Washington, D.C., and featured with a handful of inventors on U.S. postal stamps.

Her wish was to live to see a film made of her husband's life.

Well into her 90's, Mrs. Farnsworth was successful in lobbying the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences to create an award honoring her husband's contributions to the medium. She presented the first "Philo T. Farnsworth Award for Technical Excellence in Television" at the Emmy Awards in 2003.

A devout Mormon, she derived her greatest satisfaction in encouraging young people, saying "if you believe you can do it, anything is possible." Philo is quoted in the excellent book The Boy who invented Television, as saying, "I know that God exists. I know that I have never invented anything. I have been a medium by which these things were given to the culture as fast as the culture could earn them. I give all the credit to God."

Pem’s own book Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on the Invisible Frontier (Pemberly-Kent Publishing) is now a collectable, as is the original biography, The Story of Television – the life of Philo T Farnsworth.
http://www.gizmag.com/go/5575/

Why You Should Care About Network Neutrality

The future of the Internet depends on it!
Tim Wu

The Internet is largely meritocratic in its design. If people like instapundit.com better than cnn.com, that's where they'll go. If they like the search engine A9 better than Google, they vote with their clicks. Is it a problem, then, if the gatekeepers of the Internet (in most places, a duopoly of the local phone and cable companies) discriminate between favored and disfavored uses of the Internet? To take a strong example, would it be a problem if AT&T makes it slower and harder to reach Gmail and quicker and easier to reach Yahoo! mail?

Welcome to the fight over "network neutrality," Washington's current obsession. The debate centers on whether it is more "neutral" to let consumers reach all Internet content equally or to let providers discriminate if they think they'll make more money that way.

The cable firms and the Bells have (to their credit, but under pressure) sworn off blocking Web sites. Instead, they propose to carve off bandwidth for their own services—namely, television—and, more controversially, to charge selected companies a toll for "priority" service. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin thinks there is nothing wrong with that. But critics say technological prioritization and degradation are the same thing—that given limited room on the network, whoever isn't prioritized is by implication degraded.

In trying to figure out who's right, let's forget about the Internet and look at KFC. The fast-food chain discriminates. It has an exclusive deal with Pepsi, and that seems fine to pretty much everyone. Now, let's think about the nation's highways. How would you feel if I-95 announced an exclusive deal with General Motors to provide a special "rush-hour" lane for GM cars only? That seems intuitively wrong. But what, if anything, is the difference between KFC and I-95? And which is a better model for the Internet?

Two obvious differences are market power and the availability of substitutes. KFC is a small fry, relatively, locked in competition with the likes of McDonald's and Popeye's. KFC sells Pepsi? So what? McDonald's sells Coke.

It's a lot harder to substitute for an interstate. And if highways really did choose favorite brands, you might buy a Pontiac instead of a Toyota to get the rush-hour lane, not because the Pontiac is actually a good car. As a result, the nature of competition among car-makers would change. Rather than try to make the best product, they would battle to make deals with highways.

That's what would happen if discrimination reigned on the Internet: a transformation from a market where innovation rules to one where deal-making rules. Or, a market where firms rush to make exclusive agreements with AT&T and Verizon instead of trying to improve their products. There's a deeper point here: When who you know matters more than anything, the market is no longer meritocratic and consequently becomes less efficient. At the extreme, a market where centralized actors pick favorites isn't a market at all, but a planned economy.

What we're ultimately asking is a question that Adam Smith struggled with. Is there something special about "carriers" and infrastructure—roads, canals, electric grids, trains, the Internet—that mandates special treatment? Since about the 17th century, there's been a strong sense that basic transport networks should serve the public interest without discrimination.This might be because so much depends on them: They catalyze entire industries, meaning that gratuitous discrimination can have ripple effects across the nation. By this logic, so long as you think the Internet is more like a highway than a fried-chicken outlet, it should be neutral in what it carries.

This is the basic case for network neutrality—to prevent centralized control over the future of the Internet. But there's a long-standing rebuttal that goes like this: A broadband company already has incentives to make the network neutral, because it's a better network that way. If AT&T makes money on an exclusive deal, they'll lose it somewhere else. Whatever money AT&T earns by prioritizing Google rather than Yahoo!, it will lose by making its product—broadband service—less attractive to consumers. By this logic, regulating the Bells is a waste of time. AT&T and Verizon also say that they must be free to discriminate to justify their investments in building networks. If you don't let us discriminate, they say, we won't build.

It's true that the Bells might make extra cash by discriminating. But AT&T can extract cash in other ways, too, like charging its customers higher prices. I believe that it's better to have consumers pay more for service than to have AT&T picking and choosing winners on the network. Both are a cost to the economy, but the latter is a double cost. It creates costs that are passed on to consumers anyhow, and it also distorts competition between eBay, Yahoo!, and the like. Building networks at the expense of network applications has a logic O. Henry would enjoy, for it's akin to selling a painting in order to buy a better frame.

None of this is to say that a good network-neutrality rule must be absolute, or even close to absolute. It's an open secret that AT&T and Verizon want to become more like cable television companies. If Verizon wants to build a private network to sell TV, that would justify broad powers to control the network, a precondition to providing the service at all. No neutrality rule should be a bar to building better networks that do more.

But what must be banned are blocking, gratuitous discrimination, and choosing favorites. While it's one way to earn cash, it's just too close to the Tony Soprano vision of networking: Use your position to make threats and extract payments. This is similar to the outlawed, but still common, "payola" schemes in the radio world. Yes, there's money in such schemes, but they aren't good for the industry or the country. If allowing network discrimination means being stuck with AT&T's long-term vision of the Internet, it won't be worth it.
http://www.slate.com/id/2140850/fr/rss/

Markey Introduces Net Neutrality Act
Evan Derkacz

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) threw down the gauntlet just moments ago, introducing the Network Neutrality Act of 2006 [full text HERE], which "[offers a] choice between favoring the broadband designs of a small handful of very large companies, and safeguarding the dreams of thousands of inventors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. This legislation is designed to save the Internet and thwart those who seek to fundamentally and detrimentally alter the Internet as we know it."

In an unequivocal editorial today, the NY Times put it this way:
Cable and telephone companies that provide Internet service are talking about creating a two-tiered Internet, in which Web sites that pay them large fees would get priority over everything else.

The Times goes on to note that if the cable and telephone companies got their way, "[it] would be a financial windfall for Internet service providers, but a disaster for users, who could find their Web browsing influenced by whichever sites paid their service provider the most money."

Thus far, nobody who isn't working for the telephone and cable companies -- cough... Mike McCury -- those who will benefit at the expensive of ordinary internet users, has provided any legitimate opposition to Network Neutrality. To wit: watch Sean-Paul Kelley's excellent annotated video of Democrat Charlie Gonzalez's disingenuous spiel HERE. Gonzalez, as you'll find out, happens to be the recipient of a generous contribution from guess who...

During last week's debate on the earlier Markey amendment, calling on the House Energy & Commerce Committee to protect Internet freedom, the more the issue came to light, the more votes neutrality received.

This is that rare bird, a black and white issue, with large companies on one side and the vast majority of America on the other. Politicians will only oppose network neutrality so long as it stays in the darkest corners of debate.

Here's the updated action list, from Matt Stoller via parachutec:

1. SIGN a Net Neutrality petition to Congress.

2. CALL Congress now. Especially, tell your rrepresentatives in the House to support Markey’s Net Neutrality Act of 2006, but educate your senators on this issue too, as the fight will soon move there.

3. WRITE A LETTER to Congress.

4. MYSPACE: Add "Save the Internet" as a friend.

5. Check out the BLOG RESOURCES about this issue, including "Save the Internet" logo.

6. VISIT the SavetheInternet coalition Web site for more information.

The entire text of Markey's act is below or on his webpage HERE.

May 2, 2006- Introduction of the Markey Network Neutrality Act of 2006

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce the "Network Neutrality Act of 2006."

Broadband networks, Mr. Speaker, are the lifeblood of our emerging digital economy. These broadband networks also hold the promise of promoting innovation in various markets and technologies, creating jobs, and furthering education. The world-wide leadership that the U.S. provides in high technology is directly related to the government-driven policies over decades which have ensured that telecommunications networks are open to all lawful uses and all users. The Internet, which is accessible to more and more Americans with every day that goes by on such broadband networks, was also founded upon an open architecture protocol and as a result it has provided low barriers to entry for web-based content, applications, and services.

Recent decisions by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and court interpretations, however, put these aspects of broadband networks and the Internet in jeopardy. The corrosion of historic policies of nondiscrimination by the imposition of bottlenecks by broadband network owners endanger economic growth, innovation, job creation, and First Amendment freedom of expression on such networks. Broadband network owners should not be able to determine who can and who cannot offer services over broadband networks or over the Internet. The detrimental effect to the digital economy would be quite severe if such conduct were permitted and became widespread.

This network neutrality bill has essentially three parts. The first part articulates overall broadband policy and network neutrality goals for the country, and spells out exactly what network neutrality means and puts it into the statute so that it will possess the force of law. The second part embodies reasonable exceptions to the general rules, such as to route emergency communications or offer consumer protection features, such as spam blocking technology. And the final part of the bill features an expedited complaint process to deal with grievances and violations within thirty days.

The legislation states that a broadband network provider may not block, impair, degrade or discriminate against the ability of any person to use a broadband connection to access the content, applications, and services available on broadband networks, including the Internet. It ensures that broadband network providers operate their networks in a non-discriminatory manner. The bill also ensures that consumers can attach any device to the broadband operator's network, such as an Internet phone, or wi-fi router, or settop box, or any other innovative gadget invented in the coming years. Moreover, in order to prevent the warping of the World Wide Web into a system of "tiered service," the legislation will prevent broadband providers from charging new bottleneck fees for enhanced quality of service or the prioritization of bits.

Finally, if a broadband provider chooses to prioritize data of any type, it requires that it do so for all data of that type and not charge a fee for such prioritization. For instance, if a broadband provider wants to prioritize the transmission of bits representing a VOIP phone call for its own VOIP service, it must do so for all VOIP services so as not to put its competitors at an arbitrary disadvantage.

Mr. Speaker, from the beginning of Internet time until August of 2005, the Internet's nondiscriminatory nature was safeguarded from being compromised by Federal Communications Commission rules that required nondiscriminatory treatment by telecommunications carriers. In other words, no commercial telecommunications carrier could engage in discriminatory conduct regarding Internet traffic and Internet access because it was prohibited by law.

In August of 2005, however, the Federal Communications Commission re-classified broadband access to the Internet in a way which removed such legal protections. And how did the industry respond to this change? Just a few weeks after the FCC removed the Internet's protections, the Chairman of then-SBC Communications made the following statement in a November 7th Business Week interview: "Now what they [Google, Yahoo, MSN] would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. . . ."

In a December 1, 2005 Washington Post article, a BellSouth executive indicated that his company wanted to strike deals to give certain Web sites priority treatment in reaching computer users. The article noted this would "significantly change how the Internet operates" and that the BellSouth executive said "his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth's offering." Meaning, that if the rival firm did not pay, or was not permitted to pay for competitive reasons, its service presumably would not "operate with the same quality" as BellSouth's own product.

Finally, on January 6, 2006, the CEO of Verizon, in an address to the Consumer Electronics Show also indicated that Verizon would now be the corporate arbiter of how traffic would be treated when he said the following: "We have to make sure [content providers] don't sit on our network and chew up our capacity."

I think these statements should give pause to those who might argue that we shouldn't do anything to enact strong network neutrality provisions because currently no harm is being done.

Do we really have to wait till these corporate giants divide and conquer the open architecture of the Internet to make that against the law? These telephone company executives are telling us that they intend to discriminate in the prioritization of bits and to discriminate in the offering of "quality of service" functions - for a new fee, a new broadband bottleneck toll - to access high bandwidth customers, we cannot afford to wait until they actually start doing that before we step in to stop it.

Once they start making money by leveraging that bottleneck position in the marketplace, will a future Congress really stare them down and take that revenue stream away?

Mr. Speaker, if we don't protect the openness of the Internet for entrepreneurial activity, we're ruining a wonderful model for low barrier entry, innovation, and job creation. Broadband network owners should not be able to determine who can and who cannot offer services over broadband networks or over the Internet. The detrimental effect to the digital economy would be quite severe if such conduct were permitted and became widespread. The deterioration of significant policies of nondiscrimination by the imposition of artificial bottlenecks by broadband network owners imperil economic growth, innovation, job creation, and First Amendment freedom of expression on such networks.

The Network Neutrality Act of 2006 offers Members a clear choice. It is a choice between favoring the broadband designs of a small handful of very large companies, and safeguarding the dreams of thousands of inventors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. This legislation is designed to save the Internet and thwart those who seek to fundamentally and detrimentally alter the Internet as we know it. Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to support this bill and urge the House to take a decisive stand in favor of network neutrality.
http://alternet.org/blogs/peek/35728/

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http://why.openoffice.org/

Investing Carefully In Hard Drives

Demand for hard disk drives is strong thanks to consumer electronics, but investors should be selective.
Amanda Cantrell

While sales of desktop PCs are slowing down, the spike in popularity of laptops, Xbox 360s, digital video recorders and iPods has boosted hard drive manufacturers nonetheless.

The explosion of digital content -- photos, music and videos that artists and even consumers make and then upload to the Internet -- is also good news for hard drive makers, since all those large files have to be stored somewhere.

Hard drive makers shipped about 103 million hard disk drives in the fourth quarter of 2005, which was nearly a 21 percent increase over the previous year, according to market research firm iSuppli Corp.

And the stocks of these companies have performed accordingly. Shares of Seagate (down $0.45 to $26.22, Research), the number one disk drive maker in America, have climbed 54 percent in the last 12 months and 34 percent for the year to date. Shares of Western Digital (down $0.02 to $21.45, Research), which commands a roughly 17 percent market share, gained 67 percent in the last 12 months and are up 15 percent for the year.

But investors should proceed with caution. The industry is still consolidating, and with mergers come risks. Seagate is acquiring its nearest competitor, Maxtor, in a $2 billion deal that will close later this year.

"Disk drive companies have been dying for decades," said Kevin Landis, portfolio manager of Firsthand Capital Management, a mutual fund firm specializing in tech stocks. "We're down to just the toughest, craftiest, most tenacious companies."

Also, the stocks of the biggest hard drive makers have already enjoyed strong growth, raising the question of how much higher they can go.
Demand still high

Still, the need for storage should keep the hard drive makers busy for years to come; they say trends are afoot that should keep their businesses growing at a good clip.

Brian Dexheimer, senior vice president for Seagate, said the growth of laptop computers is the biggest driver of his company's growth. "As you shrink things, the technology (inside them) needs to shrink as well," he said.

That's why his company is focusing on a new technology called "perpendicular recording," which enables a hard drive to store more information by squeezing bits together more tightly on a disk. It has already shipped some high-end hard drives with this technology.

Dexheimer said the second fastest growing segment is consumer electronics.

Digital video recorders – Tivo-like devices that record programs off digital cable TV – have been a big growth business for the company in the last three years, as has the gaming industry. That's thanks in part to the success of Microsoft's (Research) wildly popular Xbox 360, which uses Seagate hard drives.

And as more consumers create their own digital content, such as photos and videos, that creates the need for more storage space for both consumers and the companies who host all this content, like Apple's iTunes music store and YouTube's video-sharing site.

"We think we are in the catbird seat relative to what we think is a digital content revolution," said Dexheimer.

He added that an increase in corporate regulation and compliance laws in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley has also boosted the bottom lines of hard drive makers, since companies are required to retain more documents and e-mails for longer periods of time.

But hard drive manufacturers also face challenges. One is the proliferation of flash drives. These are currently used instead of traditional hard drives in such devices as the iPod nano, and manufacturers are working on making "hybrid" drives for laptops that combine the properties of traditional and flash drives.

Flash drives are smaller and use less energy, and flash prices are dropping. While computer drives aren't in danger of being replaced by flash drives, consumer electronics devices like video cameras and recordable DVDs will increasingly move to these devices, experts say.

"We're not threatened by it at all," said Seagate's Dexheimer on the proliferation of flash. He points out that the digital media that is stored on portable flash drives, like those found in MP3 players, is also generally stored on consumer hard drives and on servers run by the entertainment companies that sell the media.
Experts advise caution

Investors should still proceed with caution.

Seagate posted strong quarterly results last month, reporting a 17 percent increase in sales and a 20 percent quarterly profit increase from the year-ago quarter. But its shares took a hit in after-hours trading because of a disappointing forecast for the current quarter.

The company's merger with Maxtor is also giving some investors and analysts pause in the near-term. When the deal is complete, Seagate says the combined companies will command a 40 percent share of the market. Seagate currently has about a 30 percent market share.

"In general, mergers can be messy affairs," said Firsthand Capital's Landis, whose fund owns shares of Western Digital. "Seagate has done mergers before, but if you are choosing between two companies and one has just been through a merger, it feels safer to go with one that doesn't have room for the nasty surprise."

Seagate's smaller rival Western Digital also enjoyed a strong quarter, with a 23 percent sales increase and a 45 percent jump in quarterly profit. Both Seagate and Western Digital are trading at about 12 times expected fiscal 2007 earnings.

Analysts at Robert W. Baird & Co. recently upgraded Western Digital to "outperform," saying the company is better situated than foreign rivals like Hitachi to win business from Maxtor once the merger with Seagate is finalized. The analysts also point out that Western Digital bucked an industry-wide trend by actually shipping more desktop units in its most recent quarter than it did the quarter before.

The prognosis for the hard disk industry as a whole is healthy according to analysts and investors. Although the industry is still consolidating, Landis said that the demand for more and more storage will only increase as consumers find more stuff to download -- whether that's TV shows, songs or photographs.

Says Landis: "No one complains that their Internet connection is too fast or their computer is too powerful, and no one complains there's too much storage."

Analysts for Robert W. Baird & Co. do not own stock in the companies they cover, but the firm does banking business with Western Digital and Seagate.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/03/tech...ives/index.htm

Fox, BBC, Al Jazeera Most Trusted: Poll
Jeffrey Goldfarb

One-quarter of consumers abandoned a news source over the past year because they lost trust in its reporting, according to a new survey that also found the BBC, Fox News and Al Jazeera the most trusted brands in their respective home regions.

Results of a poll of more than 10,000 adults in 10 countries by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Reuters Group Plc and The Media Center were released on Wednesday, with an additional finding that media worldwide were trusted by an average of 61 percent of respondents compared with 52 percent who said they trusted their governments.

"National TV is still the most trusted news source by a wide margin, although the Internet is gaining ground among the young," said Doug Miller, president of London-based research firm GlobeScan, which conducted the polling.

"The jury is still out on blogs," he added. "Just as many people distrust them as trust them."

The survey confirmed that media consumption is shifting online for younger generations, as 19 percent of those aged 18 to 24 named the Internet as their most important source of news compared with 9 percent overall.

Seventy-two percent of all respondents said they followed the news closely, including 67 percent of those 18 to 24 years old.

Asked to name the news source they most trusted, without any prompting, 59 percent of Egyptians said Al Jazeera, 52 percent of Brazilians said Rede Globo, 32 percent of Britons said the BBC, 22 percent of Germans said ARD and 11 percent of Americans said Fox News, each leading their respective nations.

The most trusted news brands globally were the BBC, Britain's publicly funded broadcaster, and CNN, which is owned by the world's biggest media conglomerate, Time Warner Inc..

Three Internet portals -- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN -- received the next highest trust ratings across the 10 countries, when respondents were prompted with 16 different brand names.

Although trust in media has grown in most countries over the past four years, the survey found, 28 percent of people across the 10 countries either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the statement: "In the past year I have stopped using a specific media source because it lost my trust."

Germans were unique in the survey for naming newspapers more than TV as their most important news source, by a margin of 45 percent to 30 percent.

Among South Koreans, who have a comparatively low trust of media in general, 34 percent said the Internet was their most important source of news compared with 9 percent worldwide.

More than 1,000 people were surveyed in March and April in each of the United Kingdom, United States, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia and
South Korea.

Reuters is a global news and information provider and The Media Center is a nonprofit think tank that researches media-related issues.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060503/...edia_survey_dc

Gone in 20 Minutes: Using Laptops To Steal Cars

High-tech thieves are becoming increasingly savvy when it comes to stealing automobiles equipped with keyless entry and ignition systems. While many computer-based security systems on automobiles require some type of key — mechanical or otherwise — to start the engine, so-called ‘keyless’ setups require only the presence of a key fob to start the engine.

The expert gang suspected of stealing two of David Beckham’s BMW X5 SUVs in the last six months did so by using software programs on a laptop to wirelessly break into the car’s computer, open the doors, and start the engine.

“It’s difficult to steal cars with complex security, but not impossible. There are weaknesses in any system,” Tim Hart of the Auto Locksmith Association told the U.K.’s Auto Express magazine. “At key steps the car’s software can halt progress for up to 20 minutes as part of its in-built protection,” said Hart.

Because the decryption process can take a while — up to 20 minutes, according to Hart — the thieves usually wait to find the car in a secluded area where it will be left for a long period. That is believed to be what happened to Mr. Beckham — the crooks followed him to the mall where he was to have lunch, and went to work on his X5 after it was parked.

While automakers and locksmiths are supposed to be the only groups that know where and how security information is stored in a car, the information eventually falls into the wrong hands.

According to the Prague Post leaving such information on a laptop is what got Radko Souček caught for stealing several cars. “You could delete all the data from your laptop, but that’s not good for you because the more data you have, the bigger your possibilities,” he says. He says any car that relies on software to provide security can be circumvented by other software. “Every car has its weak spot,” he says. Souček faces up to 12 years in prison.

The Leftlane Perspective: Many modern cars now rely on software entirely for security. Gone are the days where microchips supplemented mechanical locks as an additional security measure. In the case of true ‘keyless’ systems, software is the only thing between a thief and your car. As computers become more powerful, will stealing cars become even easier? Never mind future cars with better security — what about today’s cars a few years down the road? With cars as inexpensive as the Toyota Camry offering entirely keyless systems, these concerns a relevant to all consumers.
http://www.leftlanenews.com/2006/05/...to-steal-cars/

The Microsoft malaise

Commentary: Eight Signs That The Software Giant Is Dead In The Water
John C. Dvorak

For the past year or so, this is what I've been telling people in private. Now that there appears to be some sputtering by both the stock and by those who defend Microsoft I think it might be high time to explain my position.

Let me preface by saying that Microsoft is not about to stop making gobs of money. It's just that there is virtually nothing interesting or exciting happening (with the lone exception of the X-Box360) with anything the company is doing.

To make matters worse none of the upcoming upgrades to the operating system or Microsoft Office appear to have any 'must-have" qualities needed to boost sales in a meaningful way.

Compare what is going on at Microsoft to Apple. And now Apple is piling on with new TV commercials ridiculing all the viruses and security issues you buy when you buy a Windows-based PC. Microsoft advertising ironically highlights dinosaurs.

Let's just look at a casual status report of Microsoft's bed-ridden condition:

1. Vista OS. It's now so delayed that its consumer version will miss the 2006 Christmas season. It's now supposed to arrive in early 2007. Even when it does, all of its promised cool features have been removed and it appears to be little more than a gussied-up version of Windows XP. It appears as if it is going to be a great disappointment. This should have been the company's number one priority.

2. Office 2007. There is nothing in this new suite that is going to do much more than sustain the product as a dominant office suite. Unfortunately seven different versions are going to be released which will just confuse things. A new enterprise version has been added which appears to have a Lotus Notes-like element called Microsoft Groove. This is being sold as some sort of solution for online collaboration. If it is anything like Notes it will create a lot of anguish with users.

3. MSN. Microsoft should have abandoned MSN a decade ago. There is a lot of talk about Microsoft becoming more of a publisher and selling advertising. Microsoft should be buying advertising not selling it. This is not a media publishing company; it's a software publishing company. Why people keep encouraging Microsoft to go in this direction is baffling.

4. MSN Search Engine. Again more of the same and pointless. Selling ads

5. Xbox360. The potential to become the dominant game platform and an eventual and enviable profit center. Unfortunately the company did not foresee the Sony delays and failed to manufacture enough units to satisfy the demand. This was an exhibition of poor planning and bad business intelligence gathering.

6. Pad-based computing. According to Gates just a few years back this was to become the dominant form of computing by now. What happened?

7. Dot Net initiative. The .Net framework that many believe is an example of how Microsoft can actually put together elegant and powerful architectures when it wants to, is being killed by Open Source systems that are free and almost just as powerful. Microsoft has been unable to cope with Open Source except to complain about it.

8. Preoccupation with Google. Microsoft is too easily distracted by successful companies who are not competitors. There is a deep-rooted belief that if a company like Google is successful, then they are an enemy per se. So the company obsesses on what Google is doing rather than concentrating on important Microsoft projects. Now Microsoft is about to do a deal with Yahoo to flank Google. This old-lady-like skittishness is unbecoming for a company this size.

This only scratches the surface of the Microsoft malaise. Now if the investment community sees light at the end of this tunnel good for them. I sure don't see it. I see a company that has settled in and has become big, profitable, and unexciting, lacking real focus or spirit.
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Stor...s&siteid=lycos

Windows Defence on IE7 Search Is No Defence
Stan Beer

The news that Yahoo has weighed into the argument between Microsoft and Google over the bundling of Windows Live search as the default search engine with the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 browser is amusing. The source of amusement is not so much that the distant number two player in the search space is ganging up with the even more distant number three player. It's just that their arguments are so obviously ludicrous.

To bring us all up to speed, Google has complained to both the US Justice Department and the European Commission (EC) over Microsoft making MSN Search the default search engine in the new version of its dominant Internet Explorer browser, IE7. The current version IE 6 has about 85% market share. Google believes that Microsoft is once again trying use its near market monopoly to squash competition.

Google believes Microsoft is trying to make it difficult for users to choose any other search engine except Microsoft's on the browser by making its own product the default search window on the toolbar.

However, representatives from both Microsoft and Yahoo have publicly said that Google is being hypocritical. They say Google has deals with companies like Mozilla, which makes the second most popular browser Firefox and PC maker Dell, where Google is the default search window in the browsers.

If this is the best defence that Microsoft and Yahoo are able to put up in attempt to debunk Google's complaints, then I don't like Microsoft's chances in the courts. There is absolutely no comparison between what Microsoft intends to do with IE7 and what Google has done with either Mozilla's Firefox or Dell.

It is true that both Microsoft and Google make their search engines the default in the respective browsers. However, there is a huge difference.

In the case of Google, it pays hard cash to Mozilla and Dell to get the right to have its search engine placed as the default in the browsers. This is fair use of marketing capital. In addition, neither the Mozilla Firefox browser, which has 11% market share, nor Dell PCs have a near monopoly of the market.

By contrast, Microsoft has a browser, Internet Explorer, with 85% market share and it also owns a search engine with 11% market share. Microsoft does not need to pay one cent to place its search engine in the lead position on its browser, which sits on the vast majority of PCs in the world. What that amounts to is using a near monopoly position to stifle competition.

Microsoft argues that it will be easy for IE7 users to change the default search engine to Google if they want to. However, "easy" is a relative term. For any IE7 user, it's always going to be easier to just leave the default browser as it is - Microsoft's factory setting.

For those who argue that Microsoft should be free to do with its own software as it sees fit, they should recognise one fact. Today, about 95% of computer owners are locked into using expensive proprietary software running on an expensive operating system that is so insecure it has spawned an entire industry devoted to protecting users from hackers. This situation has arisen because of one market player has been allowed to become so dominant that it can use its position to effectively stifle competition.

Hopefully the Department of Justice and European Commission will both bear that in mind when they consider Google's complaint.
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/4134/937/

State Wants MySpace to Raise Minimum Age

Massachusetts Tuesday called on popular teen social networking Web site MySpace.com to strengthen protection of children against sexual predators, including raising the minimum age for users to 18 from 14.

The arrest Tuesday of a 27-year-old man in Connecticut on charges of illegal sexual contact with a 13-year-old girl he met through MySpace underlines the risks of the fast-growing Internet site that boasts about 60 million members.

"MySpace has not taken sufficient steps to ensure that the MySpace Web site is a safe place for minors," Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly said in a letter to MySpace.

He said a three-month investigation found that potential child predators were surfing MySpace seeking chats with potential victims and violent images or content were being posted to bully children.

"An adult can register as a minor member and use that profile to seek access to the profiles of countless underage members," he said in a statement.

MySpace allows teenagers and young adults to find friends and express themselves by posting profiles and blogs, or Web journals covering everything from their favorite singers to schoolwork and intimate personal details.

It generated a blizzard of headlines in national media this year that have raised alarm with parents and school authorities -- from "Man arrested in MySpace.com teen-sex case" to "Sex predators are stalking MySpace; is your teenager a target?"

Connecticut authorities said in March that two men -- one age 22 and the other 39 -- were arrested on allegations they had sexual contact with minors they met through MySpace. Another man was arrested early on Tuesday at a Connecticut hotel after a mother reported her daughter missing.

In February, California police arrested a 26-year-old for

felony child molestation after he met a 14-year-old on MySpace. "It's happening more and more all the time, both through MySpace and through chatrooms and other blogging sites," said Christina Slenk, a director of Web Wise Kids, a nonprofit Internet safety organization based in California.

Reilly, a Democrat running for governor, said his staff raised the state's concerns in a March meeting with officials at MySpace, which media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought for $580 million last year.

MySpace authorities were not immediately available to comment but its chief executive, Chris DeWolfe, told Reuters in March that it had several measures in place to prevent abuse.

He said the site prohibits children under age 14 from using it and restricts access to the profiles of 14- and 15-year-olds, allowing them to be contacted only by users that they add to their buddy lists.

MySpace also uses software to identify minors, flagging profiles with terms likely to be used by children under age 14. But DeWolfe said there was no fool-proof way to verify the age of all users.

Reilly said his investigation found that the safeguards failed. He asked MySpace to install an age and identity verification system, equip Web pages with a "Report Inappropriate Content" link, respond to all reports of inappropriate content within 24 hours and significantly raise the number of staff who review images and content.

He also wants filters to block sexually explicit or violent images, deletion of profiles of people who have abused the site, removal of all advertisements deemed inappropriate for children and free software that allows parents to block MySpace.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/interne...ction=cnn_tech

Hear the Noise or Block It Out. It's Your Choice, Instantly.
Ivan Berger

Filling your ears with music from noise-blocking earphones doesn't just diminish outside noises. It also reduces your ability to hear things you might want to, like traffic noise when you cross a street.

But taking the earphones in and out of your ears in these situations is a nuisance, so Shure is packaging a push-to-hear switch with its E500 earphones, which cut ambient noise by 30 to 37 decibels — the equivalent of bringing airliner cabin noise down to about the level of a quiet conversation. Press it, and the music in the headphone mutes, while an external microphone picks up ambient sounds.

The E500's will be priced at $499 with the switch when they arrive in stores this month. (The switch, which will work with all standard earphones, will also be available separately at $59.) The high price is partly because three miniature speakers are used in each earphone, a tweeter and two woofers, for better reproduction of high and low tones.

Modular cables for portable and home-stereo listening are included. And so are eight pairs of sleeves, to ensure that the E500 comfortably fills ears of any size.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/bu...eadphones.html

Snakes in the Garage Provide Easy Hookups for the Band
John Biggs

Those who like to rock 'n' roll all night and party every day may be interested in the LightSnake, a self-contained PC audio system from SoundTech made to let musicians hook up their instruments with a minimum of fuss.

The LightSnake is a single cable with a standard U.S.B. port at one end and a ¼-inch audio jack on the other. When it is plugged in, the ends of the cable light up and it is ready to serve as an audio input device on Windows and Macintosh PC's and laptops. The only thing left to do is plug in a guitar or other electric instrument for recording.

The 10-foot cord features built-in 16-bit digital sound processing hardware that improves and amplifies the audio before sending it to the PC. It requires no additional software on most operating systems.

The LightSnake is available at many online retailers and at Target for about $70. It is compatible with many digital audio recording programs, including GarageBand from Apple. Of course, a real garage band might consider a setup like this to be taking the stripped-down ethos a little too far.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/te...y/04snake.html

Fighting Crime With Cellphones' Clues
Noah Shachtman

THE case against Dan Kincaid was strong. A homeowner in northern Boise, Idaho, had identified Mr. Kincaid, 44, as the person who had broken into his suburban house. But eyewitness testimony isn't always rock solid, and Mr. Kincaid was refusing to talk. The police wanted more. So they searched Mr. Kincaid's BlackBerry e-mail-capable phone electronically, and found all the evidence they needed.

"Just trying to find a way out of this neighborhood without getting caught," Mr. Kincaid wrote to his girlfriend on Aug. 1, 2005, shortly after he had been spotted. "Dogs bark if I'm between or behind houses. ... "

"Cops know I have a blue shirt on," he continued. "I need to get out of here before they find me."

Faced with his e-mailed admission, Mr. Kincaid agreed to a deal with prosecutors over that crime and a string of others. In February, he pleaded guilty to five counts of grand theft, resisting arrest and burglary.

"We seized his phone," said Detective Jeff Dustin of the Boise Police Department, "and instead of a jump shot, this case is a slam dunk."

Cellphones are everywhere: 825 million were sold last year, according to the market research firm IDC. And the phones do more than just dial numbers. With expanded memories, increasingly sophisticated organizer tools and sharper cameras, they are playing ever larger roles in the lives of almost everyone — including criminals. Drug dealers, rapists and murderers across the country have been caught based, at least partly, on the electronic gadgets they carry around.

But extracting clues and leads from mobile electronics is no cakewalk. Unlike personal computers, 90 percent or more of which use the Windows operating system, cellphones rely on a confusing jumble of software that varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and even phone to phone. Data is often hidden or encrypted. And as long as a phone is connected to its cellular network, there is always a chance that its call histories and text messages will be erased, deliberately or otherwise.

Police departments have only recently begun training investigators in the delicate art of mobile-electronics forensics.

"It's a gold mine of information," said Detective Lee Reiber, the Boise officer who extracted the messages from Mr. Kincaid's phone. "But law enforcement is still way behind the curve."

Detective Reiber, 34, a former minor league catcher and longtime computer programmer, has been the Boise department's resident cellphone recovery specialist for about a year.

He usually begins an investigation by isolating the electronic device believed to be involved in the crime. Suspects or their accomplices sometimes flood captured phones with messages or calls, resulting in the deletion of incriminating notes or numbers from the device's memory, which can only hold so much information at once. Connecting to the network drains battery life. So when Detective Reiber arrives on the scene, he places the phone in a "Faraday bag," a container made of triwoven copper, nickel and silver that keeps the phone from making or receiving calls.

Back at his office, Detective Reiber tries to copy everything stored on the cellphone onto a desktop computer, where he can analyze the information. It can be a tedious process. Mobile devices lack standard cables and ports, and manufacturers use dozens of different cables. Detective Reiber must maintain a stockpile, hundreds deep, to keep up with the staggering variety.

The assortment of operating systems running these devices is as varied as the cables that connect them, so there is no single software tool that an investigator can use to communicate with the operating system to extract the data. Amber Schroader, a cellphone and palmtop expert and chief executive at Paraben Forensics, which makes the best known of the extraction programs, said the company could crack a new operating system in about a week.

"But still, there are just too many phones," she said. "And the manufacturers work like families. Just because you can speak with me doesn't mean you can speak with my cousin in Switzerland. She probably speaks a different language."

But even with the right forensics program and the right cable, extracting cellphone data can be tricky. Several mobile phone companies use a six-digit code, called a Master Subsidy Lock, to prevent the devices from connecting to other companies' networks. The code has the effect of rendering many of the phones' files invisible to investigators. The same is true if a suspect has locked his phone with a personal identification number, or PIN.

"When that happens, it's like a six-foot cement wall with barbed wire goes up," Ms. Schroader said. "There's no looking through it."

With a court order, investigators can usually get a code from the manufacturer that unlocks the PIN. Inside the phone, there is often an astounding amount of information: deleted text messages; lengthy call histories; pictures and movies taken so long ago that the owner may not even remember taking them. In February, the police in Merrimack, N.H., recovered a Porsche and a $120,000 red Ferrari 355 Challenge from what the police described as a "chop shop" after finding pictures on a suspect's phone. Also in February, officers in Atlantic City found a stolen AK-47 submachine gun the same way.

"They're these oracles of information," said Richard Mislan, a professor at Purdue University's cyberforensics center. "We can predict so much about you, based on what's inside."

Detective Reiber recently helped catch a suspected local drug dealer, after he found pictures on a hand-held device of marijuana plants and growing equipment — as well a message telling the suspect that "we want the same as last time. can you do it? 40 dollars." Phone in hand, the officers searched the suspect's car and home, finding three ounces of marijuana, bags and scales.

"If there's no cellphone, there's no vehicle, no home, no bust," Detective Reiber said. "The phone was the key."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/te...097&ei=5087%0A

Switchboard in the Sky
Tim Gnatek

CHESTERHILL, a tucked-away village in Ohio's Appalachian southeast, has been on technology's periphery for years. Its 312 residents have limited cellphone service and no broadband Internet service. The town's antiquated telephone lines struggle to handle minimal Internet speeds for those who do dial up.

But thanks to a rural technology grant from the American Distance Education Consortium and a network built by Ohio State University's Information Office, residents are set to go high speed wirelessly. With a satellite receiver mounted at their library, and a broadcast antenna on the village water tower, Chesterhill, where 20 percent of the residents live below the poverty line, now has a 1.5-megabit Internet pipeline in the air.

Local governments across the country are getting into the wireless Internet business. Communities left behind by the high-technology revolution of the last two decades view municipal networks as an affordable means of renewing their economic competitiveness and a way to bridge the digital divide between technology haves and have-nots.

Big cities and their suburbs see potential in municipal Wi-Fi, too. Systems are being developed in San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago, while last week Suffolk County on Long Island announced it was planning a network that would reach 1.5 million people spread over more than 900 square miles.

The new programs have put local governments into the telecommunications arena, where they sometimes work with conventional service providers and sometimes compete with them.

Many telecommunications providers are resisting such community networks, particularly when they overlap with the carriers' own service territories. Arguing that they are better suited to the task than their municipal rivals, telecommunications companies are bidding to manage civic networks. At the same time, industry-friendly legislative proposals at the state and federal levels threaten to limit municipal control.

Chesterhill's wireless network, which began service last month, has sparked excitement in the village and already led to several new community programs. The library will offer higher-education courses through regional colleges; the volunteer fire department will work with online distributors for discounted equipment; and local businesses expect to set up Web sites.

Ann Horner, a lifelong resident of Chesterhill and owner of the Posy Place, a flower shop, said she planned to discontinue FTD floral service and manage her own customers online. "I can keep that 20 percent, and my customers can get their full value," she said.

Municipal wireless networks are cheaper to build than cable or fiber- optic networks and are easier to deploy. According to one study by muniwireless.com, an industry Weblog, more than 120 such networks are up and running around the country, including some that allow public access and others that are exclusively for city services. Nearly 60 other cities and towns have requested proposals from vendors or taken steps toward creating networks.

Rollouts of municipal networks in major metropolitan regions like San Francisco and Philadelphia have attracted attention, but development of community wireless networks holds even greater promise for out-of-the-way and poorer areas. For these smaller cities and towns, the networks are a tool for more efficient municipal operations and a way to provide inexpensive Internet access to residents who could not afford it.

A case in point is the Tribal Digital Village, a high-speed network linking 14 remote Indian reservations spread across 250 square miles of mountains and valleys in San Diego County, Calif. The network operates by solar-powered antennas, which relay signals between tribal settlements as far as 26 miles apart. The mountaintop backbone attains transmission speeds in excess of 45 megabits a second, which is equivalent to the speeds used by Internet service providers and major Web sites.

Broadband access has greatly improved communications on a swath of reservation land that still lacks full telephone service — and in some places even water and electricity.

Michael Peralta, a descendant of the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians and the network's administrator, regularly scales the reservation's mountains to install and maintain the equipment, sometimes with helicopter assistance. Mr. Peralta says the newfound connectivity has quickly changed life on the reservation.

"There are elders who a little while ago didn't know what a computer was," he said. "Now they bug me whenever they can't get to their e-mail."

More than a social services project, the Tribal Digital Village is also a potential revenue source for the tribes. "There are million-dollar homes out there, and they can't get broadband," Mr. Peralta said. "We're looking at a new business plan that could provide broadband to those homes as well."

To speed the process and ease network responsibilities, some communities have turned to private companies for help operating municipal wireless intranets and providing Internet access to the public.

Several approaches are being tested. Philadelphia established a nonprofit corporation in 2004 to plan its municipal network. It contracted with the Internet service provider EarthLink to manage the infrastructure and make subsidized access available to the public, although the city has yet to finish plans or begin building the network.

In San Francisco, the city selected Google and EarthLink to offer tiered levels of wireless service. Google will provide free public access at near-dial-up speed, paid for by in-browser advertising, while EarthLink will charge around $20 a month for faster, ad-free service. It is unclear when the network will be completed, and last week a local politician threatened to block the arrangement for lack of public comment.

In Suffolk County, the plan announced last week calls for a comprehensive countywide network for use by the government and the public. Sharon Cates-Williams, Suffolk County commissioner for information technology, said that officials were evaluating how to pay for the system.

"It's a little too early to tell what we're going to do," Ms. Cates-Williams said. She added that she would look at other cities' business plans for ideas, and expected proposals from providers by the end of the year. "I want something that is not going to have any expense to the taxpayer, whether that's public or commercial or a combination."

Chicago announced in February that it would build a citywide wireless network requiring no public financing. City officials said they would begin requesting bids this spring from private-sector companies to install and manage the system. Other cities have chosen not to rely on existing providers but handle network administration on their own.

After unsuccessfully petitioning Verizon to bring broadband to their community, town officials in Scottsburg, Ind., decided to run their Wi-Fi network like a public utility. Scottsburg charges home users $35 a month for access to a 512-kilobit-per-second data stream (comparable to residential DSL service).

Some municipalities charge nothing at all. St. Cloud, Fla., where the city-led municipal network is among the showpieces of the community wireless movement, was the first to install a free citywide network, paying for it with money saved by administrative efficiencies generated by the network itself.

Glenn Sangiovanni, St. Cloud's former mayor, rallied for the network. "We had a true need for economic development," he said. "We needed a hook, and looked at making this a tech-savvy community."

Mr. Sangiovanni said that the rising cost of broadband service was the best argument for the public network. A study by the city showed that 47 percent of the residents were paying $450 a year for broadband, a third more than the average household's city tax bill. In all, nearly $4 million in broadband fees was leaving the community every year, Mr. Sangiovanni said.

"What if we could keep those dollars here, and spark the local economy with this project?" he said.

St. Cloud, an Orlando suburb of about 22,000 residents, spent $2.6 million to set up a network over 15 square miles. The city expects to save $650,000 annually in operating efficiencies like supplying Internet-based cellphone service to city workers. As of April 20, 45 days after it began service, 36 percent of the city had logged nearly 192,000 hours online. The network will not only help increase the efficiency of existing systems, officials say, but it will also help develop new services in health care, education and public safety.

"We're going to be doing things with public safety, and mounting video cameras in parks so our police force won't have to be everywhere in order to keep the city safe," said Howard DeYoung, director of information technology for St. Cloud. "This is going to open up performance dramatically."

When St. Cloud was considering its wireless plan, it hired MRI, a branding and consulting company, to hold public meetings on the subject to build support.

"We told them that this was no more expensive to install than a roadway intersection," said Jonathan Baltuch, MRI's president.

Despite having a free wireless network in St. Cloud, Mr. Baltuch said, there is still an option for existing providers there to sell better offerings. "Their opportunity is to deliver 20-megabit, or even 100-megabit service, to offer a luxury service to premium clients," he said.

Established telecommunications companies, meanwhile, argue that they are better equipped than local governments to provide the infrastructure for city wireless networks.

"In many cases, it's a much more effective solution to work with a service provider," said Jason Hillary, a spokesman for AT&T, which has bid on city projects in Houston and Grand Rapids, Mich. "We have infrastructure in a local level and at a backbone level, and we're updating the networks on a daily basis."

In some cases, industry spokesmen say, there is no need for municipal networks at all.

Link Hoewing, vice president for technology policy at Verizon Communications, said that carriers like Verizon are already expert at providing broadband service. "Where there's a lack of broadband, it makes sense for communities to take care of this," he said, "but in urban areas, we believe the private sector already responds well."

Mr. Hoewing said there was a role for community hot spots, however, in places like libraries and city halls, as well as in rural communities beyond the carriers' reach. "We have not supported outright bans on municipal Wi-Fi networks," he said.

Yet state and federal legislators are pushing for just that. Telecommunications companies and cable television providers are supporters of laws that could hamper cities' abilities to deploy networks, both wired and wireless. Fifteen states have passed such legislation.

Two federal bills introduced in 2005 threaten to rein in municipal broadband projects. The Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act, introduced by Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, and the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act, sponsored by Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, would limit public services' ability to coexist with private providers.

John Eger, professor of communications and public policy at San Diego State University and a former director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, said such legislation could backfire if telecommunications companies shut out their largest customers, cities.

"Providers don't want a partnership, they want to provide it all by themselves," he said.

Mr. Eger faulted the federal government for failing to curtail the companies' influence over policy.

The Congressional battle may be shifting. Another new proposal, the Community Broadband Act, sponsored by Senators Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, would protect municipal broadband programs as long as the public providers did not discriminate against private ones. And last week, the House of Representatives defeated a proposed amendment to another communications bill that would have made it easier for supporters of incumbent telecommunications providers to block rural Wi-Fi networks.

"I would hope the incumbents stand back and look at what they're seeing across the country," said Jim Baller, a lawyer in Washington who represents local governments in utility issues. "There is a way to view this situation as an opportunity."

Mr. Baller says that municipalities considering wireless programs can draw a lesson from history, and likens the modern wireless movement to the rural electrification movement of the late 1800's. Then, communities beyond the reach of the electric companies took control of their electric futures and struck out with their own power plans.

"And they were successful," Mr. Baller said. More than 2,000 of the original electrification groups still exist in rural communities and big cities like Los Angeles.

"There are a great many parallels," he said. "Broadband is becoming today's platform for everything we do: economics, education, safety, medicine and cultural enrichment. You can't blink this away."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/te...b0d&ei=5087%0A

Shot a UFO in his pajamas

I Was Just Hunting UFOs, Says Pentagon's UK Hacker
Michael Holden

To the United States, he is a seriously dangerous man who put the nation's security at risk by committing "the biggest military computer hack of all time."

But Briton Gary McKinnon says he is just an ordinary computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens and UFOs exist.

During his two-year quest, McKinnon broke into computers at the Pentagon, NASA and the Johnson Space Center as well as systems used by the U.S. army, navy and air force.

U.S. officials say he caused $700,000 worth of damage and even crippled vital defense systems shortly after the September 11 attacks.

The unemployed computer programmer is now battling extradition to the United States, where, if found guilty, he faces up to 70 years in jail and fines of up to $1.75 million. His lawyer fears he could even be sent to Guantanamo Bay.

It's all a far cry from how he first got into hacking: watching a film about a teenage boy who breaks into a military central computer and almost starts World War Three.

"I had seen the film 'War Games' and I do remember clearly thinking at the time, that's amazing -- a great big military computer system and a young, spotty teenager," the softly spoken 39-year-old told Reuters in an interview.

"HACKER'S HANDBOOK"

A decade later, McKinnon, armed with information gleaned from the book, "The Hacker's Handbook," began his snooping.

During 2000-1 from his home in Hornsey, north London, and using a computer with just a limited 56K dial-up modem, he turned his sights on the American government and military.

"My main thing was wanting to find out about UFOs and suppressed technology," he said insisting his intention was not to cause damage. "I wanted to ... find out stuff the government wouldn't tell you about."

He said it was easy, despite being only a rank amateur. Using the hacking name "Solo," he discovered that many U.S. top-security systems were using an insecure Microsoft Windows program and had no password protection at all.

"So I got commercially available off-the-shelf software and used them to scan large military networks ... anything I thought might have possible links to UFO information," he said.

ALIENS?

He said he came across a group called the "Disclosure Project," which had expert testimonies from senior figures who said technology obtained from extra-terrestrials did exist.

One NASA scientist had reported that the Johnson Space Center had a facility where UFOs were airbrushed out of high-resolution satellite images. So, he hacked in.

"I saw what I'm convinced was some kind of satellite or spacecraft but it was manufactured by no means I have ever seen before -- there were no rivets, no seams, it was like one flawless piece of material. And that was above the Earth."

However, his probing came to an end in March 2002, when British police arrested him.

"I was completely obsessed. I was completely addicted. It was like a huge game but I was getting very paranoid," he said.

McKinnon's own story might sound like the plot of a movie, but the charges he faces are deadly serious. He argues he is being made a scapegoat by U.S. authorities to deter other would-be hackers rather than address their own security flaws.

"I'm already being treated as a terrorist," he said. "I appear in an official American army pamphlet ... in a guide to combating terrorism in the 21st century."

The next stage of his legal battle takes place on May 10. But he hints that whatever happens, he has a lot more to tell.

"I can't talk about a lot of stuff that I found. It's just not the right time," he said with a smile.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060427/...in_hacker_dc_1

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

04-05-06, 02:13 PM	#1
JackSpratts Join Date: May 2001 Location: New England Posts: 10,016	Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 6th, ’06 "I don't think there's anything better we could do to turn people onto the pleasures of unlimited, legal access to music." – Chris Gorog "Broadband is becoming today's platform for everything we do: economics, education, safety, medicine and cultural enrichment. You can't blink this away." – Jim Baller "What business does the F.B.I. have spying on law-abiding citizens simply because they oppose the war in Iraq?" – Sen. Patrick Leahy, D- VT May 6th, ’06 listen to your junk, man jack just signed up and logged in under one of my old napster nics (jackspratts). went right to "track" and chose bruce springsteen's "new york city serenade." lots of strings, acoustic guitar and piano, soft and loud singing and a pretty good audio test for dynamic range and frequency response. by now you all know that napster is a free service. you can listen to anything they have up to five times. it's not a download in the strict sense (although of course it is) but something more like instant request internet radio and in the business it’s called a stream. the verdict is mixed. the convenience factor is unquestionably high. open up your browser (i used opera and firefox with no issues) and in seconds you're listening to anything and everything. the price is zero. the paranoia issues are null and the five-times limit is not exactly a crushing burden (it auto repeats and at least in one case way more than 5x). which leaves...the sound. funny thing that. not all bad for a low bit stream. clean, ok presence, decent highs and lows - except during crescendos - then it goes way over the harsh limit and it almost, hurts. going back to new york city serenade and the first third of the song, coming out of my thinkpad and into my sony phones it's good. not great, but good. then, as the boss ramps it up the flaws begin to intrude upon the experience and quite frankly, spoil the mood. fish lady! ouch. as background it'll work a lot better…it's just that as any dj knows it's hard to play cuts without planting yourself in front of your box, and that means the tunes are right there too. if napster wants to get the most out of this model they're going to have to increase the bitrate and smooth out the stream, otherwise people will try it a few times and pass. as a concept it's about as good as it gets in the (admittedly compromised) online music delivery business, but with just a little tweaking it can be a serious player, and in areas where users have handheld boxes running opera mini-browsers in wi-fi saturated cities it could be dominant. until then it will be an "almost there" also ran among serious listeners of music, although i’m sure many people will run this often, particularly in noisier environments like work and school. is "napster" back? no, it may never be what it was. but this company, and this service, is, right now, as close to that promise as it has ever come, and over the next few days, a lot of us will be signing on, and playing long, and thinking about what almost was. http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...652#post245652 Napster: New Tune, Same Chorus? The digital-music outfit is hoping to engender buzz and pump up sales with its new offerings. But the skeptics are legion Peter Burrows If Napster (NAPS ) ever figures out a way to turn a profit, Chris Gorog, CEO of the digital-music site, is going to have one heckuva big last laugh. Ever since he began his quest to create a digital-music powerhouse around the brand made famous in the late 1990s for online piracy, the skepticism has been unceasing. "No one I know believes they're going to survive," says one digital-music executive. Gorog's latest move doesn't seem destined to quiet the naysayers. On May 1, the Los Angeles-based company announced a new Web-based version of its software, along with a new service that lets users listen to any song among its catalog of 2 million songs absolutely free -- so long as they don't want to listen to any one song more than five times. While Napster's share price had risen 30% since Jan. 1, based on expectations for a Web-based service, the actual unveiling did little to keep the momentum going. The stock closed at $4.61 on May 1, virtually unchanged from its previous close. ADVERTISING PLAY. The idea is designed to tackle the twin problems that have caused Napster to lose $175 million on $237 million in sales over the past four years: lackluster sales growth paired with eye-popping costs. By launching this free service, Gorog hopes to get millions of consumers to come to Napster's Web site -- without having to invest nearly as much in advertising, the company's biggest discretionary cost. Sales will get a boost, in theory, as some percentage of these consumers upgrade to Napster's for-pay services. Its basic subscription lets consumers listen to whichever songs they want on their PCs, with no limit on the number of listens and with greater sound quality than the Web-based offering, for $10 a month. It costs $15 if the songs are to be transferred to a portable music player. The Web strategy also introduces an ad-supported plank to Gorog's strategy, since users of the free service are shown a variety of online ads. While some of the initial advertisers have past links to the company -- Samsung, for example, sells a digital-music player -- heavy-hitters including Walt Disney (DIS ) and the U.S. Navy are also present. GOOD, OL' NINETIES. Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster doubts Gorog's claim that ad revenue could exceed Napster's expected fiscal 2006 revenue of $112 million within a few years. He reckons advertising will add closer to $50 million to the top line in that time frame. Any success the strategy has will hinge on whether Napster can recapture anything approaching the buzz and loyalty its namesake site had in the late 1990s. Back then, 50 million Netizens routinely swapped songs digitally for no money down, until the recording industry won legal victories that shut it down. From the time Gorog purchased the Napster brand name along with other remaining assets for $5 million in 2002, he hoped to combine the famous name with new technology that would make it simple to legally find and then pay for the music. To that end, Napster on May 1 also unveiled technology to let anyone add a link to a song, so it can be incorporated into an e-mail, blog, or home video (and played for as many as five times). These NapsterLinks, as the company calls them, "will unleash digital music across the Web in a very powerful way," says Gorog. RISKY ASSUMPTIONS. It's the kind of big claim that Gorog has become known for. Despite Apple's (AAPL ) gargantuan success in digital music -- and Napster's relative insignificance -- Gorog continues to fire away at what he considers Apple's vulnerabilities. He notes that the average iPod owner buys only about 20 songs via Apple's iTunes online store. That's damning proof, Gorog says, that Apple isn't helping the music business go digital -- but rather using iTunes less to sell digital downloads and more as a means to crank up its own hardware profits as consumers rip their own CD collections or listen to MP3s from file-sharing sites. With Napster's new free service, "we'll be able to help millions of people get out of the world of 30-second clips and of having to buy individual songs," Gorog says. "I don't think there's anything better we could do to turn people onto the pleasures of unlimited, legal access to music." But the reality facing Napster is hardly so cheery. Even if some users of the free service decide to pay for Napster's basic offering, many current paying customers may decide to go for free instead. At the least, little evidence exists that a free offering will send sales through the roof. Since Real Networks (RNWK ) unveiled the Web-based version of its own Rhapsody music service last December, the number of subscribers has grown from 1.4 million to 1.575 million -- just a slight uptick from previous growth patterns. "JUST SWINGING AWAY." And none of the new offerings solve the biggest problem: Napster's services don't work with Apple's iPod, which holds more than 70% share of the portable-music player market. As such, even free won't be a powerful lure to members of iPod nation. "My concern for Napster isn't that no one knows about them," says David Pakman, chief executive of rival service eMusic, which is compatible with the iPod because it sells music sold by independent labels that don't demand anti-piracy protections. "They claim to have the biggest brand in music -- with greater unaided recall than [Apple's] iTunes. But people are voting not to use the service. There's an issue with the product -- incompatibility with the device that everyone wants to use." In all, Gorog's latest announcements probably don't presage a coming of age for Napster, but the start of just another scary chapter as the company fights for survival. Napster is expected to show a smaller quarterly loss when it announces fiscal fourth-quarter results on May 17, versus the year before. Still, the ambitious Gorog faces an uphill climb to profitability. "I think he's just swinging away right now" by trying many different tactics, Munster says. "But that's what he has to do." http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...502_659394.htm Mmmm, lossless. Pitui! DRM! Neil Young Goes With Download First, CD Later Michael Kanellos Neil Young has released his next album, "Living With War," on a Web site specializing in high-fidelity downloads--before the record hits stores. The collection of songs, which will be sold as an album and not singles, is available on MusicGiants. The company sells music in the Windows Media Audio Lossless format, a beefier format that provides better sound quality than standard downloads from iTunes or other services, according to MusicGiants. An average song in the Lossless format might be 15MB, said Elliot Mazer, a producer for Young (he mastered the 1970s album "Harvest") and a consultant for MusicGiants. By contrast, an MP3 file of the same song might be 3MB. The reduction in file size for MP3s is accomplished through perceptual coding, he said. In that process, the dominant sound on a track--the primary vocal tone, for example--is retained, while overtones or other sounds are swept away. Mazer says perceptual coding is analogous to cranking down the color quality on a monitor from 32 bit to 16 bit. While the smaller files economize on bandwidth and storage, sound quality diminishes. When a song in the lossless format is unzipped and played back, it contains more depth of tone and texture. "On a Lossless file, when played back it is exactly like the CD. If you took a CD and listened to it and then listened to something on Napster or iTunes, it would sound deader or smaller," he said. "With bandwidth and storage the way it is, why would you want to go with the smaller format?" The site sells songs for $1.29 a song. A complete album generally sells for about $15.29. The company has a music library of about 500,000 songs from labels such as EMI, Sony and Warner Music. Windows Media Audio Lossless format files can be played back on Windows Media Player 10. http://news.com.com/Neil+Young+goes+...3-6067937.html Warner Music Rejects EMI’s $4.2 Billion Takeover Bid Andrew Ross Sorkin Things got off to a rocky start as the British music giant EMI Group rekindled its on-again off-again courtship of the Warner Music Group in the United States. Reacting to reports that a bid was in the works, EMI said in a press release Wednesday that it had approached Warner Music on Monday in connection with a plan to buy the company for $28.50 in cash and EMI stock. But the offer, which carries a value of about $4.2 billion, was rejected the following day, EMI said. Warner Music issued its own press release and said the company’s board had unanimously rejected the nonbinding proposal, which it described as “not in the best interests of our shareholders.” That is not likely to be the end of the story, however. EMI and Warner Music have tried to merge twice before, and many analysts see two companies as a compelling match. For EMI, adding Warner would bulk up the company’s presence in the United States and give it access to a catalog that includes Ray Charles, Madonna and Led Zeppelin. EMI unsuccessfully bid to buy Warner from its previous parent, Time Warner, in late 2003 before losing out to an investment group led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. Before that, European regulators blocked a proposed merger of the two giants. EMI is apt to raise the $28.50-a-share offer it presented on Monday, though how much higher is unclear. The company’s chairman, Eric Nicoli, has suggested that EMI is willing to pay about $30 a share for Time Warner, people involved in the negotiations said Tuesday. Besides the price, there are other obstacles standing between a potential EMI-Warner merger, as The New York Times reported: Any deal still faces several challenges, including regulatory hurdles and questions about the management structure. The two companies would probably be forced to sell one of their respective music publishing units — probably the Warner/Chappell unit — to satisfy regulators that the entity would not unfairly dominate that sector of the business. The deal is also riddled with tricky personnel questions that could make it difficult to build a harmonious management team. http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=2577 From last year How Much Is Your Stolen Music Worth? Probably more than you think. Daniel Engber Last month, a student at the University of Arizona was sentenced to three years probation and a $5,400 fine for illegally distributing music and movies on the Internet. A spokesman for the recording industry claims investigators found more than $50 million worth of pirated material on his computer. That seems like an awful lot of money. How much is stolen music worth? A lot more than you might think. Since a song costs only 99 cents on iTunes, and movies go for less than $20 on Amazon.com, it seems impossible to amass $50 million worth of entertainment on one computer. (Indeed, even if you could find 50.5 million songs or 2.5 million movies to download, they would take up hundreds of terabytes of disk space, which would itself cost a fortune.) But in some court cases, the value of a pirated file is based not on its retail price, but on the damages done to the company that legally produces and sells it. There are a number of ways to calculate these damages. Some federal prosecutors have assumed that about 10 people will download anything on a file-sharing network, so they multiply the retail value of shared song files by 10. But it can get much worse: Lawsuits brought by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have claimed statutory damages as set out in the United States Copyright Law from 1976. According to the section on "Remedies for infringement," each work carries a value of between $750 and $30,000, as determined by a judge. (These are the current figures; the Digital Theft Deterrence Act boosted statutory damages by about half in 1999.) While a judge must also determine what qualifies as a "work," RIAA lawsuits typically request statutory damages for each song—and not each album. When the digital pirate can be shown to have "willfully" violated intellectual property rights (knowing it was an infringement), statutory damages go as high as $150,000 per song, movie, or album. That means the $50 million hard disk might have contained just 30 or 40 pirated albums. As it happens, the Arizona student was prosecuted according to state laws in a criminal court—and it was the number, not the value, of his computer files that helped determine his final sentence. (He was convicted of a felony because he engaged in the "unlawful copying" of between 100 and 1,000 songs or between 10 and 100 movies.) For those prosecuted under federal copyright law, the punishment for criminal infringement may depend on the value of the copied work. The thresholds are low, however—all people who accumulate more than $2,500 worth of material face the same maximum penalties. http://www.slate.com/id/2114507/fr/rss/ Getting what they asked for Studios See Big Rise In Estimates of Losses To Movie Piracy Sarah McBride and Geoffrey A. Fowler The movie industry wanted the world to know exactly how much money it loses to piracy. But now a study shows the damage is far worse than expected, giving some studio executives second thoughts about releasing the information to the public. The Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood's lobbying group, two years ago commissioned a detailed study that it hoped would pinpoint more precisely how much the industry loses to piracy annually. The study, by LEK Consulting LLC, was completed last year, and people familiar with it say it reached a startling conclusion: U.S. movie studios are losing about $6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue to piracy, about 75% more than previous estimated losses of $3.5 billion in hard goods. On top of that, losses are coming not only from lost ticket sales, but from DVD sales that have been Hollywood's cash cow in recent years. The MPAA froze plans to release the survey. Late yesterday, in response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, the MPAA released some information from the survey, including members' U.S. and global piracy losses. "A study this magnitude takes some work to roll out," says an MPAA spokeswoman. She says the numbers weren't far out of line with what the industry expected. For months, MPAA members debated whether and how to release the information. Some studios argued that making the figures public would help the industry win tougher laws and enforcement. Other studios said the figures were so bad that releasing them would hurt their stock prices and make a laughingstock of their enforcement efforts. The result: Piracy, an issue that normally brings Hollywood studios together, was driving them apart. Although the studios eventually agreed to release parts of the information, it was only after months of infighting. Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. and News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox fought hardest to release the information, people familiar with the matter say, while Walt Disney Co. and Viacom Inc.'s Paramount were very reluctant. General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal and Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures fell in the middle, these people say. The estimate showing a dramatic increase in piracy is a function of different methodology used in the report. Previously, people familiar with the matter say, the MPAA used figures based on a series of random calculations that estimated how much was lost in each country. In one market, it was calculated that for every bootleg DVD that turned up in raids, seven more existed. Thus, estimates for piracy losses ran from $280 million in China to $275 million in Russia. There was no previous estimate for the U.S. alone, but in the new survey, losses from piracy are believed to total almost $1.3 billion solely in the U.S. The LEK report provides staggering revisions elsewhere in the world: Mexico overshadows Russia and China to rank as the world's largest market for pirated U.S. films, accounting for an estimated $483 million in lost revenue to MPAA member studios in 2005. That is up from $140 million in 2004 by old tallying procedures, according to partial data the MPAA released in February. The new approach reduces the estimated losses in some of the world's most notorious pirate markets, even as it adds Internet-related losses for the first time. China's losses slipped to an estimated $244 million in 2005, from $280 million in 2004 under the old counting technique. Russia's estimate declined by about $10 million. These international results have also generated skepticism about whether Mexico could really be a bigger piracy market than giants like China. The survey was conducted over 18 months in 28 countries and cost $3 million. It uses more consistent methods and incorporates consumer research for the first time -- in the form of telephone and Internet surveys and focus groups -- to derive estimated losses. In recent months, the MPAA has been fine-tuning the totals after factoring in outside analysis and new information, in some cases lowering the estimated losses -- for example, the losses due to potential customers receiving illegal copies of movies from friends. The previous estimates didn't include the impact of free Internet downloading, which is incorporated in the LEK report. Another surprise involves the fast expansion of online piracy by consumers compared to the losses stemming from professional bootleggers who sell DVDs. Last year, according to a person familiar with the matter, copies of movies downloaded or received from people who had downloaded them cost the studios $447 million in the U.S., whereas copies stemming from professional bootleggers cost the studios $335 million. An additional $529 million in losses came from consumers making copies of legitimate films they bought on DVD or VHS. Critics have faulted some piracy estimates for equating each pirated DVD with a lost sale, when many consumers would have skipped the movie altogether if they hadn't gotten a cheap or free unauthorized version. This time, the survey specifically asked consumers how many of their pirated movies they would have purchased in stores or seen in theaters if they didn't have an unauthorized copy, giving studios a different picture of their true losses. The study also shows that home video, not theatrical distribution, is the market that piracy hits hardest, accounting for two-thirds of the studio's lost revenue. That is a big blow to the studios, which had been counting on the lucrative DVD market to increase their bottom lines, but in recent months have found DVD sales are slowing considerably. The survey also bucks the assumption that piracy is a kids' activity. In Japan, one of Hollywood's biggest foreign markets, 50% of the overall industry's losses are the result of piracy by people ages 25 to 39. While piracy hasn't had much of an impact on the stock prices of the big conglomerates that own studios, that could change if investors feared DVDs would no longer generate sales at the pace they expected, says Michael Nathanson, an analyst with Bernstein Research. "If it became an issue, you would see a collapse in [valuation] multiples," he says. While new data are potentially helpful in negotiating with foreign governments because they also estimate losses to local film industries, the information is also bad news for the MPAA's antipiracy efforts. Those have ranged from public-awareness campaigns to beefing up laws to raids of illegal DVD plants. Dan Glickman, the organization's president for almost two years, has made fighting piracy a priority. He joined the organization a few months after it hired John Malcolm, a former Justice Department official, to head its world-wide antipiracy operations. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1146..._whats_news_us How The RIAA Does Math: Why You Might Be A $50 Million Felon Mike Yesterday, in discussing the odd case of a teen convicted under Arizona state laws for unauthorized copying, we wondered about some of the details -- including the $50 million claim pinned to the material on his hard drive in early versions of the AP story (later removed, for no clear reason). Luckily, we've got some answers. Slate takes a look at the $50 million and explains how the content industry does math to come up with such figures. The real answer is they basically make it up. They determine that each work can be valued somewhere between $750 and $30,000, even if they can all be downloaded legally for $1 a piece. It certainly seems a bit presumptuous to put such a high number on the value. However, this story gets even better. Ernest Miller takes a crack at the specific Arizona state law that tripped up this guy, and realizes it turns fair use copying into a felony. That's right. The details show that if you're simply ripping your own legally purchased CDs into MP3s for personal use or backup, you are breaking this particular law, and could reach the felony stage with as little as 1,000 songs -- even though fair use copying is legal. Of course, at $30,000 per song, that's only $30 million. To get up to $50 million, you'd need to rip 1,667 songs. If we assume an average album has... say... 12 songs, you'd just need to rip approximately 140 CDs to reach the $50 million felon mark. Not so hard. You might already be there. So, while it appears this particular kid was doing much more, you too could be convicted of a felony for having $50 million worth of content on your hard drive just for legally (oh, wait, maybe not...) ripping a bunch of your legally purchased CDs into MP3s. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...752252_F.shtml Grossly Excessive Penalties in the Battle Against Illegal File-Sharing The Troubling Effects of Aggregating Minimum Statutory Damages for Copyright Infringement J. Cam Barker Texas Law Review, Vol. 83, No. 2 83 Texas L. Rev. 525 (2004) Abstract: The recent copyright-infringement lawsuits targeting individual file-sharers have in common the following facts: a statutory damage award with a substantial punitive component, a large number of like-kind violations, and fairly low reprehensibility as assessed under the relevant Supreme Court test. The substantive due process principles laid out by the Court in BMW v. Gore provide a roadmap for evaluating whether the aggregated punitive effect of these awards has become unconstitutionally excessive. In this paper, I argue that there is a constitutional right to not have a highly punitive statutory damage award stacked hundreds or thousands of times over for similar, low-reprehensibility misconduct. I point to the rationale behind criminal law's single-larceny doctrine, identify the concept of wholly proportionate reprehensibility, and use this to explain why the massive aggregation of statutory damage awards can violate substantive due process. I conclude that massively aggregated awards of even the minimum statutory damages for illegal file-sharing will impose huge penalties and can be constitutionally infirm like the punitive damage award of Gore itself. Yet practical and institutional reasons will likely make this norm underenforced by the courts, pointing to Congress as the actor that should modify copyright law to remove the possibility of grossly excessive punishment. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...ract_id=660601 Are The RIAA's $750-Per-Song Fines Unconstitutional? Mike In the past, many have questioned why the RIAA gets to request $750 to $30,000 per song fines against those they've charged with offering up unauthorized songs on file sharing networks. Last year there was actually a research paper published that questioned whether or not these fines were unconstitutional, since they may be excessive. That paper included some interesting case history to suggest why the fines might be a bit too high. It appears that one lawyer is finally testing a similar theory in court, and has filed a motion in one such case suggesting that $750 fines are unconstitutional. If you look at the details, it looks like the argument is based on different case law than the research paper -- and the motion seems pretty weak overall in describing the details (i.e., it has very few details). The RIAA quickly filed a response that hits back pretty strongly against the original motion, saying that the case cited isn't really relevant at all -- and that the comparisons made in the motion don't really apply. The original motion points to the money the recording industry would make from someone buying the song on iTunes, but the industry points out that buying a song on iTunes isn't the same thing as a license to distribute it -- which makes sense. It seems highly unlikely that the court will buy the unconstitutional argument, especially as presented, but it's an interesting tactic nonetheless. It's not clear why the original motion didn't delver further into the issue, or use some of the info in last year's paper as a resource to back up the claim... but maybe the lawyer decided it wasn't that compelling. Dear Mike I appreciate your critical thinking; if the Courts do as well, we'll all be okay. However, I must say that comparing a scholarly law review article to a letter like ours isn't exactly fair, since (a) some poor lady has to pay for our letter; nobody has to pay for the law review article; and (b) advocacy just isn't the same thing as pure scholarship; judges would hate it, and the lawyer's clients would be losing more than winning, if every time there was a legal point to be made the lawyer handed the judge a law review article-type analysis discussing each and every case that ever touched upon the subject. A good advocate knows if you have a controlling case, you shut up. Parker v. Time Warner happens to be a controlling case for Judge Trager. Additionally, your comparison is a little bit off in some respects. 1. The letter which we sent is not a "motion", it is a letter requesting a pre-motion conference; 2. such a letter has a short page limit, and would not be used to discuss each and every authority which the writer intends to cite in his motion; even a motion would not necessarily discuss every possible authority; 3. the letter and the excellent law review article do indeed rely on the same line of cases; Parker -- cited in both -- is an interpretation of Campbell and Gore in the statutory damages context; 4. the Napster decision upon which we relied, which follows Parker and is the closest case on the facts to the situation described by the law review author, came out in 2005; the law review article was published in 2004. Keep up your good work! Best regards, Ray http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com http://techdirt.com/articles/20060503/0411203.shtml RIAA Targets Piracy 'Hot-Spot' Cities David Miller Music piracy, long associated with peer-to-peer (define) file-sharing networks, is a booming business offline. Professional pirates have become more sophisticated and are costing the music industry $300 million a year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. In a report released on Wednesday, the RIAA, cited 12 piracy "hot spots" -- Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, San Diego, and San Francisco -- where " multi-state criminal operations" are producing and selling bogus CDs. The RIAA plans to work with law enforcement and deploy its own investigative resources in these cities in the coming year, said RIAA spokeswoman Jenni Engebretsen. "With the problem as widespread as it is, we have to focus our resources," she said. "So in these 12 cities we are making a commitment to step up investigative and training efforts with local law enforcement." The RIAA also intends to shift its efforts from pursuing individuals to stopping piracy at the source of the distribution chain where, according to the report, "law enforcement can not only seize illegal goods but also shut down the means of production and thus have a far greater impact on the overall availability of pirate product." The RIAA claims that unauthorized compilations of popular music hits and counterfeit CDs with bonus tracks are increasingly being created and offered for sale. Engebretsen said that these CDs are sometimes purchased by consumers who are unaware that the CDs contain pirated music. Consumers were urged to avoid purchasing deeply discounted CDs, "dream compilation" CDs (songs by numerous artists who record on different record labels), CDs packaged in shoddy wrapping (misspelled words, blurry graphics), and to avoid purchasing CDs from places like flea markets or street corners. It's no surprise that professional piracy is on the rise, said Mike McGuire, vice president or research at Gartner. McGuire said that the tools for counterfeiting -- DVD and CD burners and pro-level authoring software -- have gotten much cheaper and easier to use. Since the costs of producing pirated disks isn't much, distributors can charge $5 a disc and still make a profit. He believes the RIAA can make a dent in the counterfeiters' business but said it would be difficult to end the practice. "You could argue it's similar to the war on drugs. You can go after the demand side, but it's hard to say you'll stamp it out completely," he said. "And it's pretty hard to say to people 'don't buy that CD for $5.' There's always a demand for bargains." But McGuire added that the RIAA needs to combat offline piracy if only to raise awareness that the counterfeited materials are being produced. "A lot of folks were saying that piracy was only happening on P2P networks." According to the RIAA's research, seizures of counterfeit CDs from commercial manufacturing facilities grew by 46 percent - - more than 424,000 units -- in 2005 and the total number of cases at the manufacturer level was up 7 percent. In response, legal seizures of piracy equipment grew by 57 percent in 2005. Rap and Latin music accounted for nearly 95 percent of pirate operations stopped by authorities last year, according to the RIAA. In other piracy news, The Motion Picture Association of America's own study, conducted by LEK Consulting, found that studios lost $6.1 billion to film theft in 2005. The majority of movie theft -- about $4.8 billion -- happened in China, Russia and Mexico. According to an article published in The Wall Street Journal this week, the MPAA study was completed last year but the MPAA opted not to release the results publicly due to a debate among its members. Some felt that publicizing the figures would enable the industry to push for stricter antipiracy laws and enforcement while others believed that releasing the figures would hurt stock prices and "make a laughingstock of their enforcement efforts," according to the Journal. http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3603751 UN Broadcasting Treaty Seen As Severely Limiting Essential Freedoms Anders Bylund A remarkably unacceptable treaty proposal is currently being pushed through the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, seemingly concieved by the RIAA and MPAA and backed by traditional old-line media businesses. The Broadcasting Treaty, currently undergoing review at a UN convention in Geneva, Switzerland, contains passages that would severely restrict the concepts of fair use and freedom of speech—on a global level. IP Watch has an excellent overview of the issues: The proposed broadcasting treaty would create entirely new global rights for broadcasting companies who have neither created nor own the programming. What's even more alarming is the proposal from the United States that the treaty regulate the Internet transmission of audio and video entertainment. It is dangerous and inappropriate for an unelected international treaty body to undertake the task of creating entirely new rights, which currently exist in no national law, such as webcasting rights and anti-circumvention laws related to broadcasting. A global treaty is not the place for experimentation with new rights, but rather for the harmonization of existing legal norms. WIPO treads on shaky ground by proposing to create new rights that no elected body in the world has yet agreed to. Under the treaty, broadcasters such as cable companies, radio stations, and Webcasting operators would essentially take over the rights to control material broadcast over the Internet, to the point where the original content creator would have to "beg permission from broadcasting companies in order to make any use of their own performances." If you don't think you should care about a measure like this, consider the effects it could have on freedoms we take for granted today in the US: For example, if US President Bush gave an interview to Fox News, Fox could prevent any subsequent use of that footage including fair use, commentary, or criticism of President Bush - at its sole discretion - under the new anti- circumvention rights created by this treaty. Much of the political humor available on Comedy Central's "The Jon Stewart Show" could become illegal under this treaty. In addition, countries signed to the agreement would have to enforce the implementation of DRM shackles akin to the proposed Broadcast Flag, harsh enough that even Intel objects. Because you can never protect your pilfered ownership rights too much, you know. Unsurprisingly, the EFF has voiced its opposition to the proposal: As we've noted elsewhere, EFF believes that these new rights will stifle innovation, create a new layer of liability for Internet intermediaries, impair consumers' existing rights, restrict the public's access to knowledge and culture, and change the nature of the Internet as a communication medium. Many of these concerns could be addressed by limiting the scope of the treaty to its intended purpose—signal theft. Unfortunately the new draft doesn't remove any of our concerns, but only deepens them. It's disturbing how often it happens that innocuous or even positive legal drafts get additional and often quite scary addendums tacked on along the way toward final approval. And opposing views seem to have a tendency to be overlooked, ignored, or pushed aside. In this case, a majority of the UN member states have already rejected the Webcasting inclusions, but that hasn't stopped the current draft of the main document from retaining that language. Instead, many of the proposed changes that would lead to lesser broadcaster controls and better protection of basic freedoms have been thrown out or relegated to a separate document. "Core" parts of the proposal form the Draft Basic Proposal, while "alternatives" make up the Draft Working Paper, where parties to the treaty are free to opt out of individual clauses. Several countries have complained about their voices not being heard in this process, and after this week's discussions, the draft most likely goes on to receive the official stamp of approval. Is the whole world really that eager to protect the interests of big, established media to the detriment of independent expression? http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060503-6742.html Senators Question F.B.I. Director John O'Neil The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, came under sharp questioning from senators of both parties today on matters ranging from slow progress in intelligence sharing to an attempt to search the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, cited what he said was evidence of more than 100 instances in which F.B.I. agents improperly conducted surveillance of antiwar groups. He said the list included Quakers, a Catholic antiwar organization and the Raging Grannies, which Mr. Leahy sarcastically called "a scary group." As Mr. Leahy and his Democratic colleagues criticized Mr. Mueller, and by extension, the Bush administration, most sharply, the F.B.I. director heard little praise from Republicans on the committee. Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvanian Republican who is the panel's chairman, asked Mr. Mueller about a report issued last month by the General Accounting Office that he said "raises questions about the adequacy of information sharing" between the F.B.I. and other agencies involved in counterterrorism. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, asked Mr. Mueller about reports that F.B.I. agents had "tried to trick" Mr. Anderson's 79-year-old widow into allowing a search of his files after being turned down by her son and the family's lawyer. And Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a close ally of the Bush administration, told the F.B.I. director that he was "troubled" by the agency's actions in the case of an Oregon lawyer who was arrested in connection with the Madrid train bombings in 2003 based on mistaken fingerprint evidence. After describing how a report had concluded that it was the "arrogance" of agents in the F.B.I. lab that led them to disregard doubts raised by Spanish fingerprint experts, Mr. Cornyn told Mr. Mueller, "I certainly hope that strong actions will be taken if these are indeed the facts." Mr. Mueller responded that "the report is absolutely accurate in that we made a mistake," although he questioned the choice of the word arrogant. "There was self-assurance when they shouldn't have been self-assured," he said. The sharpest exchange of the hearing came when Senator Leahy read from F.B.I. memos he said had been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act concerning surveillance of members of the Thomas Merton Center, a group that describes itself as "Pittsburgh's Peace and Social Justice Center." The memos described surveillance of a meeting of the group and of an event in which antiwar leaflets were handed out on street corners shortly before the invasion of Iraq; each noted the number of people of Middle Eastern descent in attendance. "What business does the F.B.I. have spying on law-abiding citizens simply because they oppose the war in Iraq?" Mr. Leahy demanded. "Those memos are an outgrowth of an investigation to identify an individual," Mr. Mueller said. "We were not concerned about the political dissent." "To my knowledge, we have not surveilled the Quakers and I have not heard of the other group you talked about, the grannies," he said. "I am concerned about this raising to this level, without a shred of evidence, without support for those rumors." Mr. Leahy said he would make copies of the memos available to the director. Mr. Leahy also questioned the F.B.I.'s effort to search the files of Mr. Anderson, who feuded with the bureau during his long investigative career. "There's a concern that the F.B.I. may go into his files because of things he discovered about J. Edgar Hoover's personal life," he said. Mr. Mueller said, when asked about the subject by Mr. Specter, that the effort was spurred by the recent discovery of "information indicating that there may be classified national security documents within Mr. Anderson's collection and that the collection may be made available to the public." Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, asked Mr. Mueller about a Justice Department report submitted to Congress last week that showed that the F.B.I. last year issued more than 9,200 "national security letters," which allow agents to collect data on individuals from businesses without a court warrant. The information was first reported today by The Washington Post. Mr. Feingold noted that the requests made for national security letters was a "far, far larger" total than the number of requests for data on individuals made to businesses last year under another provision of the Patriot Act known as Section 215. "I fear that the reason might be that under 215 you have to go before a judge, and you don't under N.S.L.," he said. Mr. Mueller pointed out that the 9,200 national security letters involved only 3,500 individuals. But he acknowledged that the report only covered citizens or people legally within the United States and did not include requests for phone or Internet records. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, pressed Mr. Mueller for answers about how his agency was working with the Coast Guard in the wake of an inspector's general report that said their overlapping missions could lead to a "confused and potentially disastrous" response to a maritime terrorist attack. "We have a preliminary agreement with the Coast Guard," Mr. Mueller said. "And we are discussing with the Coast Guard how we can be more precise in our allocation of responsibilities." "If I were director," Senator Feinstein said, "I think I'd want to be able to say more than I'm looking into it." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/wa...ne r=homepage U.S.: FBI Sought Info Without Court OK Mark Sherman The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court's approval, the Justice Department said Friday. It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge's approval or a grand jury subpoena. Friday's disclosure was mandated as part of the renewal of the Patriot Act, the administration's sweeping anti-terror law. The FBI delivered a total of 9,254 NSLs relating to 3,501 people in 2005, according to a report submitted late Friday to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate. In some cases, the bureau demanded information about one person from several companies. The numbers from previous years remain classified, officials said. The department also reported it received a secret court's approval for 155 warrants to examine business records last year under a Patriot Act provision that includes library records. However, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said the department has never used the provision to ask for library records. The number was a significant jump over past use of the warrant for business records. A year ago, Gonzales told Congress there had been 35 warrants approved between November 2003 and April 2005. The spike is expected to be temporary, however, because the Patriot Act renewal that President Bush signed in March made it easier for authorities to obtain subscriber information on telephone numbers captured through certain wiretaps. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the same panel that signs off on applications for business records warrants, also approved 2,072 special warrants last year for secret wiretaps and searches of suspected terrorists and spies. The record number is more than twice as many as were issued in 2000, the last full year before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The FBI security letters have been the subject of legal battles in two federal courts because, until the Patriot Act changes, recipients were barred from telling anyone about them. Ann Beeson, the associate legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the report to Congress "confirms our fear all along that National Security Letters are being used to get the records of thousands of innocent Americans without court approval." The number disclosed Friday excludes requests for subscriber information, an exception written into the law. It was unclear how many FBI letters were not counted for that reason. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060428/...ot_act_records Feds Try To Dismiss Domestic Spying Suit AP The Justice Department said Friday it was moving to dismiss a federal lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's secretive domestic wiretapping program. The lawsuit, brought by the Internet privacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, does not include the government. Instead, it names AT&T, which the San Francisco-based group accuses of colluding with the National Security Agency to make communications on AT&T networks available to the spy agency without warrants. The government, in a filing here late Friday, said the lawsuit threatens to expose government and military secrets and therefore should be tossed. The administration added that its bid to intervene in the case should not be viewed as a concession that the allegations are true. Gonzales said the administration, assuming the conversation related to al-Qaida, would have to determine if the surveillance were crucial to the nation's fight against terrorism, as authorized by Congress following the Sept. 11 attacks. The EFF lawsuit, alleging AT&T violated U.S. law and its customers' privacy, seeks to stop the surveillance program. The San Antonio-based telecommunications giant said it follows all applicable laws. http://news.newstimeslive.com/storyprint.php?id=83336 FCC Approves Net-Wiretapping Taxes Declan McCullagh Broadband providers and Internet phone companies will have to pick up the tab for the cost of building in mandatory wiretap access for police surveillance, federal regulators ruled Wednesday. The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to levy what likely will amount to wiretapping taxes on companies, municipalities and universities, saying it would create an incentive for them to keep costs down and that it was necessary to fight the war on terror. Universities have estimated their cost to be about $7 billion. "The first obligation is...the safety of the people," said FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat. "This commission supports efforts to protect the public safety and homeland security of the United States and its people." Federal police agencies have spent years lobbying for mandatory backdoors for easy surveillance, saying "criminals, terrorists and spies" could cloak their Internet communications with impunity unless centralized wiretapping hubs become mandatory. Last year, the FCC set a deadline of May 14, 2007, for compliance. But universities, libraries and some technology companies have filed suit against the agency, and arguments before a federal court are scheduled for Friday. "We're going to have a lot of fights over cost reimbursement," Al Gidari, a partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie, who is co-counsel in the lawsuit, said in an interview after the vote. "It continues the lunacy of their prior order and confirms they've learned nothing from what's been filed" in the lawsuit, he said. The original 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, authorized $500 million to pay telecommunications carriers for the cost of upgrading their networks to facilitate wiretapping. Some broadband and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers had hoped that they'd be reimbursed as well. Jonathan Askin, general counsel of Pulver.com, likened Wednesday's vote to earlier FCC rules extending 911 regulations to VoIP. "It essentially imposed a mandate on the industry without giving the industry the necessary support to abide by the rules--and the same thing seems to be happening here," Askin said. Even without the CALEA regulations, police have the legal authority to conduct Internet wiretaps--that's precisely what the FBI's Carnivore system was designed to do. Still, the FBI has argued, the need for "standardized broadband intercept capabilities is especially urgent in light of today's heightened threats to homeland security and the ongoing tendency of criminals to use the most clandestine modes of communication." The American Council on Education, which represents 1,800 colleges and universities, estimates that the costs of CALEA compliance could total roughly $7 billion for the entire higher-education community, or a tuition hike of $450 for every student in the nation. Documents filed in the lawsuit challenging the FCC's rules put the cost at hundreds of dollars per student. But during Wednesday's vote, commissioners dismissed those concerns as unfounded. "I am not persuaded merely by largely speculative allegations that the financial burden on the higher-education community could total billions of dollars," said FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, a Republican. The FCC's initial ruling last fall had left open the question of whether broadband and VoIP providers would be reimbursed for rewiring their networks and upgrading equipment to comply with CALEA. Another open question is what portion of a university's or library's network must be rendered wiretap-friendly. One possibility is that only the pipe (or pipes) connecting a school with the rest of the Internet must be made CALEA-compliant. Another is that the entire network would be covered. The FCC adopted its second order on Wednesday but released only a two-page summary, which didn't offer much clarity. In its initial ruling last year, the FCC said only that it had reached "no conclusions" about exactly what universities and libraries would have to do, prompting a flurry of comments filed with the agency and the federal lawsuit. (Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Sun Microsystems, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the American Library Association, the American Council on Education and VoIP firm Pulver.com.) Commissioner Copps acknowledged that there is "still some clarity to be provided" for library and university network operators, but he suggested that additional clarity would not be forthcoming from the FCC. Instead, "all those agencies and offices of government who are involved in CALEA implementation should be working together to provide clarity there to avoid confusion and possibly expenses for these institutions," Copps said. At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference here Wednesday, John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology said libraries and universities are still left with more questions than answers. "There's some serious uncertainty about how it will really play out for universities," Morris said. Even if the FCC technically calls for Internet interception at the edge of a campus network, that likely won't be enough to satisfy law enforcement demands for all of an individual student's network traffic, including on-campus activities, he added. Injecting additional uncertainty is whether the FCC's action is legal. It represents what critics call an unreasonable extension of CALEA--which was designed to address telephone features such as three-way calling and call waiting--to the Internet. A House of Representatives committee report (click here for PDF) prepared in October 1994 emphatically says CALEA's requirements "do not apply to information services such as electronic-mail services; or online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online or Mead Data (Central); or to Internet service providers." When Congress was debating CALEA, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh reassured nervous senators that the law would be limited to telephone calls. "So what we are looking for is strictly telephone--what is said over a telephone?" Sen. Larry Pressler, R-S.D., asked during one hearing. Freeh replied: "That is the way I understand it. Yes, sir." Two of the four FCC commissioners who voted for the initial CALEA ruling last fall acknowledged that the federal government was on shaky legal ground. The FCC's regulation is based on arguing that the law's definition of "telecommunications carrier" applies to broadband and VoIP providers. Then-FCC Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy, a Republican, said, "Because litigation is as inevitable as death and taxes, and because some might not read the statute to permit the extension of CALEA to the broadband Internet access and VoIP services at issue here, I have stated my concern that an approach like the one we adopt today is not without legal risk." The FCC is no stranger to having its decisions rejected by a federal appeals court that can be hostile to what it views as regulatory overreaching. Last May, for instance, the FCC's "broadcast flag" was unceremoniously tossed out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. http://news.com.com/FCC+approves+Net...3-6067971.html Official: National Card Due By 2010 Louise Dodson and Stephanie Peatling AUSTRALIANS will need a photo identity card within four years to receive Medicare and welfare payments but will not be forced to carry it at all times. The new "smart card" will contain "enhanced security" and replace 17 existing cards for Medicare benefits, family tax, child-care and unemployment payments, pensions, Austudy and pharmaceutical and transport concessions. People will be able to register for the card from the beginning of 2008 and it will be phased in over two years. The card will also be used to check identities for immigration and security purposes and to crack down on fraud. Its embedded computer chip will include a photograph, number, signature, date of birth and address. From 2010 people will not be able to receive government health and welfare payments without a card. People may choose to have other information stored on the card, such as health and emergency contact details which, for example, ambulance officers could use. Although it will cost $1 billion it is estimated it will save the Government $3 billion a year. The Prime Minister, John Howard, said the Government had considered a national identity card after last year's London bombings but in the end it "was not predisposed to adopt a national ID card". He denied the card was "a Trojan horse for an ID card" but acknowledged it would have "enhanced security features". He said the security features of the smart card were one reason that a separate national identity card was not deemed necessary. Its perceived "Big Brother" features were another reason. The Government's decision followed a number of cabinet debates. Mr Howard said it showed a balance had been struck between ease of access to government payments and enhanced security measures on the one hand and legitimate concerns about storing personal information on the other. However some of his ministers think of it as an identity card. Before the announcement the Treasurer, Peter Costello, referred to it as just that, and then corrected himself. The NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, whom Mr Howard consulted before the announcement, welcomed the card. He said it was possible to balance threats to security with individual rights. However, the president of the NSW Council of Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, said the card would put people at risk of identity theft and fraud. "Everybody is interested in streamlining accessibility to government services," he said. "It's really how you go about doing it and ensuring any system is safe and secure and people aren't forced to provide information that is unnecessary and exposes them to the risk of fraud." The president of the Australian Council of Civil Liberties, Terry O'Gorman, said the announcement "marked a move towards an eventual ID card". Business reacted suspiciously, saying it could easily turn into an identity card. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's chief, Peter Hendy, said that although he supported clamping down on welfare fraud he was concerned that "an upgraded card runs the risk of providing government with a platform for a far more costly and intrusive Australia Card-type proposal". The Opposition's human services spokesman, Kelvin Thomson, gave in-principle support to the card but warned of a potential cost blow-out. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/...861419456.html Selling Surveillance to Anxious Parents Matt Richtel KEVIN REYNOLDS, a real estate appraiser and father of two, is confronting a quandary: should he put his daughters under electronic surveillance? It's a question more parents will face in the next months, thanks to new technology that lets them use cellphones to monitor their children's location. Next month, Verizon Wireless plans to introduce a child-monitoring service, joining Sprint Nextel and Disney Mobile, which started similar services this spring. Cingular is working on the concept, too. The systems track cellphones by satellite, allowing parents to look on the Internet to make sure their children arrived safely, say, at school or at a friend's house. "If you don't do it and something happens to your kids, how would you feel?" said Mr. Reynolds, 49, contemplating giving such phones to his daughters, ages 4 and 8. But he is also wary of being overly intrusive. "It's Big Brother on a kid's level," he said. "What's it like to live in a world where everybody has a device that tracks where we are?" We may soon find out. Several new programs for consumers use cellphones to tell us — and our parents and employers, not to mention advertisers — where we are, how fast we're moving, what direction we're moving in and how close we happen to be to restaurants, movie theaters, banks and other businesses. Soon our cellphones will locate, record and even herald us with digital precision: "You are here." These location-based services take advantage of technology built into dozens of the newest phones. It can instantaneously identify a phone's location by using satellites and the Global Positioning System, or by determining the location of the cell tower connected to the phone. For the telecommunications companies that are eager to sell these services, they are a possible new source of revenue at a time when nearly every American old enough to read the user manual is already carrying a cellphone. For users, the technologies raise social, psychological, legal and interpersonal questions. A gadget that could save lives or bring peace of mind by identifying where a lost, rebellious or even kidnapped child is can also be viewed as a surveillance device, threatening one's privacy. There is also the question of reliability. The network could fail, or the person with the phone could turn it off, making it futile as a monitor and perhaps causing more concern. "If I was going somewhere I wasn't supposed to, I'd just turn it off and say my phone died," said Marshaye Savoy, a 10th grader at Grant High School in Sacramento. Marshaye lives with her mother, Maisha Savoy. Marshaye's grandmother Montreal McClain, 54, said she had mixed feelings about the service. Mrs. McClain worries that it will be worthless if a child turns it off — but she likes the idea of being able to locate Marshaye. "Children tell us they're going to be in one place and they're in another — this could make them accountable," Mrs. McClain said, adding that she was also afraid of children being abducted. "There are a lot of wicked people." The companies behind the technology bristle when it is characterized as a surveillance tool. Sensitive to accusations of fearmongering, cellular carriers argue that they are supplying parents with "peace of mind." Verizon Wireless, which plans to introduce its $9.99 monthly service, called Chaperone, in June, said it tried to balance privacy and safety concerns, discussing its plans with law enforcement officials, educators and missing-children advocates. Concerns about the services have not stopped Verizon from plunging ahead. The company aims to take the concept beyond spot-checks on a child's whereabouts. For $19.99, parents can program a child's phone with geographic boundaries (around a school, say). When a child leaves the area, the parent will get a text message indicating the perimeter has been breached. "Whether the child is arriving at or leaving the zone, the parent will get a text message," said Lee Daniels, who oversees location-based services at Verizon. The company calls the service "geo-fencing." "It's a tool to enhance peace of mind," Mr. Daniels said, though he acknowledged that the system might not always work. "You'll always have that risk that the kid can turn off the phone, destroy the phone, take off the battery," he said. "It's not the be-all, end-all. We don't see this service as being an alternative to a parent, or as a babysitter for the parent." Chaperone and its geo-fencing service could be good for the phone companies' sales. Industry analysts say the companies, whose rapid growth has begun to taper off as American society has reached cellphone saturation, are looking for new revenue sources. Location-based services — from child monitors to car navigation systems — are a hot opportunity, the analysts say. "They will be very big," said Ed Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. "Tracking your kids is something everybody will pay $5 or $10 a month for." Sprint Nextel hopes people will pay for other things too, like determining how far and how fast they run and bike. In February, the company began offering a service called Bones in Motion, which for $9.99 a month records the distance traveled, speed, elevation and even calories burned during a workout. In March, the company introduced a search engine for mobile phones that lets people willing to pay $2.99 a month find businesses nearby. For instance, a person can click on the phone to search for restaurants, and the phone will report back the nearest ones, with phone numbers, maps and directions. Infospace, the company that makes the mobile search technology, has programmed the service so that, with a few clicks, a phone user can find movie theaters, A.T.M.'s, even doctor's offices — some 13 million business nationwide. Infospace, Verizon Wireless and others said that another promising concept would allow people to make their whereabouts known to friends. With this service, friends can receive alerts if they are in each others' vicinity — at the mall, say, or a club. This idea of mobile social networking could extend to Internet dating services. For example, members in a dating service could receive notifications if others in the service were nearby. Another technology under development at Verizon Wireless would allow people who can receive e-mail on their phones and other portable devices to click on any physical address pasted into the e-mail to receive information on its proximity and directions. Earlier this year, Verizon announced a service that uses satellite systems to let people with certain phones use them to get turn-by-turn driving directions, either in text format or spoken aloud by a computerized voice. The service, called VZ Navigator, is one of several new phone-based car and on-foot navigation tools the carriers are offering. Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon's chief operating officer, said location-based services were the next big advance for the industry. "Before you knew the phone was out there; now you know exactly where the phone is," he said. "It allows you to do a whole bunch more complicated tasks." The issues raised by the services are part of a growing awareness that cellular communications can be a double-edged sword, allowing enormous efficiencies at the expense of making people accessible any time and virtually from anywhere. There are also potential legal issues raised by location-based services, particularly the child-monitoring technology, said Roger Entner, an analyst with Ovum Research. In the nightmare situation, he said, a child with a phone might be abducted and harmed but unreachable because the phone had been turned off or the network was down. Another potential problem, Mr. Entner said, could arise if adults used the service to track one another without permission. For instance, he said, a disgruntled spouse could surreptitiously attach a phone to his partner's car to track its movements. By offering these services, the carriers "put a lot of responsibility on their shoulders," Mr. Entner said. The carriers counter by saying they are not responsible for how people use the services, nor are they pitching the technology as 100 percent effective. "Sprint cannot and does not guarantee the availability of its network, products and services in all instances," the company said in a statement, adding, "We believe wireless customers understand this and do not expect otherwise." Critics also say that some of the monitoring services capitalize on and reinforce fear not just among parents but among employers, too. "There's too much hype and too much worry," said Parry Aftab, executive director of wiredsafety.org, an organization that, among other things, educates the public on how to protect children using technology. "I've never seen parents more freaked out than they are now." Ms. Aftab said she blamed television mostly for blowing things out of proportion. "These technologies reflect our neuroses by having to protect against very unlikely scenarios," said James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. The devices, he said, could "diminish the quality of life between now and when a catastrophe occurs, if it ever does." For her part, Ms. Aftab is a consultant to Disney Mobile for its own child-monitoring service, a job she said she took only after the company agreed it would not use fear to market the service. "Under no circumstances should they be talking about 'peace of mind,' because that's just selling fear," Ms. Aftab said. But, perhaps underscoring the gray areas raised by the technology — and putting Ms. Aftab at odds with her employer — George Grobar, general manager of Disney Mobile, says "peace of mind" is exactly what the company is selling. "It lets parents follow up and make sure their kids have arrived somewhere," he said. What is also critical is that some employees have been equipped with monitoring phones. "We hardly have any privacy as it is now — you go to a gas station and there's a camera on you, there are cameras outside of residential homes," said Pam Dickey, a San Francisco resident who works in sales for a major pharmaceutical company, which has asked its national sales force to carry phones that monitor their whereabouts. "Now you have a telephone that will potentially tell people where you are, too — when you're in the bathroom, and how long you're there. "It's too much an invasion of privacy," she said. She said she had no plans to ask her daughter to carry such a phone. But Megan Dickey, 17, a junior at Lowell High School in San Francisco, said she wouldn't mind if her mother did ask. "It's a really good safety feature," she said. "You never know what will happen, and it seems like more bad things are happening now." "But isn't crime going down?" asked her friend, Morgan Molvig, 17, also a junior at Lowell, as they recently ate lunch on campus. Morgan says she wants no part of such a device. "I want my parents to trust me," she said. "I would feel my privacy was being invaded." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/te...008&ei=5087%0A File-Sharing Is The New Email As our digital photos and videos get bigger and bigger, email can't handle the load. Three stealthy startups say file-sharing is the answer. Om Malik Thanks to record-label lawsuits and spyware scares, file-sharing has a bad reputation among consumers. But three startups are nevertheless betting that they can harness the technology to solve a growing problem: Conveniently sharing photos and home videos with friends and family. The three oufits that are exiting stealth mode this week -- New York-based Pando Networks, Perenety of Sunnyvale, California, and WiredReach of Austin, Texas -- have developed products that aim to supplant email for sharing digital photo albums, home videos, and other weighty files. Digital cameras and camcorders are fast increasing the resolution they capture, which in turn leads to larger files. But Internet service providers typically block users from sending files bigger than 10 megabytes to prevent large email attachments from clogging up their systems. For email recipients, it's no easier: Even though free services like Yahoo (Research) Mail and Google's (Research) Gmail now offer gigabytes of storage, it's easy to run through that limit with just a few photo albums or videos. "Most of us attach dozens of photos to an email and send them to our friends and family," says Pando co-founder Yaron Samid. "It is quite a big hassle, and you are never sure if the email gets to the person you are sending." The big picture There are websites like Flickr and YouTube, of course, where users can post photos and video -- but those are designed for material you want to share with the world, not just a few friends or family members. Photo-sharing websites like Kodak (Research) EasyShare Gallery, Snapfish, and Shutterfly all share a common flaw: The need to upload photos to a Web server, a process which just gets lengthier and more prone to error the bigger the files get. That's where file sharing comes in handy. Unlike email or website uploads, which have to go through a central server, file sharing connects two computers directly for more efficient content transfer -- what's known as "peer-to-peer networking." Peer-to-peer networking came to the forefront in the late 1990s when Napster (Research) made it relatively easy for far-flung users to share music files. Napster drew the ire of the music industry and went bankrupt, only to be replaced by the more exotically named Kazaa, Gnutella, and other networks. (A reborn Napster took the old company's name, but doesn't use file-sharing technology.) File-sharing got its outlaw reputation because the technology made it easier to download large files, but difficult to trace where digitally pirated movie and music came from. This new wave of file-sharing startups isn't aiming to share music or Hollywood movies, however. It's just using the technology to speed and simplify the problem of moving a large file from computer A to computer B. Pando's Samid founded the company in December 2004 with Laird Popkin, a former director of digital technology for Warner Music (Research), and Robert Levitan, the cofounder of media website iVillage, now owned by GE's NBC Universal unit. The three started developing Pando's application, which lets users drag and drop files into a "package" which they can then email to friends. Rather than containing the photo and video files themselves, Pando's package just contains information about the location of the files. The recipient gets a link to download Pando's software, which begins downloading the files as soon as it's installed. Pando uses the same technology found in BitTorrent, a relatively new file-sharing system that's been gaining popularity among the geek set, but which still remains beyond the grasp of the average computer user, according to Samid. "Our goal was to bring the power of BitTorrent to the mainstream user who just wants to email Mom some heavy photos and videos," he says. So far, the plan seems to be working. The company has more than 315,000 users, with 6,000 signing up every day. They share 15 terabytes of data on an average day. Preventing piracy To keep Pando from being used by music and movie pirates, Pando has restricted the number of people to whom you can send a Pando package, and limited the file size to one gigabyte, enough space to hold about 45 7-megapixel photos. While Pando has tried to keep its application close to the email-attachment model, Perenety has modeled its Shooter application after Skype, the voice-over-Internet-protocol outfit which was bought by eBay (Research), says co-founder Xavier Casanova. It may seem like an unlikely comparison, but Perenety, which is now conducting a limited test of Shooter, is emulating Skype's one-to-one connectivity and buddy-list features. Just as Skype connects two PCs directly for a call and tells you which people are available to talk, Perenety connects PCs directly for speedier file transfers and lets you know when your contacts share new files. "We have developed this technology so that it is optimized for one-to-one file transfers and sharing," says Casanova. Every time a friend uploads new photos into Shooter, people who have previously received files from that person get an alert, just like you get when a buddy signs on to your instant-messaging network. Like Pando, it has a one-gigabyte file-size limit. WiredReach's BoxCloud service, which has yet to launch publicly, also models itself after popular instant-messaging software. Unlike Pando and Perenety, it won't have limits on file size or the number of people you can share a file with. Of the three startups vying to replace email, Pando has the biggest lead in users, even in its limited beta-test phase. That suggests that keeping the process of sharing large files as close as possible to the familiar experience of sending email attachments may be the smartest way to go. One thing's clear: Unless we all agree to ditch our digital cameras and stop promising to send Mom pictures, this problem isn't going away anytime soon. http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/01/tech...n=money_latest Five Face Piracy Charges For 'Warez' Alleged copyright violators hail from around the U.S. Grant Gross Five U.S. residents face criminal copyright charges for their alleged participation in the online "warez" file-trading community, the U.S. Department of Justice announced today. The charges come out of an ongoing DOJ crackdown against international online piracy groups that distribute copyrighted movies, software, games and music on the Internet. The five defendants are alleged to be leading members of the "warez scene," groups of Internet users who illegally distribute copyrighted materials online. Warez groups, using servers worldwide, are often the first distributors of copyrighted works online, before the works filter down to peer-to-peer and other public networks, the DOJ said. Kevin Fuchs, 25, of West Amherst, N.Y., and Cuong Quoc Trang, 35, of Parker, Colo., were charged in an indictment with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and copyright infringement, the DOJ said. Matthew Alderman, 24, of Ashland, Ore., was charged with criminal copyright infringement, and David Morvant, 35, of Thibodaux, La., and Michael Hays, 51, of Delafield, Wis., were charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. The charges are part of Operations FastLink and Site Down, the two largest international law enforcement efforts targeted at online distribution of copyrighted material, the DOJ said. The operations have resulted in more than 200 search warrants executed in 16 countries, hundreds of computers being confiscated and more than $100 million worth of copyrighted software, games, movies and music removed from download sites. Countries participating in the U.S.-led operations included France, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Hungary, Israel, Spain, Australia, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium and Germany. The charges are being prosecuted by the U.S. attorney's office for the Western District of North Carolina. The office charged eight other alleged warez leaders with copyright-related crimes in July. Operation FastLink has resulted in 28 felony convictions so far. In Operation Site Down, 53 people have been charged and 23 convicted of felony offenses. http://www.computerworld.com/securit...110929,00.html CEO of Company That Owns Kazaa File-Sharing Network Appears In Sydney Court The chief executive of the company that owns the Kazaa file-sharing network Friday denied hastily selling her multimillion dollar Sydney mansion and sending the proceeds to the tax haven of Vanuatu to make sure record company lawyers could not get their hands on it. The denial capped more than four hours on the stand for Nikki Hemming at the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney for cross examination on two affidavits she has written detailing her assets ahead of a possible court order for damages against Kazaa's owners for authorizing widescale copyright breaches by users of the so-called peer-to-peer network. Hemming's appearance marked the first time such a senior executive linked to Kazaa has taken the stand in a long-running legal battle between Australian record labels and Kazaa. Last year, a federal court judge ruled that Kazaa's owners, including Hemming, did nothing to rein in widespread copyright infringements by Kazaa users. Lawyers for the owners have appealed and no decision has yet been handed down on the appeal. If the appeal fails, the Australian recording industry has vowed to seek millions of dollars in damages. Fearing that Hemming and other executives named in the case could send their assets overseas out of the court's reach, the Federal Court last year froze their assets. Friday's questioning appeared aimed at establishing whether Hemming was able to get some money offshore before her assets were frozen. In a packed courtroom, record company lawyer Richard Cobden painstakingly outlined a complex web of companies and a trust linked to Kazaa in Australia and Vanuatu. Hemming is chief executive officer of Sharman Networks, the Vanuatu-based company that owns the Kazaa software used by millions of people around the world to swap music and video files. Hemming, wearing a black suit and white blouse, said Sharman bought the Kazaa file-sharing software in early 2002 for 600,000 euros (US$750,000) from a Dutch company, Kazaa B.V. In February 2003, Hemming bought a 1.7 million Australian dollar house in Sydney, partly funded by a US$810,000 unsecured loan from a company in Vanuatu with an interest rate of 3.5 percent, well below Australian rates at the time. In December 2004, with a new swimming pool she was having built still not finished, Hemming sold the house to John Myers, an accountant who worked for Sharman, for A$2.1 million (US$1.58 million) and paid back the loan to Vanuatu. Cobden said to Hemming she appeared to have rushed through the sale because the Kazaa trial was close to ending "and you had formed a pessimistic view about your prospects in that trial." Hemming, who earlier denied that the so-called loan was actually money controlled by Sharman in Vanuatu, replied: "That is also not true." "The sale of the house had nothing to do with the case," she added. In earlier testimony, Hemming told the court that a veil of secrecy around the trust she set up for Sharman in Vanuatu was useful to her when setting up Sharman. "Confidentiality was something which enabled me to have a flexible arrangement when I set up the business," she said without elaborating. http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/intern...in035000c.html Next Step In Pirating: Faking a Company David Lague BEIJING At first it seemed to be nothing more than a routine, if damaging, case of counterfeiting in a country where faking it has become an industry. Reports filtering back to the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese electronics giant NEC in mid-2004 alerted managers that pirated keyboards and recordable CD and DVD discs bearing the company's brand were on sale in retail outlets in Beijing and Hong Kong. Like hundreds, if not thousands, of manufacturers now locked in a war of attrition with intellectual property thieves in China, the company hired an investigator to track down the pirates. After two years and thousands of hours of investigation in conjunction with law enforcement agencies in China, Taiwan and Japan, the company said it had uncovered something far more ambitious than clandestine workshops turning out inferior copies of NEC products. The pirates were faking the entire company. Evidence seized in raids on 18 factories and warehouses in China and Taiwan over the past year showed that the counterfeiters had set up what amounted to a parallel NEC brand with links to a network of more than 50 electronics factories in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In the name of NEC, the pirates copied NEC products, and went as far as developing their own range of consumer electronic products - everything from home entertainment centers to MP3 players. They also coordinated manufacturing and distribution, collecting all the proceeds. The Japanese company even received complaints about products - which were of generally good quality - that they did not make or provide with warranties. NEC said it was unable to estimate the total value of the pirated goods from these factories, but the company believed the organizers had "profited substantially" from the operation. "These entities are part of a sophisticated ring, coordinated by two key entities based in Taiwan and Japan, which has attempted to completely assume the NEC brand," said Fujio Okada, the NEC senior vice president and legal division general manager, in written answers to questions. "Many of these entities are familiar with each other and cooperate with each other to develop, manufacture and sell products utilizing the NEC brand." NEC declined to identify the companies for legal reasons. Officials from branch offices of the Chinese State Administration of Industry and Commerce in southern China confirmed that counterfeit goods carrying the NEC brand had been seized in raids on a number of factories and that investigations were continuing. Some technology companies have been criticized for piecemeal and half- hearted attempts to protect their intellectual property, but Okada said NEC was prepared to take proactive measures to defend its brand. NEC had not previously made public the piracy in order not to compromise its investigation. NEC said it would continue collecting evidence to support further criminal complaints. It was also planning to start civil lawsuits against some factories while negotiating with others. Steve Vickers, president of International Risk, a Hong Kong-based company that NEC hired to investigate the piracy, said documents and computer records seized by the police during the factory and warehouse raids had revealed the scope of the piracy. These records showed that the counterfeiters carried NEC business cards, commissioned product research and development in the company's name and signed production and supply orders. He said they also required factories to pay royalties for "licensed" products and issued official-looking warranty and service documents. Some of the factories that were raided had erected bogus NEC signs and shipped their products packaged in authentic looking boxes and display cases. NEC said about 50 products were counterfeited, including home entertainment systems, MP3 players, batteries, microphones and DVD players. Many of these pirated items were not part of the genuine NEC product range. The investigation also revealed that fake goods from these factories were on sale in Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In some cases, they were being sold alongside legitimate NEC products in retail outlets. Vickers, a former senior Hong Kong police officer, said he believed that the NEC case demonstrated how piracy is evolving from opportunistic and often shoddy copying of branded goods to highly coordinated operations. "On the surface, it looked like a series of intellectual property infringements, but in reality a highly organized group has attempted to hijack the entire brand," he said. "It is not a simple case of a factory knocking off a branded product. Many of them have been given bogus paperwork that they say gives them the right to do it." An official for a Chinese economic inspection team in Zhuhai in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, who would give his name only as Zeng, said the managers of one factory that had been raided insisted they had a license to manufacture NEC goods. He said that Chinese officials were seeking clarification from NEC and that the investigation was continuing. The counterfeiting attack on the NEC brand comes as the Chinese government is coming under intense international pressure to crack down on rampant intellectual property theft. The U.S. government and American businesses complain that the Chinese efforts to combat piracy have so far been ineffective. Gregory Shea, president of the U.S. Information Technology Office in Beijing, which represents more than 6,000 technology companies, said it was clear that the top Chinese leaders understood that intellectual property rights contributed to economic growth. "We commend that, but we do recognize nonetheless that the situation is not improving on the ground," he said. "It has not turned the corner." In response to the losses suffered by Japanese companies, Tokyo has called on China to crack down on piracy. Japan last year joined the United States in filing a formal request under World Trade Organization rules calling on Beijing to detail efforts it was making to enforce intellectual property rights. But piracy experts say privately that strained Chinese-Japanese ties complicate Tokyo's efforts to support Japanese companies operating in China. While intellectual property violations continue, there are clear signs that China is responding to international pressure. In the lead-up to the visit of the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, to the United States this month, Beijing began a publicity campaign to draw attention to what it said was an intensified crackdown on intellectual property theft. And, while Hu toured technology companies in the United States, the Chinese leader reinforced this message. After a visit to the Microsoft headquarters in Seattle on April 18, Hu said the protection of intellectual property was crucial for China's future. "It is necessary to create a favorable investment environment, good and fast development, and for China's own innovative capability," he said. "We take very seriously our promises to enforce our laws on this issue." Senior Chinese officials acknowledge that trademark violations occur, but they argue that local manufacturers were sometimes duped into producing pirated goods. At a media briefing in March, the Chinese deputy minister for customs, Gong Zheng, said many factories produced goods under license to be exported and sold under a company's brand. "Its easy for them to be deceived or lured by foreign traders to manufacture and export infringing goods," he said. Vickers agreed that Chinese factories were often just part of the problem. "The factory in China sometimes appears to be the bad guy, but often the bad guy is someone behind the scenes and they are often not in China," he said. The first phase in NEC's effort to disrupt the counterfeiters began early last year when evidence that the piracy was coordinated from Taiwan was handed over to authorities on the island. Prosecutors in the southern city of Kaohsiung issued warrants for the local police to raid a warehouse and offices in the area where investigators seized 60 pallets of counterfeit goods, mostly audio products, carrying the NEC brand. Evidence collected in these raids also implicated factories in mainland China, according to people familiar with the investigation in Taiwan. Officials at the Kaohsiung District Court said the case was still under investigation. Beginning in November, the Chinese economic authorities coordinated further raids on nine factories in the cities of Guangzhou, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and Shenzhen in Guangdong Province. Vickers said many multinational companies were now facing similar challenges to NEC as piracy expanded and became better organized. "The reality is that factories in China will produce what they are asked to produce," he said. "The challenge is finding out who placed the orders and who funded it." http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/27/business/nec.php Microsoft Settles Calif. Antitrust Suit For $70 Million Michael Liedtke Microsoft Corp. will pay $70 million to thousands of California government agencies in the latest legal settlement spurred by price-gouging allegations against the world's largest computer software maker. The proposed truce covers a wide range of taxpayer-backed agencies — from local school districts to regional transportation systems — that bought Microsoft products dating back to 1995. If the settlement gains court approval later this year, Microsoft will divide the $70 million among the eligible government agencies as they buy computers, printers and software, including brands that compete against Microsoft. The proposed payments are similar to a $1.1 billion pool that Microsoft set up for California consumers and businesses in 2004 after settling a lawsuit alleging the software maker had abused its power in the computing industry to inflate prices. Although Microsoft has consistently defended its prices as fair and reasonable, government regulators, customers and business rivals have long insisted that the software maker leveraged its Windows operating system — the brains of most personal computers — to build an unfair market advantage. The backlash unleashed a tidal wave of lawsuits, including a closely watched antitrust case filed by the U.S. Justice Department. That showdown culminated in a 2002 settlement. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft spent billions resolving other suits brought by rivals like AOL Time Warner Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., as well as other government entities. Led by the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the California government agencies filed their suit in 2004. The counties of Santa Clara, San Mateo, Los Angeles and Contra Costa also joined in the action. In a statement Tuesday, Microsoft denied it did anything wrong. "We value our relationship with these cities and counties and are pleased to reach a settlement that allows us all to focus on the future," said Tom Burt, Microsoft's deputy general counsel. San Francisco lawyer Richard Grossman, who represented the government agencies, said his clients were "delighted" with the settlement. The agreement still requires the approval of U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore. The California agencies originally sued in San Francisco Superior Court, but the case was transferred to Maryland, where Motz is overseeing several other similar suits against Microsoft. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...f162555D21.DTL Wal-mart's Wikipedia War Richard Demsyn For up to two years Wal-mart lobbyists have successfully waged a war against a fair viewpoint on Wikipedia's Wal-mart page[1]. Although the Wal-mart page was originally highly critical of Wal-mart, it has slowly shifted to a very positive perspective. Although Wikipedia maintains a 'Neutral Point of View' (NPOV) policy[2], the Wal-mart page is highly biased. Additionally, all criticism has, contrary to policy, practice, and the general opinion of those concerned, been moved to a Debates Over Wal-mart section[3]. Even that page has noticeable resistance to negative points of view about Wal-mart. My query into Wal-mart and Wikipedia started on Friday, April 14. I went to the page to find information on Wal-mart's union issues in Quebec, which had been a large issue in the media here. I found just one small entry on a timeline, saying '2004: Wal-Mart employees in JonquiÃ¨re, Quebec, Canada vote in favour of becoming the first unionized Wal-Mart in North America. Five months later, Wal-Mart announces that it would close the store, citing poor sales.' The corresponding page, Debates over Wal-mart, has no mention of the issue, or even Quebec at all. I found it very curios that such an important and popular issue was barely discussed. My first reaction was to think that Wal-mart, one of the largest and most powerful capitalist enterprises in the world, has lobbyists progressing the Wikipedia page into propaganda. Trying to be wary, I took some time to gather information and discuss the theory with others, and found nothing contrary to my original impression, and only evidence supporting it. Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopaedia. It uses a model of information where anybody can contribute. Although this leads to some vandalism and some disinformation, almost always an accurate and knowledgeable viewpoint prevails. The project has brought thousands of intelligent people devoted to its cause. The model is effective enough that my own user page was once vandalized, and then fixed by another user a single minute later, without me knowing for another three months. Rarely has there been enough interest in spreading disinformation to cause a lengthy disruption to an article. We usually see that contained to very controversial political issues, such as the page for President George W. Bush, particularly around the 2004 election. We've also seen numerous edits by US congressional staff[4]. However, nothing I've seen before has been has been this bad: on an article so large, often visited, and been so successful so long after being discovered by the NPOV folk at Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page Wal-mart was originally small and haphazard. Starting in February 2004, there was a sharp increase in edits to the page. In September, 2004, the edit number ballooned, and since then has continued to grow. There has been a lot of work by Wikipedia regulars to bring fairness and quality to the article, but an equal disruptive force has been caused by lobbyists. Now, the page will have over a dozen edits on any average day. My own short experience with this article makes a fair example. After bringing up discussion on the topic in Wikipedia's generally IRC channel, a fellow user, Bogdangiusca, who had fought for a NPOV on the article as far back as May 1, 2005, added a totally disputed tag[5]. This tag would mean that anyone visiting the page would see a red block at the top indicating that 'The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article are disputed'. This tag was removed the next day. The person who did so then defaced Bogdangiusca's user page with a long paragraph demanding that Bogdangiusca stop any contribution to the Wal-mart page[6]. The user claimed to be an employee of Wal-mart and lamented, 'So why don’t you just keep to what you know and allow those that do have facts about walmart to create an accurate picture of walmart for the world.' This pattern has been repeated over and over again about the Wal-mart page. Many users struggling for a NPOV have had their pages defaced, and defacers have in the past been banned. So who are the lobbyists, and what do they look like? Unfortunately it is very difficult to prove that any one user is corrupted, let alone paid for this by a particular company, especially with only a few days of research. Sorting through thousands of edits and user contribution pages is not an easy task[7]. A lot of these edits are done by anonymous users, just IPs to me. Some others actually have logins. Usually these accounts have very few edits other than on the Wal-mart page, and they have either blank user pages or simple statements. Sometimes they just edit out sentences that aren't favourable to Wal-mart. Sometimes they add more propaganda to the page. Sometimes they will follow an unfavourable mention with a revert, possibly back through several edits to a pro-Wal-mart addition. The simple fact that there is a separate Debates over Wal-mart page is incriminating. This isn't an accepted Wikipedia policy. In other articles contrary opinions are still embedded, even if at times the page will link to secondary articles on smaller topics if they cannot be explained in full on the current page. Any reference articles will be read less than the main article, so despite a link on Wal-mart to Debates over Wal-mart, the debates page will be read less. Even then, it is currently introduced with the following view: 'From a financial standpoint, Wal-Mart is one of the most successful corporations ever; the company has generated a total return to shareholders greater than 180,000% since its initial public offering. Academic research, business leaders and trade publications praise Wal-Mart for benefiting consumers by lowering prices and increasing Overall productivity.' Like many successful businesses, however, Wal-Mart is a target of much criticism. Critics, such as trade unions and environmental groups, state that the company's success derives from business practices harmful to employees, local communities, the economy and the environment.' After all analysis, Wal-mart is clearly 'point of view'. The page is highly supportive of Wal-mart, and lobbyists will not allow anything contrary to last. It reads like a propaganda piece. It is unprecedented that such support would come from random, untainted users. The support is aggressive, unfair, distributed, and over an extended period of time. The only conclusion I can make is that Wal-mart has used its economic power to hire lobbyists who as part of their job use Wikipedia to spread disinformation for the benefit of Wal-mart. This stands as a powerful strike against the very integrity of Wikipedia. http://www.whitedust.net/article/55/...Wikipedia_War/ Microsoft's China Card Olga Kharif with Steve Hamm and Sarah Lacy By investing heavily in local software outfits, Microsoft aims to counter piracy and expand its foothold in the Middle Kingdom China's president Hu Jintao kicked off his recent U.S. visit not by checking in first at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., but by meeting Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. The social call may have paid off. On Apr. 26, the Redmond (Wash.)-based software giant announced plans to invest $900 million in Chinese software companies and hardware over the next five years. The aim is to reduce piracy rates and establish Windows as the dominant operating system in the region. The deal represents Microsoft's biggest commitment to China to date. The company said in 2002 it would invest $750 million in Chinese companies and products over three years, a period the company and China have dubbed Phase I of Microsoft-China relations. Microsoft (MSFT ) is now upping the ante on investments. Microsoft, with China's National Development & Reform Commission, will also establish a development center to boost capabilities of Chinese software companies. In addition, Microsoft will train 10,000 Chinese software engineers. These aren't mere goodwill gestures. Gates & Co. aim to reduce the rampant unauthorized sales of Windows at Chinese shops and bazaars. Microsoft also hopes the deal will result in wider use of its Windows operating system in China, where the PC market is growing at a double-digit pace, representing "the world's best opportunity [for PC software sales]," says Roger Kay, president of tech consultancy Endpoint Technologies Associates. Microsoft, looking to step up growth, clearly wants a slice of the pie. PIRACY PEAKING. To now, Microsoft's investment efforts have made little headway in reducing piracy. The company should be booking about $1 billion on annual sales of some 20 million PCs in China, says Paul DeGroot, an analyst at consultancy Directions on Microsoft. Instead, sales there are about $100 million, he says. The PC makers don't pre-load Windows on their computers, and consumers install pirated copies of the operating system on their own. Software piracy has fallen a few percentage points in China in recent years, according to a 2005 survey by Business Software Alliance, an industry consortium fighting piracy. But it's still at an eye-popping 90%, and the decline has more to do with the country's growing prosperity than Microsoft's investments, DeGroot says. Now that they make more money, users can afford legal versions of Windows. Microsoft tried to block Kai-Fu Lee, an executive in its Chinese operations, from joining competitor Google (GOOG ) last year. During court proceedings, Lee said Microsoft botched efforts in China by failing to make friends with the Chinese government early on. The software company may be making up for lost time. Some analysts say Microsoft could finally see returns in the next two years. GOVERNMENT SUPPORT. The Chinese government appears to be making efforts to reduce piracy. On March 31, China announced it would require all new PCs to be shipped with pre-installed, legal operating systems. While many PC makers will likely opt for the cheaper (or free) Linux system, the policy could boost legal sales of Windows as well. And on Mar. 30, three Chinese government agencies began requiring that all PCs they buy come pre-loaded with Windows. Partly due to the Chinese government's thaw, Microsoft is gaining traction with Chinese computer manufacturers. On Apr. 18, on the eve of Hu Jintao's arrival at Gates' house for dinner, Yang Yuanqing, chairman of Chinese PC maker Lenovo, signed an agreement with Microsoft to jointly market PCs in China. Before then, last November, when the PC maker has agreed to pre-load Windows onto Lenovo-branded PCs, fewer than 10% of which came with Windows (the rest used Linux and DOS). SOLID INVESTMENT. Today, 70% of Lenovo-branded PCs in China have Windows XP pre-installed. "It gave us a competitive advantage over other PC makers who weren't shipping Windows," says Yang. "We were the first to start doing this. It improved the image of the company." Lenovo acquired IBM's (IBM ) PC business last year. Now, more local PC makers are flocking to Microsoft. Recently, the company signed deals to bundle Windows onto PCs made by several other Chinese manufacturers. The financial impact of the Chinese deals on Microsoft is as yet unclear. But "any incremental [downward] change in the level of piracy is incremental revenues for Microsoft at [virtually] no incremental cost," says Peter Misek, an analyst with Cannacord Adams. In fact, some analysts, DeGroot among them, believe that Microsoft should be able to recoup its $900 million investment within two to three years. "The return on that investment is not certain," he says. "But it could pay off." "BLIND EYE." Meantime, Microsoft can console itself that as Windows gains popularity in China (legal copies or no) consumers are less likely to opt for Linux, says Jim Murphy, research director at consultancy AMR. "The dilemma is, do they turn a blind eye now in order to have opportunities down the line?" he says. "The space between the rock and the hard place is getting tighter." But Chinese consumers are getting used to the Windows interface and functions. Those who use pirated copies -- as their incomes rise -- could be enticed to pay for legitimate versions of Windows that have more features or fewer glitches, DeGroot says. Microsoft is clearly only at the beginning of a long road to overcoming piracy. But the right balance of statesmanship, investment and marketing are a step in the right direction. http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...gn_id=bier_tca New P2P Software Could Lead to ISP Abuse Jennifer LeClaire Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed software designed to enable people to share their high-speed wireless connections without sacrificing security or privacy. Researchers believe the software can improve Internet connectivity in residential areas at no additional cost. A typical residential user accesses his broadband home connection about 12 to 15 hours per week, figured Haiyun Luo, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So, while the Internet connection is always on, most of the time it sits idle. Luo would like to see that idleness put to good use by benefiting other users. He and graduate student Nathanael Thompson may have come up with a way to do it. "Significantly improved speed and the 'always on' feature of wireless routers have been driving the rapid spread of broadband Internet access in many residential areas," said Luo. "More than 56 percent of homes in the United States already have Internet access, and more than half of those homes are using WiFi wireless home networks." Getting a PERM Luo and Thompson have developed a software framework called PERM (Practical End-host collaborative Residential Multihoming) that intends to allow neighbors to pool their Internet access and, in doing so, improve both performance and resilience. "PERM exploits the diversity of broadband Internet access in residential areas to improve connectivity in a managed way," Luo said. "Our design requires no support outside the user's wireless router, and is immediately deployable." By pooling all available Internet connections, neighbors can enhance their Internet connectivity at no additional cost. That is, if neighbors are willing to share. "PERM represents a paradigm shift in the Internet user community," Luo said. "Until now, most users have been unwilling to share their wireless connections for fear of losing security and privacy. We offer a solution that ensures mutual benefit, security and privacy." The sharing of Internet connections is open only to registered users who, in exchange for using connections belonging to others, must offer the use of their own. This "peer-to-peer" sharing concept has enormous potential, with millions of possible nodes, Luo said. ISP Abuse? The issue with technology like PERM is not about whether it is secure, but whether it is legal, according to Predrag Filipovic, Ph.D., senior analyst, Multimedia and Wireless Networks, at The Diffusion Group. It opens up ISPs to abuse by folks who aren't paying for it, much like someone who uses his neighbor's water hose to water his yard. "I can see this technology being applied on campus networks. When it comes to a peer-to-peer sharing in residential areas, I think some of the ISPs might have an issue with that because in densely populated neighborhoods instead of getting 50 subscribers they suddenly may only get five," Filipovic told TechNewsWorld. "There is a legal question here." http://www.technewsworld.com/story/50244.html Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who plays Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on "Sesame Street," received the lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences on Friday. Here’s a profile of the performer from 2004. 35 Years as a Bird and a Grouch Deirdre Wilson Caroll Spinney never thought of himself as a singer, certainly not one who’d be crooning from the stage of the nation’s most famous concert hall. But a career inside an 8-foot puppet covered in 4,000 yellow feathers takes you places. And for Spinney, one of the ultimate destinations was New York’s Carnegie Hall. “I was asked to sing ‘People’ on stage with [composer] Jules Styne,” says Spinney, the puppeteer of two enduring Sesame Street characters, Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. “So there I was [as Big Bird] on stage. I’m reaching the top of the song and I could see the top of Carnegie Hall as I leaned back and sang, ‘People who need people,’” Spinney says, pausing to belt out the words in Big Bird’s unmistakable voice. “I thought, my God, look where I am! Look where Sesame Street has brought me!” In the 35 years that Spinney has been with Sesame Street, his beloved characters have taken him many places – from appearances on the Emmy Awards show and Hollywood Squares to performances in Europe, Australia and China. As Big Bird, he has met every First Lady since Nancy Reagan and worked with celebrities such as Bob Hope, Flip Wilson and Rosie O’Donnell. Spinney has four Emmys, two Grammys, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Living Legend Award from the Library of Congress. All of this figures into why Spinney has remained in the roles of Big Bird and Oscar for so long; he’s one of three original cast members still with the show, along with human characters Susan and Gordon. But he’s got a more visceral reason for spending 35 years on the Sesame Street set. “I just can’t imagine walking away from Big Bird. He’s like my kid,” says Spinney, now 70. “I don’t feel I am him; I just can’t imagine not being with him.” Humble Beginnings Spinney has always been a puppeteer, performing in festivals and even working on Bozo’s Big Top, a popular kids’ TV show in the 1960s. At one puppet festival, he presented an innovative performance involving a film screen with moving backgrounds behind the live action of his puppets. Just before the show, Spinney learned that Muppets creator Jim Henson was in the audience. In his autobiography, The Wisdom of Big Bird and The Dark Genius of Oscar the Grouch (Villard, 2003), Spinney describes that performance as a disaster – a bright stage light washed out the images on the screen behind his puppets. But Henson approached him after the show and told him he admired what he was trying to do. Henson invited him to New York to talk about the Muppets, and the rest is history. Spinney has played Big Bird and Oscar ever since. Two Opposite Characters Big Bird was initially cast as a clumsy, country-bumpkin character. But Spinney came to believe that children would relate better to Big Bird if the bird himself was a child. Henson agreed. “He’s very realistic in a sense. Big Bird is pretty much a human child,” Spinney says, noting that, as a bird, he doesn’t have to be a particular race of child. He is simply childlike. Oscar, on the other hand, is a grumpy, trash-loving, hermit-like monster (modeled after a New York cabbie Spinney had met) who has occasionally been miscast as very unkind by Sesame Street writers and producers. “With Oscar, at times, I felt they got off base a bit,” Spinney says. “Once in a while, he was actually mean – and there’s a difference between being mean and being a grouch. He once made Telly (another Muppet) cry. He called Gordon ‘chrome dome.’ I told the producers I didn’t think he should do the name-calling stuff or make someone cry. “The best explanation of why Oscar is on the show is that it takes all kinds to make the world,” Spinney adds. “He certainly goes against the grain of what it used to be with children’s shows – a pretty nice little world. But Oscar isn’t the keeper of the crypt, either. Don’t lose track of what he is: he’s a grouchy guy. And once in a while, he’ll say to Susan, ‘Uh, don’t tell anyone I said this, but – oh, this is hard – thanks!’” More Ups Than Downs Spinney’s career hasn’t been without discomfort, or even danger. He has come close to being seriously burned during accidents on the set. He has also fallen a few times as Big Bird because his view inside the giant puppet is limited. He operates primarily through the use of a tiny TV monitor inside the bird suit. His job has also had a personal, emotional side, particularly since Spinney is also a father and a grandfather. One of his three children was once teased for having a dad who worked “on a baby, sissy show.” When the boy later appeared on Sesame Street riding a bicycle in the background, his peers excitedly told him they had seen him on the show. Spinney was amused that his son could retort, “Oh? I thought you didn’t watch that sissy show!” His grandson, Wyatt, now 16, was 10 when Spinney revealed to him that he was, in fact, Big Bird. “He was crushed,” Spinney recalls. “He had a unique relationship with Big Bird where he would call me on the phone and say, ‘Hi Grandpa, is Big Bird there?’ and Big Bird would come to the phone. I actually regret telling him because I think it still bothers him.” But Spinney describes his job as the best in the world and one that he is thankful for. “I’d love to do another five years, which would make it 40 years on the show,” he says. “I don’t even want to limit it to that!” He’s also not bothered by the relative anonymity of being a puppeteer. “I love playing a role where no one sees you. You can be anything that’s on your arm.” http://topics-az.parenthood.com/arti...rticle_id=6468 Keith Richards Hospitalized in New Zealand AP Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards suffered a mild concussion while vacationing in Fiji and was flown to a New Zealand hospital for treatment, a band spokeswoman said Saturday. Media reports said Richards fell out of a palm tree and remained hospitalized in Auckland. Richards, 62, suffered a mild concussion while on holiday in Fiji earlier this week and was flown to New Zealand, band spokeswoman Fran Curtis said in a statement. ''Following treatment locally and as a precautionary measure, he flew to a hospital accompanied by his wife, Patti, for observation,'' Curtis said. The statement did not elaborate on Richards' condition. But media reports in Australian and New Zealand said Richards hurt his head after falling out of a palm tree at an exclusive Fiji resort and remained hospitalized in Auckland. Newspapers in the Fairfax media group reported in their Sunday editions that Richards was flown to Auckland's Ascot Hospital on Thursday after the accident. Steve Kirby, duty manager at the Ascot Hospital, would not comment on whether Richards was a patient there, citing the hospital's privacy policy. The Fijilive.com news Web site reported that the accident was believed to have happened at Fiji's exclusive Wakaya Club resort. Salesi Finau of the resort told The Associated Press that Richards and his wife recently stayed at the resort for about a week but would not say when they left. Finau also refused to comment on the reports Richards had an accident. ''I am sorry, I do not have any comment on that,'' he said. The Rolling Stones played a concert in Wellington on April 18 as part of their ''A Bigger Bang'' world tour. According to the band's Web site, the Stones' next scheduled concert is at the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona, Spain, followed by 34 more dates across Europe. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...-Richards.html Computer CARE Packages Joe Nocera IT used to be easy to poke fun at Nicholas Negroponte. The founding director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab — and for many years the marquee columnist for Wired magazine, which he also helped found — Mr. Negroponte was one of those people given to pronouncements so grand they bordered on the grandiose. The Financial Times once described him as being "the world's chief cyberevangelist" who liked to prophesy that the Internet would "bring world peace, destroy trade barriers and promote democracy." His 1995 book, "Being Digital," cemented his reputation as the Bernard-Henri Lévy of the digerati: even when he was right, he made your eyes roll. In the late 1990's, though, Mr. Negroponte began ratcheting down the pontificating. He gave up his Wired column in 1998, and in 2000 he stepped down as the head of the Media Lab, though he remained at M.I.T. And a year and a half ago, he took a leave from the university to do something you just don't expect from a 63-year-old man who has long made his living taking the 30,000-foot view. He decided to roll up his sleeves and create a new computer. Not just any new computer, either. Mr. Negroponte and the 10 or so technologists who have joined him are trying to design — and mass-produce — a computer that will cost a mere $100, a price so low that governments in developing nations will buy them in bulk and turn them over to children who live even in the poorest, most remote areas of the Third World. Someday, he hopes, there will be hundreds of millions of such machines all over the world, revolutionizing the way children learn. And as poor children gain knowledge that has long been out of their reach, they will help raise living standards all over the world. Right now, Mr. Negroponte's nonprofit organization, One Laptop per Child, is testing prototypes, raising money, and talking to governments. It plans to start in seven countries, at a million laptops a country. Advanced Micro Devices is building the microprocessor for the laptop, and Quanta Computer has agreed to manufacture it. Mr. Negroponte expects the laptop to be in production by March 2007, with an initial price around $135 that will drop as low as $50 by 2010. Whether or not this is realistic, it is unarguable that what Mr. Negroponte is trying to do is both really hard and really good. You'd think the world would be standing up and cheering. And in some quarters, that is happening. "It is an inspirational effort and a very important step to take," said Calestous Juma, who teaches international development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. But not everybody is so complimentary. This time, though, those mocking Mr. Negroponte are among the most important people in technology. Bill Gates, for instance. When asked about the $100 laptop last month, the Microsoft chairman replied, "Geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type." Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of Intel, called the machine a "$100 gadget." This month, Mr. Negroponte lashed back at a trade show in Boston. Although everyone is now trying to lower the temperature, the dispute speaks to some serious, underlying issues. What does a computer need to be truly useful? What makes the most sense in terms of bringing computing and connectivity to poor areas of the world? And how can computers best help children learn? Let's dispense first with the crassest part of the dispute. The operating system for the $100 laptop is a version of Linux, the free open-source software. And yes, Microsoft would prefer that it run Windows. "I think it would be useful to have Windows in it," acknowledged Craig Mundie, one of Microsoft's three chief technical officers. He argues that because Windows is installed in most of the world's computers, there is a Windows "ecosystem" that includes tens of millions of people who know how to operate Windows machines, fix them and use them as teaching tools. (Could it also be possible that Microsoft is worried that putting 100 million Linux machines into the world might pose a threat to the Windows hegemony? Mr. Mundie was not about to go there.) Mr. Negroponte, though, can sound downright evangelical when he talks about open-source software. All the machine's software will be open source, not just the operating system, because Mr. Negroponte believes that people should be able to get into the software and make it better, and that can be done only with open-source code. And he is not just talking about professional developers either. "We believe that the kids ought to be able to go in there and do their own code," he said. Part of Mr. Negroponte's vision is that even illiterate children will be able to use the machine virtually the moment they take it out of the box — and that, in time, they will adapt it to their own needs and desires. The Microsoft/Intel view is that what Mr. Negroponte is proposing is implausible—that kids who have never dealt with computers simply won't have the skills to be able to do much with a computer without some professional training. Which leads to the second area of dispute. Behind the $100 laptop are some radical theories of learning that have been championed by Seymour Papert, a former M.I.T. professor and a close colleague of Mr. Negroponte. Mr. Papert is a critic of modern curriculums, and a leading proponent of using computers to, in effect, learn by doing. "The computer," he told me, "is a way to make teaching less formal and abstract and more experiential." On some level, the $100 laptop is a stalking horse for Mr. Papert's ideas. Maybe a village that gets 50 laptops will have a good teacher — but maybe it won't. In Mr. Papert's view, that shouldn't matter all that much. With the right software, he believes, the machine itself will help kids transcend the limitations of their teachers and their environment. But that is a notion a lot of people have trouble accepting. "When you ask them who is going to create the programs for this, they say, 'the kids,' " said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research. "You ask them who is going to fix the machines. They say, 'the kids.' Who is going to create the curriculum? 'The kids.' Some of this stuff is going to need adult supervision." The third element in dispute has to do with what a computer really needs to be useful. The $100 laptop will have a great deal of what we think of as a modern computer, including word processing, Wi-Fi and more. It will indeed have some sort of crank — or maybe a pedal — to generate power; how else can it work in places that lack electricity? It will have a dual screen that will allow children to use it either as an e-book device or a normal computer. It will be able to network with other $100 laptops, so that if a village lacks Internet access, at least the 50 or 100 kids can communicate with each other. But it will not be "fully loaded" as we know that term today. The Microsoft/Intel argument is that even poor children want real computers that do everything traditional computers do. The One Laptop per Child team, however, takes the view that much of what exists in a computer is bloat. Mr. Papert became irate when I mentioned that Mr. Barrett of Intel had called the $100 laptop a gadget. "That's a joke," he said. "For most people in the world, it is a better computer than they are selling because it is not bogged down with all the junk they put in computers." Modern computers also cost a lot more than $100, which is why the big computer makers have generally argued that it makes more sense to set up Internet kiosks, or computer cafes, where people can share machines. By contrast, Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Papert insist that for learning purposes at least, it is critically important for children to have machines that they own, and which they can use all the time. I must say, I find this latter argument pretty persuasive. Or course, I don't live in the developing world — but then neither does anyone else arguing over these issues. And that is what ultimately makes this fight both so depressing and so silly. It turns out that there are lots of efforts under way right now to get computers and Internet connectivity to the poor regions of the world. Advanced Micro Devices has a program called 50x15 — it hopes to have 50 percent of the world connected to the Internet by 2015. Microsoft has a bunch of programs. So does Intel. Next week, at a big conference in Austin, the two companies, along with Dell, will introduce a new low-cost notebook device that the three companies hope will be suitable — and desirable—in the developing world. But who knows if that will be the answer? And that is the real point. Nobody has a clue at this point what will work and what won't. Mr. Negroponte's effort is important because it is so different — it is not wedded to modern computing business infrastructure. Mr. Negroponte thinks that will be a huge advantage. But it could just as easily be a crippling disadvantage. There is only one way to find out: make the machine, start handing them out and see what happens. For now, the only thing his critics should be telling Mr. Negroponte is "Good luck." http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/29.../29nocera.html Up to Her Eyes in Gore, and Loving It Alex Williams GROWING up, Chris Zelez was not like other girls. Yes, like some, she had an imaginary friend. Hers, however, was not named Jill or Susan, but Freddy Krueger, inspired by the razor-fingered killer in "A Nightmare on Elm Street." By the time she reached her teenage years she was decorating her bedroom with posters of Leatherface, the villain from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." So if any woman was ready to embrace the booming new subgenre of ultraviolent horror movies, it was Ms. Zelez, now 20, an editor for a video production company in Charlotte, N.C. Two weeks ago she rushed out to buy a DVD of "Hostel," the hit splatterfest in which older European men attack touring American college boys with power tools, on its release day. In 2004, she stood in line to see a midnight preview of the equally gory "Saw." "A lot of us are coming up right now," Ms. Zelez said of female fans of the horror genre, which is helping revive ticket sales this year after a dismal 2005. "We're liking the same things guys are." Ms. Zelez bristles at the cliché that women only go to scary movies as an excuse to cuddle with their boyfriends. "I have girlfriends that love gratuitous violence, blood and gore and people getting carved to pieces," she said. She is right about one thing: The number of young women buying tickets to the bloody new wave of horror films is striking, and even Hollywood executives say they are surprised. "Saw II," in which a sadist imprisons victims in a house and poisons them with gas, drew more women than men under 25 — the target age group for horror movies. Lionsgate, the studio behind the "Saw" series, said 32 percent of ticket-buyers for "Saw II" were women under 25, compared with 28 percent of men the same age. In another survey by the studio, more than two-thirds of teenage girls identified themselves as horror movie buffs, compared with only about half of teenage boys (who preferred comedies). While female viewers have long been associated with a more ethereal, subtly creepy breed of horror films like the Dracula movies of the 1930's and "The Ring" more recently, the conventional Hollywood wisdom has been that "girls don't want to be grossed out," said Marc Weinstock, an executive vice president of marketing at Sony Pictures Entertainment. But apparently they do. Sony's exit polls at "Silent Hill," the gory horror movie based on a video game and the top-grossing film in the country last weekend, indicated that women composed nearly half the audience. "I go to see how gross and gory it can get; the story line is irrelevant," said Helen Gauh, 21, a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College, who showed up on Tuesday at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square theater on West 68th Street to see "Silent Hill." The interest among young women in horror is linked in part to an evolution of the genre, with many of those movies growing more cerebral even as they have become more gruesome. Since the heyday of the slasher films of the late 1970's and early 80's, women's roles have evolved from hysterical, half-nude teenage victims to more complex and satisfying characters — the family protectors, feisty self defenders or sometimes the killers themselves. A generation of young women has been reared in the firm belief that they can do anything, from winning a skateboard championship to becoming school president. Going to blood-soaked movies is one more club they can now feel free to join. "It makes me feel like a rebel among the girls," Ms. Gauh said. To her, the tension-and-release cycle that accompanies cinematic terror brings about something like a gambler's high. "It's not that I'm a self-mutilator," she said, "but it's just a powerful rush when you can overcome some pain." The violent extreme of new horror films, epitomized by "Hostel" and its planned sequel, "Hostel 2," has become a matter of hand-wringing among some film critics, beginning with the release of "Saw" in October 2004. "Saw" and its sequel have earned $250 million worldwide and "Saw III" is in production. Of the 25 top-grossing movies released so far this year, almost a quarter are horror films. David Edelstein, a critic for New York Magazine, equated some with "torture porn." "High Tension," for example, is a gruesome French film about a killer in coveralls who butchers a family staying in a country house. It drew an audience of 28 percent women under 25, compared with 24 percent for men of the same age since its release in the United States last summer. At least "High Tension" had strong women characters in prominent roles. But in "Hostel" the women who are seen at all are usually topless. Still, it drew nearly as many young women as young men—32 percent compared with 36 percent. "The perception would be that as you get into more hardcore gore — the 'Hostels' of the world — that the number of women would fall off," said Tim Palen, a president of marketing for Lionsgate. "But that's absolutely not the case." He added that even as you get into what he called "gristle," women are hanging in there. This was not always so. John Carpenter, who helped start the last slasher film wave with "Halloween" in 1978, said that studios in those days did not track sophisticated demographic data for a genre it considered best suited to drive-ins and grindhouses. But the target audience then was almost entirely young and male. "In the old days, this was boy culture," Mr. Carpenter said. "For some reason over the years that's changed." While some feminist scholars have tried to divine an empowering subtext in the fact that the lead girls in such movies, like Jamie Lee Curtis's character in "Halloween," usually triumphed — or at least survived — Mr. Carpenter said the girls functioned as little more than bait. "The distributor said to me, 'Let's do a movie about a killer that stalks baby sitters,' " he said when asked why he settled on a strong female character as a protagonist for "Halloween." "There was really nothing more to it than that." In contrast, female characters in neo-slasher films tend to be more three-dimensional and dynamic. "High Tension," for instance, explores the border between friendship and an erotic attraction between its two main female characters. In modern slasher movies, "the women aren't as objectified as they are in old ones," in which the heroines were "blatantly sexualized," said Sierra Pasquale, a 21-year-old student at Hunter College. "A lot of my guy friends are surprised when I go to see those movies," Ms. Pasquale added. "Because it's mostly men who are doing the slashing, so men see it as a dominating thing. But sometimes it's the women who figure it out, so we seem smarter in the end. It's 'Ha ha, we didn't die, you did.' " Although studios may be writing in more interesting female characters, they often do little to tailor their marketing to women. Mr. Palen of Lionsgate said the studio was initially concerned that the male tenor of the first "Saw," about two men tormented by a male serial killer named Jigsaw, would alienate women. So the studio made an alternate television ad focused on the wife of the protagonist, a supporting part, in which she attempts to protect the couple's young daughter. "It was an interesting dynamic, a mother bear protecting her cub, and we thought, 'That will be great for women,' " Mr. Palen said. But women didn't respond to the ad in test screenings, so the studio stuck with its original campaign built around blood and terror. Women saw the movie in substantial numbers. "It's the adrenaline," said Sarah Stark, a movie theater manager in Lima, Ohio, explaining her longtime interest in gory movies. For her, she said, violent horror movies amount to something of a personal endurance test, a bit like white-water rafting — the sheer terror of which clears the mind and, briefly, seems to reduce all of life down to a single exhilarating moment. The cheap-looking sets and special effects of traditional slasher movies have generally been replaced by an arty aesthetic. Sarah Morris, 23, a photo-agency researcher in Washington, said she appreciated how slasher movies "are much more visual now," at once fantastically campy and hypergritty. "You're trapped in a basement with coachroaches on the floor and there's dirt," she said. "I feel dirty when I watch them. I like that about them." In interviews with professors, the working theory is that the greater the emotional complexity of the horror movie, the more attractive they are to women. In "Saw," the killer, who has a fatal disease, constructs elaborate psychological traps in a twisted effort at pushing his victims toward a new appreciation for their lives. Or maybe the appeal is more visceral. Although critics like Roger Ebert once railed against early slasher movies as a backlash to feminism, some of the new movies are a different kind of revenge fantasy. The primary victim in "Saw" is a philandering husband. The main victims in "Hostel" are lecherous, beer-soaked frat boys. "I loved how the women used their bodies to deceive," Ms. Zelez said, referring to the women in "Hostel," who appear to be sexual playthings for the victims but actually lure the men to their deaths. As women, she asserted, "We use our bodies and get what we want. And they definitely got what they wanted." Paula Schwartz contributed reporting for this article. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/fa.../30horror.html Microsoft Software Will Let Times Readers Download Paper Katharine Q. Seelye Microsoft and The New York Times unveiled software on Friday that would allow readers to download an electronic version of the newspaper and view it on a portable device. With Microsoft's new Windows Vista software, to be available in January, virtually any newspaper, magazine or book can be formatted into an electronic version and read online or off. The software would allow The Times to replicate its look — fonts, typeface and layout — more closely than its Web site now does. Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, unveiled the prototype at the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Newspapers have been trying to develop a stronger online presence as readers and advertisers continue to migrate to the Internet. The new software is meant to make it easier to read an electronic version of a paper and allow readers to download multiple papers and magazines to take with them. The Times said it would charge advertisers to appear on the new version of the newspaper, called Times Reader, but it had not decided whether to charge readers for the service. Microsoft would include the offering in the next version of its operating system. For today's demonstration, The Times was downloaded onto small tablet computers, about the size of a hardcover book, which are already commercially available for $1,000 to $3,000. But this printlike version of the newspaper could also be downloaded onto a home computer or a laptop. The electronic paper is displayed in columns and it formats itself to fit any size screen. Mr. Gates said he had long wanted to make easier what he called "on-screen reading" and he had reached out to The Times to help develop that ability. Mr. Sulzberger said the software combined the portability of the print paper with the immediacy of the Internet. Readers can in effect turn the page electronically. There is also a gauge that tells them how much of the paper they have read and how much more is left. Tom Bodkin, an assistant managing editor of The Times and its design director, demonstrated Times Reader to the audience. "You can page through the entire paper in a natural and intuitive way," Mr. Bodkin said. Mr. Gates said that starting in January, new computers would come equipped with the software that would allow access to such newly formatted newspapers. He said he expected that by then, other publications would have developed electronic versions closer to their own styles and typefaces. There have been previous efforts to create digital content distribution systems. For example, Zinio Systems Inc. publishes Zinio Reader, that allows viewing various magazines in digital format, including Penthouse and Macworld magazine. Roger F. Fidler, director of technology initiatives at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, has long been an advocate of digital mobile publishing. His group recently introduced eMprint, a hybrid digital publishing platform based on Adobe Reader software. Microsoft's software will be available for testing in several weeks, as will Times Reader. John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco for this article. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/te...y/29paper.html Is Microsoft Preparing a Big Attack? John Markoff Microsoft reported strong third-quarter revenue growth on Thursday, but analysts said the company also telegraphed a significant increase in spending, an indication that it was preparing to take on its big online rivals, Google and Yahoo. The company reported a 13 percent increase in sales for the quarter, to $10.9 billion, and a 16 percent rise in net income, to $2.98 billion, or 31 cents a share, from $2.56 billion, or 28 cents, in the period a year earlier. The earnings were 2 cents a share below what analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call had forecast. The chief financial officer for Microsoft, Chris Liddell, said: "Over all for the quarter, we are very happy with the continued market momentum we're seeing. Revenue is accelerating for the year." Despite a bullish stance on revenue, Microsoft evidently surprised analysts by predicting significantly higher expenses in the next fiscal year. Its shares, which had gained 15 cents, to $27.25, in regular trading, fell on the expectation of higher expenses, dropping more than 6 percent after hours, to $25.50. Executives also said they did not see any immediate increase in profit on the horizon even as Microsoft prepared for its largest release of new products in more than five years. The company said once again that the update for its new operating system software, Windows Vista, would not be available until January. For the first time, the company offered guidance on the coming year; its 2007 fiscal year starts in July. Microsoft said revenue for 2007 would be $49.5 billion to $50.5 billion, with earnings expected to be $1.36 to $1.41 a share. Financial analysts were forecasting $1.53 a share. That guidance created some concern among securities analysts in a conference call with Mr. Liddell. Richard G. Sherlund of Goldman Sachs, in a comment during the conference, said, "There is something really big here that we haven't put our fingers on." Other analysts were more direct in their assessment. "It looks like Microsoft is going to war with Google, and trying to get their product development back in track," said Eugene Munster of Piper Jaffray. According to Mark Stahlman of Caris & Company, the fact that Microsoft plans to spend significantly more in 2007 was an indication of renewed aggressiveness in its competitive strategy and an indication that the company was returning to the kind of actions it exhibited before the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit in the mid- and late 1990's. "It's pretty clear that Bill is running the company again," Mr. Stahlman said, referring to Bill Gates, "and they are going to remake the business. They are being much more combative and much more strategically managed." After Microsoft released its report, Mr. Sherlund issued a research note saying it appeared that the company planned to spend $2.4 billion more than he had expected in the 2007 fiscal year. He pointed to the costs of building the new Windows and Office Live online services, both intended to reposition the company to compete against Google and Yahoo. When confronted with that figure during the question-and-answer session with analysts Thursday, Mr. Liddell only partly disputed the conclusion of several of them that Microsoft had begun preparing to "go to war" with its online search rivals. "I would characterize it as a broad-based approach," he said. "There are some big numbers there, that is certainly true." Several other analysts noted that Microsoft's expenses appeared to be running away even before 2007, many of them focusing on what they called "margin compression." "It looks like a mess," said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, "and the big issue is margins and expenses, the big issue is the bottom line. It makes it hard to get very excited about the company's near-term prospects." During the conference call, Mr. Liddell was optimistic about progress in the introduction of the next-generation Xbox 360 video game player. He said that a significant part of the increased spending this year was related to a push Microsoft is making in an effort to capitalize on a delay in Sony's PlayStation 3. Microsoft now says it will ship 5 million to 5.5 million of the new Xbox systems in 2006. Sales of Xbox rose 85 percent, to $1.06 billion, in the quarter. The company also noted that its search ad revenue fell during the quarter as it tried to shift its online advertising away from a service provided by Yahoo to the newly developed MSN Ad Center system. It also reported that losses widened in its home and entertainment division, the Mobile and Embedded Devices Group, and the MSN service. Sales of Windows for PC's increased 7.5 percent, to $3.19 billion, in the quarter, while office sales rose 5 percent, to $2.95 billion. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/te...gy/28soft.html Band of Activists in Europe Holds the Line in the Case Against Microsoft James Kanter Carlo Piana is part of a brigade of software activists and lawyers who formed a primary line of defense in court this week for the European Union in its antitrust dispute with Microsoft. Two years ago, Mr. Piana, a lawyer from Milan with a passion for technology, awakened to the news that the European Union had fined Microsoft a record 497 million euros (more than $600 million) for abusing its dominant position in the software market by designing and marketing software in ways that excluded rivals from the market. After Microsoft vowed to overturn the decision, Mr. Piana received a call from a friend who is a member of the Free Software Foundation Europe, which supports making code more accessible to the public. "He was worried because Microsoft was especially targeting free software," said Mr. Piana, who had already done some free software work for his friend. "I said to him, 'O.K., I'll help you out. I guess I'm the most expert person you know.' " As it turns out, Mr. Piana and his colleagues from the Free Software Foundation are among the most prominent supporters of the European Union who officially remain in the antitrust case. Many titans of the software industry backed European regulators initially, but Sun Microsystems settled with Microsoft for $1.6 billion in April 2004, while Novell settled in November 2004 for $536 million. RealNetworks dropped out in October 2005 after settling for $761 million. The settlements left a group of computer programmers and activists, united under the banner of the foundation, with a bigger-than-expected role in supporting the union's goal of loosening Microsoft's grip on the software industry. On Friday, 13 judges at the second-highest tribunal in Europe, the Court of First Instance, wrapped up five days of testimony that could determine whether the ruling will stand and whether Microsoft must open up its Windows operating system to greater competition. The parties could appeal any verdict to the European Court of Justice, the highest European Union tribunal. After a grueling fourth day of testimony on Thursday evening, Microsoft's chief lawyer, Brad Smith, led his team of lawyers out of the courtroom and down the polished granite corridors to their luxury hotel across the street to prepare their final testimony behind closed doors. Just a few meters away, huddled in the haze of the smoking area in the court's cafe, was a diverse group including Mr. Piana and Andrew Tridgell, the Australian developer of software called Samba, who had enlivened the courtroom that afternoon. "Tridge is something unexpected and something the judges don't often see," Mr. Piana said, using the nickname for Mr. Tridgell, who speaks with the earnestness of a Boy Scout. "I don't want a hired gun, I want a real person," Mr. Piana added. It remains to be seen whether the European judges, who are famously hard to read from their questioning in court, will be swayed by the likes of Mr. Tridgell or Mr. Piana. Bo Vesterdorf, the Danish president of the court, and John Cooke, the Irish judge who will lead in drafting the decision, are not expected to issue a verdict until next year. In testimony this week, judges doled out their share of painful questions to both sides, exposing holes in the union's case as well as forcing Microsoft to make concessions. On Friday, Microsoft argued that the record fine imposed by the commission should be vacated or reduced, and each side reiterated its arguments that its approach to the software industry was more favorable for the future of innovation. But Mr. Tridgell's contribution may prove important, not for the concrete evidence he gave, but because of the way he characterized the world of software development and Microsoft's role in it. In one exchange, Judge Cooke asked Mr. Tridgell if he had ever tested Samba software to determine whether it operated smoothly with rivals' systems. Mr. Tridgell's reply seemed to illustrate the problem posed by Microsoft to the rest of the software industry more effectively than all the legal and technical explanations offered by the European Union during the rest of the weeklong hearing. Once a year, Mr. Tridgell said, programmers from rival companies gather for a "plugfest," where they connect computers together to see how their programs interoperate. "We work around the clock for a week," he told a rapt courtroom. "We torture our machines in the pursuit of interoperability." "'Can you do this test with Microsoft?" Judge Cooke asked. "Yes, but they don't turn up," Mr. Tridgell said. Later, Mr. Tridgell explained that for the last six years Microsoft has boycotted the event: "They used to come. It used to be held in Seattle, close to Microsoft's headquarters." Microsoft said the technologies demanded by Samba were available for license but that Samba was at odds with industry norms. "While Microsoft respects Samba's technical expertise, it does not share its approach to intellectual property rights or the value of software technology," Ian Forrester, a lawyer for Microsoft, told the court. Sitting with the Free Software Foundation Europe on Thursday evening, and closely following Mr. Tridgell's thoughts on the day's testimony, were representatives of I.B.M. and Oracle, major Microsoft competitors. Neither I.B.M. nor Oracle finances the foundation, according to a Free Software Foundation spokesman, Joachim Jakobs. I.B.M. and Oracle, however, are members of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, or E.C.I.S., a trade group that lodged a new European Union antitrust complaint against Microsoft this year. Mr. Tridgell "was a witness sent from heaven," said Thomas Vinje, a lawyer for the E.C.I.S., who testified in support of the commission's decision this week. The decisions by Sun, Novell and RealNetworks to settle had been "a loss to the court," Mr. Vinje added. Paul Meller contributed reporting for this article. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/bu...ss/29soft.html Rockers Sue Over Download Royalties Charles Duhigg Two of the bigger rock bands of the past are suing over the future of their music. In a lawsuit filed Thursday in New York, the Allman Brothers Band and Cheap Trick allege that they and other groups are being shortchanged by Sony Music, a division of music giant Sony BMG, as digital music downloads explode. The suit seeks class-action status. Both bands contend that when Sony Music sells downloads of their songs through such services as iTunes, it amounts to the licensing of their music, not its distribution, entitling them to more generous royalties. Currently, the lawsuit says, Sony Music accounts for such sales as "physical phonorecords," deducting a 20% fee for packaging even though downloads are electronic. The suit also alleges that Sony Music deducts 15% of revenue for "breakage" as it would with a CD or cassette. As a result, the suit contends, bands should receive 30 cents of the 70 cents Sony Music collects when a digital song is sold. Instead, they receive only 4.5 cents, the bands allege. "Sony Music is presently engaged in a widespread attempt to underpay its recording artists," band lawyer Brian Caplan said. "With the technological advancements in the music industry, where many people download songs to their iPods and other portable devices, it is essential that artists receive the royalty income to which they are entitled." Sony BMG declined to comment. The Allman Brothers had such hits as "Ramblin' Man" and "Whipping Post." Cheap Trick's hits included "I Want You to Want Me" and "Dream Police." http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...ck=1&cset=true New Microsoft Browser Raises Google's Hackles Steve Lohr With a $10 billion advertising market at stake, Google, the fast-rising Internet star, is raising objections to the way that it says Microsoft, the incumbent powerhouse of computing, is wielding control over Internet searching in its new Web browser. Google, which only recently began beefing up its lobbying efforts in Washington, says it expressed concerns about competition in the Web search business in recent talks with the Justice Department and the European Commission, both of which have brought previous antitrust actions against Microsoft. The new browser includes a search box in the upper-right corner that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft's MSN search service. Google contends that this puts Microsoft in a position to unfairly grab Web traffic and advertising dollars from its competitors. The move, Google claims, limits consumer choice and is reminiscent of the tactics that got Microsoft into antitrust trouble in the late 1990's. "The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. "We don't think it's right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose." Microsoft replies that Google is misreading its intentions and actions. It says the default settings in the browser, Internet Explorer 7, are easy to change. And it says the product was designed with consumers and many partners in mind — even though it might not be to the liking of Google, the leading search engine. "Whatever behavior happened in the past, the guiding principle we had is that the user is in control," said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer group. Companies often talk with antitrust officials, and the talks do not imply that an investigation is imminent. But they do indicate that Google is pursuing every option in its escalating rivalry with Microsoft, which has already led to some public battles. Last December, Google outbid Microsoft to remain the primary search service on America Online, paying $1 billion and taking a 5 percent stake in AOL. Last year, Microsoft sued Google to stop a star computer scientist and manager at Microsoft, Kai-Fu Lee, from working on search technology at Google. The suit was settled, and Mr. Lee runs Google's operations in China. The browser that set off the latest dispute has been in development for some time, but Microsoft first made it available to the public for downloading last week in a test version. It is the first new release of Microsoft's browser in five years. A final version is expected to be released this summer and will be included in Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, which is scheduled for release next January. The focus of Google's concern is a slender box in the corner of the browser window that allows users to start a search directly instead of first going to the Web site of a search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN. Typing a query and hitting "Enter" immediately brings up a page of results from a designated search engine. That slice of on-screen real estate has the potential to be enormously valuable, and Microsoft is the landlord. Internet Explorer 7 is the first Microsoft browser to have a built-in search box, while other browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari have had them for some time. Google estimates that the boxes, when available, are the starting point for 30 to 50 percent of a user's searches, making them a crucial gateway to the lucrative and fast-growing market for advertisements that appear next to search results. Microsoft has lost some ground in the browser market in the last year, mainly to Firefox, which is a Google ally. But Microsoft still holds more than 80 percent of the market. And Internet Explorer 7 is expected to be extremely popular because it is an improvement over Microsoft's previous browser, and because Microsoft will promote downloads of it and include it in Windows Vista. That gives Microsoft the potential to use the browser to steer substantial traffic, and business, to MSN and away from rivals. MSN handled 11 percent of searches in the United States in March, down slightly from a year earlier, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, a market research firm. That put it well behind Google, which had a 49 percent share, and Yahoo, with 22 percent. Microsoft insists it has no intention of deploying its browser as a weapon in the search wars. But Google suspects otherwise. In meetings beginning last year, Google told Microsoft of its objections to the company's plans to set MSN as the default search engine in Internet Explorer 7, according to Ms. Mayer of Google. Yahoo raised similar objections in a meeting with Microsoft last year, according to a Yahoo employee who was briefed on the conversation. Yahoo declined to comment last week beyond a statement: "We would be concerned about any company's attempts to limit user choice or change user preferences without their knowledge, and believe others would share that concern." With its objections unresolved, Google took the matter to antitrust authorities in Europe and the United States during the last month. It is not clear what, if anything, will come of the talks or how far Google is willing to push the issue. In Europe, where Microsoft is challenging an antitrust decision against the company for its past behavior, the European Commission has already made inquiries about Microsoft's plans for Vista. Though it is now distributing Internet Explorer 7 separately, Microsoft has long maintained that its browser is part of its Windows operating system. Google has informed the European antitrust authorities of its worry that "Microsoft's approach to setting search defaults in Internet Explorer 7 benefits Microsoft while taking away choice from users," said Steve Langdon, a spokesman for Google. Google would not say specifically what it has discussed with American antitrust officials. "We have spoken to the Justice Department generally about our business and the importance of preserving competition in the search market," Mr. Langdon said. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. The best way to handle the search box, Google asserts, would be to give users a choice when they first start up Internet Explorer 7. It says that could be done by asking the user to either type in the name of their favorite search engine or choose from a handful of the most popular services, using a simple drop-down menu next to the search box. The Firefox and Opera browsers come with Google set as the default, but Ms. Mayer said Google would support unfettered choice on those as well. Microsoft replies that giving users an open-ended choice could add complexity and confusion to the browser set-up process, while offering a few options would be arbitrarily limiting. Instead, those wanting to pick a new search-box option in the new browser need to click through a menu with options like "Get Search Providers," which links to a Web page with six search engines including Google and 16 "topic search" sites, from Amazon to MTV to Wal-Mart. Mr. Hachamovitch, who led Microsoft's browser team, said MSN was not always the default search in Internet Explorer 7. When downloaded, the new browser inherits the settings from the old Microsoft browser, version 6. But the search default in that program was based on a feature called AutoSearch that Google says was not widely used. Mr. Hachamovitch said Microsoft's user research and early reviews indicate that it is easy to change the default setting. "People seem to be O.K. with what we're doing," he said. Google counters that claim with a study it sponsored that was conducted by Tec-Ed, a research firm. It found that only a third of users could master the four-click process to change the default. Whether Microsoft's treatment of the search box will have an impact on the search market is uncertain. From an antitrust perspective, harm to competition is the litmus test, not just swinging a sharp elbow or two. There are many ways people get to search engines other than through a search box — for example, by typing google.com in the browser or making it their home page. "Assume that everything Google says is true; the question then is whether Microsoft's conduct is really going to have a serious effect on Google," said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. "Obviously, Google thinks that it will." Google is now a rich, powerful company in its own right, far larger than the browser pioneer Netscape Communications was when Microsoft set out to dominate the market it had created in the 1990's. In 2001, after a lengthy trial, a federal appeals court held that Microsoft had repeatedly violated antitrust laws as it tried to stifle the challenge from Netscape. Later, Microsoft reached a settlement with the Justice Department that freed personal computer makers from some restrictions Microsoft had placed on their use of software and services that compete with its own products. When Internet Explorer 7 begins to be loaded on new machines next year, computer makers like Dell and Hewlett-Packard will be free to determine what search engines and other sites they feature in the browser's Web guide and search box. That promises to be valuable screen real estate indeed, especially the coveted spot as the preferred search engine, which the computer makers are likely to sell to the highest bidder. Google and Yahoo have deep pockets, but no one can match Microsoft's spending power. "People will be bidding aggressively to get in that space," said Mr. Hachamovitch of Microsoft. "And that's a good thing." John Markoff contributed reporting for this article. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/te...rtner=homepage A Small Step at Starbucks From Mocha to Movies Sharon Waxman With barely one movie under its belt, Starbucks is moving aggressively toward expanding its involvement in the entertainment business, seeking movies and books to promote in the hope of duplicating the success it has had with music. The retail coffee giant — which used its stores to promote "Akeelah and the Bee," a Lionsgate movie that opened this weekend — is to announce Monday that it has signed an agreement with the William Morris Agency to find more movie and book projects to market. The aim is to have one book in Starbucks stores this year, and at least two or three movies to promote and sell on DVD next year, with more projects in years to come. In the meantime, the company's small entertainment staff will move from Seattle, where Starbucks is based, to Santa Monica, Calif., this year to be closer to the heart of the entertainment industry. "Akeelah and the Bee" is an inspirational tale about an African-American girl in Los Angeles who competes in a spelling bee. Starbucks is promoting the movie in places like the sleeves of its coffee cups, and the "Akeelah" soundtrack is on sale at the stores. The DVD of the movie will be on sale at Starbucks this fall. Howard D. Schultz, the company's chairman, said that in the wake of promoting "Akeelah," it had been deluged with material from film distributors who hope to be Starbucks' next movie partner. It became clear, he said, that the company needed more expertise in handling that work. "We're not prepared in terms of our core business" to respond to such approaches "in a way that is timely," Mr. Schultz said from Seattle, explaining the plan to work with William Morris. He said it was not Starbucks' goal to become an entertainment-business investor. "We have no intention of financing movies, or being traditional investors in movie projects," he said, although the company's promotion of "Akeelah" gave it an undisclosed equity stake in that film. Instead, Mr. Schultz said, it will selectively link the Starbucks brand with certain kinds of movies and books in the belief that Starbucks customers trust the company, in essence, to choose their entertainment for them. "We're looking for quality, and substance," he said. "We want to see our name associated with the kind of music, literature and movies that people will say, 'I'm glad Starbucks brought this to the marketplace.' " He gave "Crash" as an example of the kind of movie that Starbucks might promote. The film, which was about racial tension and also was from Lionsgate, was a sleeper hit at the box office and went on to win an Oscar for best picture this year. The company has already done this successfully with music, becoming a tastemaker in an industry still struggling with piracy and depressed sales. Starbucks sold 3.5 million CD's in the 2005 fiscal year, promoting artists like Coldplay and Bob Dylan and introducing the group Antigone Rising and the singer-songwriter Sonya Kitchell. (The company does not break out revenue figures for its CD's.) Starbucks had its biggest success with a Ray Charles album in 2004, "Genius Loves Company," which sold 775,000 copies and went on to win eight Grammys. Hollywood can only hope for this kind of success at a time when new technology is encroaching on traditional film distribution models. While this year's box-office total has so far pulled ahead of last year's disastrous statistics, industry experts are still puzzling over how to adapt to changing consumer habits in a world of Internet, cellphone and iPod entertainment. In this environment, Starbucks provides a potentially important new point of sale, and could have the kind of impact on movies — narrow, but profound — that Oprah Winfrey has had on publishing with her book club. In the case of "Akeelah and the Bee," the box-office revenue from opening weekend did not indicate that the Starbucks promotion, which also included whimsical vocabulary plastered across store windows, had immediately led to a hit. The movie took in $6.25 million over the weekend at 2,195 theaters, an average of just $2,847 a screen, according to Exhibitor Relations, which tracks box-office sales. It was No. 8 among movies for the weekend, behind offerings like the Robin Williams comedy "RV"; the teenage drama "Stick It"; and the harrowing Sept. 11 drama "United 93." "This was an interesting experiment," said Paul Dergarabedian, the president of Exhibitor Relations. "The Starbucks tie-in didn't hurt, but with the movie opening at No. 8, I don't know if it really helped." He noted that signs at Starbucks stores might have been too subtle in some cases for customers to associate them with the movie. And other industry analysts suggested that the boost from Starbucks could give the movie longer legs at the box office than most releases. Asked last week if he thought the movie would do well, Mr. Schultz responded: "I don't know what 'well' is. We won't use the box office as our only criteria for success here." Starbucks had been looking for a partner in movie promotion for about a year before one of its executives came across "Akeelah and the Bee," Mr. Schultz said. It was not until the movie was mostly complete, though, that a deal was struck to give Starbucks an equity stake — including an on-screen credit as one of its "presenters" — in exchange for the promotion. Lionsgate executives could not be reached for comment over the weekend. Nicole Miller, a research analyst with ThinkEquity Partners in New York, said of Starbucks: "This is the third evolution they're in — it's the entertainment evolution, finding a way to grow Starbucks outside the four walls of the store. The reason it works is they're a trusted brand. They have six million people a day in their stores, and those people trust Starbucks and what Starbucks is selling to them. That's very powerful." Mr. Schultz said he was also considering self-publishing books for Starbucks stores. "I want to bring books to the marketplace that perhaps can't be found," he said, citing "The Kite Runner," a novel about an Afghan boy that won a huge readership through word of mouth, as an example of the sort of content he would seek. "There's no reason to believe we can't be a self-publisher." The depth of Starbucks' future involvement in entertainment ventures will depend at least in part on the company's experiences in dealing with Hollywood, said Jim Wiatt, the chief executive of William Morris. "Depending on how the process goes," he said, "and how they enjoy this process, and how much impact they want to make, they may want to end up functioning as a real distributor." Mr. Schultz emphasized that not only was Starbucks aiming to extend the reach of its brand, but it was also trying to achieve something more ephemeral: enhancing the experience of being in Starbucks stores. "It's more than just coffee, it's human connection," he said. "In terms of content, the linkage is tied to that aspiration. We want to add texture to the brand, and value to the experience." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/bu...starbucks.html The Rise and Fall of Revolution Laura M. Holson For more than a year, Joe Roth has been hearing the Hollywood gossips predict the demise of his six-year-old movie studio, Revolution Studios. Now that they are right, he wants to set the record straight. His version goes something like this: In 2000, Mr. Roth, who ran not one but two major Hollywood studios, announced with fanfare that he would start an independent studio that would create quality movies with modest budgets. He brought in investors, most notably Sony Pictures Entertainment, to share the cost. But in 2003, Revolution abandoned its strategy, and budgets ballooned while quality suffered. Six of the 10 movies it released lost money. The next year, Mr. Roth and his wife divorced, a family trauma complicated by her being a major Revolution stakeholder. There were more losses in 2005, making it tough for the studio to recover. The story, though, has a plot twist. While critics maligned many of Revolution's movies — everything from the raunchy comedy "Tomcats" to the colossal bomb "Gigli" — Mr. Roth said the studio would actually turn a profit and was in discussions with financiers to begin paying off investors as early as this summer. Revolution estimated that 22 of the 36 films it had already released would be profitable once they finished their run on DVD and television. That number would rise to 27 films if the future value of the library grows as Revolution has predicted. "The time for the company is up," Mr. Roth, 57, explained in a recent interview in his office in Santa Monica, Calif., as he fiddled with the cane that he is using after having hip-replacement surgery. "I am no longer necessary, and I don't like feeling as if I'm not necessary anymore. I've made enough money. Why do I want to keep walking up that hill?" But to many people both inside and outside Hollywood — some of whom envied Mr. Roth's ability to make any movie he wanted — it is a hard fall for Revolution, which failed to live up to its promise. Once Revolution closes its doors in October 2007, Mr. Roth will join Sony Pictures as a producer, making one or two movies a year. And his longtime friend and colleague, the actress Julia Roberts, will join him, he said. When Mr. Roth started Revolution in 2000, after serving as chairman at both 20th Century Fox and Walt Disney Studios, Hollywood was flush with money. Fox agreed to invest $25 million for a 2.5 percent stake in Revolution, and Starz Encore invested $150 million for a 15 percent stake. But by far Revolution's most important partner was Sony Pictures. Sony paid $75 million to acquire a 7.5 percent stake. As part of the deal, it agreed to put up 42.5 percent of the production budget for Revolution's movies, as well as 100 percent of the marketing money. In return, Sony would earn a 12.5 percent movie distribution fee. Mr. Roth, for his part, agreed to lower the cost of making movies to about $40 million a film, $10 million less than the industry average. And he retained ownership of Revolution's library, agreeing to make at least 36 films. Few producers could demand such generous terms and get them. But Sony's Columbia Pictures division was struggling then and needed movies to fill its slate. In 2000, Sony ranked No. 7 in domestic market share, bringing in $667 million at the domestic box office with hits like "Charlie's Angels." But it also had misses like "Hanging Up." Revolution's first movie in 2001 was "Tomcats," a smutty comedy that earned a small profit. It was panned by critics, and even former Revolution executives agree the movie set the wrong tone. "People had this big vision for Joe beyond being commercially successful," said Rob Moore, a friend and former partner of Mr. Roth's who is now a top executive at Paramount Pictures. With no movies of his own developed yet, Mr. Roth said, he had little choice but to pick up fare like "Tomcats" from another studio, although Revolution also produced the Academy Award-winning "Black Hawk Down" that year. Mr. Moore said: "People reacted to 'Tomcats' with derision, saying, 'You had creative freedom and this is what you made?' It was as if 'Black Hawk Down' didn't exist." Revolution continued to chalk up hits, including "America's Sweethearts" (which Mr. Roth directed and which starred Ms. Roberts) and "The Animal," a cheaply made Rob Schneider comedy. As a result, Mr. Roth's profile within Sony grew. In 2001, Sir Howard Stringer, then chairman of Sony's domestic entertainment arm and now chief executive of the parent company, praised Mr. Roth in a cover story about Revolution in Forbes magazine. "He wants to make quality pictures, but not sink the studio," Sir Howard said then. Mr. Roth said Sir Howard even broached the subject of Mr. Roth running Sony Pictures when John Calley, then the studio chief, retired. In 2002, though, Sony revived, partly because of a shift toward making franchise movies like "Spider-Man." And its newfound prosperity strained its relationship with Revolution. Several former Sony and Revolution executives said tension grew as the studios were forced to share coveted dates on Sony's increasingly crowded release schedule. "With the success of 'Spider-Man,' there was more of a rivalry than a collaboration," said Mr. Moore. "It was like, 'Look how well we are doing now.' " Amy Pascal, chairwoman of Sony's motion picture group, would not address whether there was tension, but she did say that she had worked with Mr. Roth for 20 years and they had been through a lot. "The test of that is, he is going to make his home here at Sony," Ms. Pascal said. Mr. Roth, for his part, said, "I never felt discriminated against. I was happy. There was not outright animosity." Then came 2003, a historic year for Revolution, but not for the right reasons as Revolution strayed from its lower-cost strategy. The first disappointment that year was "Tears of the Sun," starring Bruce Willis, whom Mr. Roth brought with him to Revolution. The movie cost about $70 million to make and brought in $43.4 million at the domestic box office. That was followed by "Hollywood Homicide," a buddy cop story starring Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett that made $30 million domestically but cost about $75 million to make. But the movie Revolution may be best remembered for is "Gigli," the $60 million dark comedy starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez that brought in only $5.6 million domestically. Mr. Roth said he had agreed to give the director, Martin Brest, final-cut authority — something few studios give — meaning Mr. Roth could not make changes without the director agreeing. When Mr. Roth demanded that Mr. Brest cut the film after an early and poorly received screening, Mr. Roth recalled, the director balked. Mr. Brest said he resisted making changes but ultimately reshot scenes and altered the story to accommodate the studio. "I was kicking and screaming," he said. The movie, its name and everyone involved were universally panned. Mr. Roth reversed course after "Gigli." Budgets for movies were cut back to less than $40 million. Movie stars and directors were given less generous profit participation. And directors were not given final-cut authority again. While the losses were hard on Revolution, they were even tougher on Sony, which covered nearly half of the production budgets and all of the marketing costs. Those losses would not be recouped, although Mr. Roth said Sony would get back its principal investment. Not surprising to many in Hollywood, Mr. Roth was not named to replace Mr. Calley at Sony when the studio chief resigned. Mr. Roth said he spent much of 2004 trying to forget 2003. He produced the Academy Awards. He agreed to direct the racial drama "Freedomland." And he announced a flurry of new movie and television production deals. "I couldn't be busy enough," said Mr. Roth. "I was trying to get control over events I couldn't get control over." Revolution's movies that year fared better than they had in 2003. And in the summer of 2004, Mr. Roth and his colleagues gathered for dinner at the Buffalo Club in Santa Monica to discuss whether they wanted to stay together with Sony when Revolution's deal ended in 2006. "It was too soon to talk to Sony," said Mr. Roth. "Besides, I was going through my own changes." Mr. Roth was getting a divorce from his wife of more than two decades, Donna Arkoff Roth. That complicated Revolution's financial situation because Ms. Roth shared her husband's 62 percent stake in the company. So, Mr. Roth said, his lawyer negotiated an agreement that permitted Ms. Roth to share in the profit of 36 Revolution films. (That agreement did not include the 11 films yet to be released.) That fall, too, Mr. Roth had a frank talk with Sony executives, who were concerned about his growing development schedule. If Mr. Roth had stuck to the original 36-film plan, he said, he would have fallen short of the initial rate of return he had projected to woo investors. So he sought to make additional movies, which his deal allowed. But Sony, which co-financed the films, did not want the extra ones, preferring to spend money on its own instead. Mr. Roth said the two sides agreed then that he would not develop any new projects beyond the ones already agreed upon. Mr. Roth cannot pinpoint when he decided to shutter Revolution, but it was clear he would never receive the same deal he brokered with Sony in 2000. So, by early 2005, he encouraged top executives to seek new jobs. And by the end the year, almost all of those who had gone to Revolution with Mr. Roth had left. The staff dwindled to 35 from 53. And the performance of the movies for that year? There were more disappointments than hits, including the sequel to "XXX" — Revolution's biggest money-loser — and the forgettable "Man of the House." (The first "XXX" made more than $140 million at the box office in 2002.) Mr. Roth said he expected to sell Revolution's 47-film library after the last movie was released in October 2007. And he predicted that investors, including Sony, would receive a healthy rate of return on their initial investment, though financial analysts say the number is difficult to determine until the last movies are released. Last week, as Mr. Roth mulled his new venture at Sony, he was introspective. He talked about the movies that he had made that other studios would not. "I love orphans," he said. One of those is "Rocky Balboa," the sixth film in a 30-year-old franchise, which is to be released in the fall. In it, a 59-year-old Sylvester Stallone stars as a boxer past his prime who returns to the ring for one last shot at being the champ. "This is our story," Mr. Roth said he told a friend. "Everyone is entitled to a third act." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/bu...evolution.html New Subscribers Help Comcast More Than Triple Its Profit Ken Belson The Comcast Corporation, the country's largest cable television provider, said yesterday that profit more than tripled in the first quarter, driven by a better-than-expected increase in new subscribers and strong demand for its broadband and phone services. The gain was a sign that a growing number of consumers are interested in buying bundles of services from a single provider. Cable and phone companies have been promoting such packages to generate more revenue and to retain customers because consumers who buy them are less likely to switch providers. Compared with Cablevision and Time Warner Cable, Comcast was slow to introduce its digital phone service, the newest piece of its bundle. But in the first quarter, the company signed up 211,000 phone customers, more than it added in all of 2005. The company also added 47,000 cable television customers, almost three times the number that analysts had expected. In the quarter, Comcast earned $466 million, or 22 cents a share, compared with $143 million, or 6 cents a share, a year earlier. Sales rose 10 percent, to $5.9 billion, from $5.4 billion. Both profit and sales figures were more than analysts had forecast, helping lift Comcast's stock by $1.25, or 4.3 percent, to $30.45, its biggest one-day gain in percentage terms in nearly three years. Investors dumped cable stocks last year on concern that phone companies and others starting to sell their own video services would erode the cable industry's dominance in the pay television market. Those fears may be receding. So far this year, Comcast's stock has risen 17.5 percent. "It's been a long dry spell in the eyes of some investors, but there's a recognition that the industry is on the offensive, not the defensive," said Brian L. Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast. Mr. Roberts noted that Comcast added 437,000 new customers for its high-speed data service, 15.6 percent more than in the first quarter of last year. Comcast, like AT&T, Verizon and other providers, has been persuading more consumers to give up their slower dial-up connections. With their bundle of products, cable companies are also likely to steal customers from satellite television providers even as Verizon and other Bell companies win over more cable subscribers. "Satellite companies are going to get hurt," said Robin Diedrich, who covers Comcast for Edward Jones, a brokerage firm in St. Louis. "Cable isn't going to see as much erosion from satellite, but now you have phone companies pushing their own video product." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/bu...28comcast.html Surf Securely, Carrying Privacy in Your Pocket Eric A. Taub In today's terrorism-conscious world, personal privacy seems to be diminishing. But a specialized flash drive from Stealth Ideas can ensure that your Web travels, at least, remain secret. The StealthSurfer II ID Protect, an upgrade of a previous product, combines several programs to let users navigate the Web anonymously and create e-mail that cannot be read by others. The programs come loaded on a flash drive, available from the company's Web site (www.stealthsurfer.com) in capacities from 256 megabytes ($99) to 2 gigabytes ($279). Plug the flash drive into a PC's U.S.B. port, and all files created when Web surfing are stored on the drive, not on the computer's hard disk. Programs include the Firefox browser; Anonymizer, to mask the user's Internet protocol address; RoboForm, a program that prevents keystrokes from being recorded; and Thunderbird, an e-mail program. Whether at home, a public Wi-Fi location or an Internet cafe, privacy is protected — as long as you don't forget to take the flash drive with you when you leave. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/te...27privacy.html In Internet Age, Writers Face Frontier Justice Tom Zeller Jr. WRITING last Monday at SepiaMutiny.com, a Web log dedicated to the Southeast Asian diaspora, a user called RC declared that "there is no scientific way to compare works of literature." This observation was prompted by news, published a day earlier in The Harvard Crimson, suggesting that the budding novelist Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard sophomore, was actually a plagiarist who had served up large, sometimes verbatim helpings of two young-adult novels by Megan McCafferty — "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings" — in her lucrative first yarn, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life." Just where science fits into the weeklong fracas that followed is an open question. The news broke the old-fashioned way: in a newspaper. And the expanding scope of the scandal — first 12 passages were questioned, then 29, then 40 — was driven by findings from Ms. McCafferty's publishers as much as anything else. But certainly technology — and the relentless, sometimes merciless social interaction it has enabled in the digital age — played a part in forcing Ms. Viswanathan's publisher, Little, Brown, to recall the spoiled product by week's end. For days, the author's name was one of the most searched terms at the blog search engine Technorati, while commentators at forums from Metafilter to Amazon.com hashed over details revealed in the mainstream media, or offered up new discoveries and insights of their own: "Viswanathan might have plagiarism issues with more than McCafferty's books," wrote Janak Ramakrishnan, another blogger at Sepia Mutiny. Mr. Ramakrishnan had noticed a similarity between pious aphorisms scribbled onto posters by a character in Ms. Viswanathan's book ("If from drink you get your thrill, take precaution, write your will" and "All the dangerous drug abusers end up safe as total losers") and passages from the 1990 book "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" by Salman Rushdie. A chapter titled "The Mail Coach" in Mr. Rushdie's book depicts a series of rhyming road signs, including two that read, "If from speed you get your thrill, take precaution, make your will" and "All the dangerous overtakers end up safe at the undertaker's." To be fair, of course, rhyming road-safety signs are common along India's expressways, so Mr. Rushdie was himself borrowing on a theme. But like everything else, even this minute similarity — homage? remix? rip-off? — became part of the ceaseless compare-and-contrast debate. Indeed, whatever Ms. Viswanathan's culpability (she maintained, by week's end, that all similarities to Ms. McCafferty's books were unintentional), one might hope the episode would be the final object lesson for would-be plagiarists who still think that their indiscretions can escape scrutiny. In the age of the Internet, literary exegesis (whether driven by scandal or not) is no longer undertaken solely by pale critics or plodding lawyers speaking only to each other, but by a global hive, humming everywhere at once, and linked to the wiki. And if you are big enough to matter (as any writer would hope to be), one misstep, one mistake, can incite a horde of analysts, each with a global publishing medium in the living room and, it sometimes seems, limitless amounts of time. Frontier justice? Mob rule? Perhaps. But last week, not just petty gadflies fueled by schadenfreude and bloodlust (though there was that), but also armchair defense attorneys and the merely curious were discussing the books — as well as whether Ms. Viswanathan's status as a) immigrant, b) minority, c) child of privilege or d) hottie — played a role in her treatment. Many online commentators detected an underlying racism, for instance, in even good-natured rants — perhaps typified by Gawker's cheeky (and occasionally misinterpreted) comment on Tuesday: "Isn't it kind of awesome to see an overachieving Indian kid finally do something wrong?" But others pointed to the fact that Ms. Viswanathan had only one week earlier told The Newark Star-Ledger that "nothing I read gave me the inspiration" for the novel, but now, under scrutiny, suddenly recalled adoring Ms. McCafferty's books and claimed to have unconsciously channeled them. Given that, her critics charged, she was being treated better than other fabulists of late. "If Viswanathan weren't young, attractive and a student at the best brand name in higher education, wouldn't she be James Frey II?" Jane Genova, a marketing consultant in Connecticut, wrote on her blog (janegenova.com) on Thursday. "You bet," she continued. "The pile-on would have been fast and massive." But what if she had been deaf and blind? That was a question raised in a discussion at Metafilter, where Andrew Shalit, in a defense of Ms. Viswanathan's claim of unconscious copying, pointed to the Helen Keller archives at the Web site for the American Foundation for the Blind. There, in her autobiography "The Story of My Life," Ms. Keller describes how, at age 12, she wrote a story — "The Frost King" — that created her ownpublishing scandal. "Mr. Anagnos was delighted with 'The Frost King,' and published it in one of the Perkins Institution reports," Ms. Keller wrote (Chapter 14 at afb.org/mylife). "This was the pinnacle of my happiness, from which I was in a little while dashed to earth. I had been in Boston only a short time when it was discovered that a story similar to 'The Frost King,' called 'The Frost Fairies' by Miss Margaret T. Canby, had appeared before I was born in a book called 'Birdie and His Friends.' The two stories were so much alike in thought and language that it was evident Miss Canby's story had been read to me, and that mine was — a plagiarism." It was surmised that Ms. Keller must have heard Ms. Canby's story read to her as a child and unconsciously retold the story years later as her own, an event that left her in dread of trying to write anything original again. Back at Metafilter, Keith M. Ellis wondered if Ms. Keller would have received a fair shake in the rush to judgment that is now de rigueur in the Internet age. "It seems to me we give zero consideration to the possibility that it might be plagiarism, but unintentional," Mr. Ellis wrote, adding: "If we changed the name and obscured the disability-indicating details, would we still be willing to consider innocence?" A piercing question, that — though so, too, is whether Ms. Viswanathan's case warrants a comparison to Ms. Keller's. And as mercenaries stampeded to eBay to peddle copies of Ms. Viswanathan's suddenly scarce book (a first edition was selling for $80 on Friday), the hope for any larger lessons in the "Opal" episode began to dim. Yet here, too, the Internet presented something of a solution. Purveyors of "The MehtaMorphasis Award" (snipurl.com/Mehtaward) were offering $75 for the most eloquently crafted moral to a week of charged debate surrounding the frothy, ephemeral novel. Among the submissions: "The controversy may deservedly be far more interesting than the story itself." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/bu...ia/01link.html Guidelines for Radio Tags Aim to Protect Buyer Privacy Barnaby J. Feder Some of the opponents in the debate over the potential privacy abuses of identification and tracking systems using tiny radio tags have come together to draft best-practices guidelines that are to be released today at a technology trade show in Las Vegas. Radio tagging technology, called RFID for radio frequency identification, is already widely used in wireless toll collection systems and to control access to buildings, track livestock and manage industrial assets. It is also rapidly spreading into libraries, hospitals and systems that track consumer goods through the retail supply chain. Radio tags, which are based on microchips, carry more information than bar codes, and large numbers of them can be scanned at the same time. Among other things, the guidelines say that consumers should be notified when goods have radio tags, which can be invisibly buried in labels, packaging or the goods themselves. The guidelines also say that it should be clear to consumers how to disable disposable forms of the tags and that it should be easy to do so once items with such tags have been purchased. Businesses are called on to notify consumers about how information gathered from the tags will be used. The guidelines were the work of a group of businesses and consumer advocates. Among the participants who are expected to endorse the guidelines are Procter & Gamble, I.B.M., Microsoft, Visa USA and the National Consumers League. "This is a really good start," said Susan Grant, vice president for public policy at the National Consumers League, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington. However, some participants in the drafting are not endorsing the result, including the National Retail Federation, the nation's largest retailing trade group, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that was the most vocal privacy advocate. "We are calling it an interim draft for a reason," said Paula J. Bruening, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a policy organization in Washington that orchestrated the effort. "There's a clear sense the guidelines will have to be reconsidered in the future." A survey last year found that 7 percent of 89 retailers and 11 percent of 120 consumer products manufacturers had delayed or scaled back RFID investments because of privacy concerns, according to Christine Overby, who follows the technology for Forrester Research, a market research company based in Cambridge, Mass. The technology got a major boost two years ago when Wal-Mart endorsed a standard developed by an industry consortium and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for tagging consumer goods, and said that it would begin requiring suppliers to tag cartons and pallets shipped to it. That standard, called E.P.C. (for electronic product code), is now administered by EPCglobal, which is based in Brussels. EPCglobal has issued its own privacy guidelines. Maureen Riehl, a lawyer with the National Retail Federation, said that experience with the E.P.C. guidelines was one reason her group was not endorsing the broader guidelines to be released today. Legislators in New Hampshire are using the E.P.C. guidelines as a basis for a proposed law that retailers there say could be costly and unnecessarily alarming for consumers, she said. Lee Tien, senior staff lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that the new guidelines were a valuable "first step" but that they gave industry too much "wiggle room." He also noted that the guidelines ignored government use of RFID and privacy concerns for employees in business-to-business dealings. Mr. Tien said that he had warned his fellow participants at the outset that it was highly unlikely his group would endorse the end result. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/te...gy/01rfid.html A Touch of Gold to Keep Treasured Discs From Degrading Dan Mitchell There is nothing worse than popping in a disc loaded with treasured memories, or even just a favorite movie or sound recording, only to find that the data has disappeared because the disc has deteriorated. The new Kodak Preservation DVD-R and CD-R products are made to preserve data for 100 years on the DVD-R and 300 years on the CD-R. KMP Media, which is manufacturing the discs under license from Kodak, says they are made with a reflective layer of 24-karat gold, which prevents the tarnish and oxidation that occur with common silver discs. The discs were tested using accelerated aging techniques, according to KMP. A scratch-resistant coating on the discs is designed to prevent physical damage from heat, light and rough handling, while a long-life dye is used in the actual data-storage layer. The just-released discs are available on many Web sites, and major retailers are beginning to stock them, said Steven L. Mizelle, KMP's president. The 700-megabyte CD-R's cost $4 to $5, and the 4.7-gigabyte DVD-R's are about $1 more, he said. While such high-end storage products can help preserve data for long periods, they are no guarantee against data loss. Mr. Mizelle recommends keeping hard-drive copies of everything, if possible. "Redundancy is your friend," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/te...gy/27disc.html Macs No Longer Immune To Viruses, Experts Say Apple's growing market share, new chips said making it more of a target AP Benjamin Daines was browsing the Web when he clicked on a series of links that promised pictures of an unreleased update to his computer’s operating system. Instead, a window opened on the screen and strange commands ran as if the machine was under the control of someone — or something — else. Daines was the victim of a computer virus. Such headaches are hardly unusual on PCs running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system. Daines, however, was using a Mac — an Apple Computer Inc. machine often touted as being immune to such risks. He and at least one other person who clicked on the links were infected by what security experts call the first-ever virus for Mac OS X, the operating system that has shipped with every Mac sold since 2001 and has survived virtually unscathed from the onslaught of malware unleashed on the Internet in recent years. “It just shows people that no matter what kind of computer you use you are still open to some level of attack,” said Daines, a 29-year-old British chemical engineer who once considered Macs invulnerable to such attacks. Apple’s iconic status, growing market share and adoption of same microprocessors used in machines running Windows are making Macs a bigger target, some experts warn. Apple’s most recent wake-up call came last week, as a Southern California researcher reported seven new vulnerabilities. Tom Ferris said malicious Web sites can exploit the holes without a user’s knowledge, potentially allowing a criminal to execute code remotely and gain access to passwords and other sensitive information. Ferris said he warned Apple of the vulnerabilities in January and February and that the company has yet to patch the holes, prompting him to compare the Cupertino-based computer maker to Microsoft three years ago, when the world’s largest software company was criticized for being slow to respond to weaknesses in its products. (MSNBC.com is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.) “They didn’t know how to deal with security, and I think Apple is in the same situation now,” said Ferris, himself a Mac user. Apple officials point to the company’s virtually unvarnished security track record and disputed claims that Mac OS X is more susceptible to attack now than in the past. Apple plans to patch the holes reported by Ferris in the next automatic update of Mac OS X, and there have been no reports of them being exploited, spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said. She disagreed that the vulnerabilities make it possible for a criminal to run code on a targeted machine. In Daines’ infection, a bug in the virus’ code prevented it from doing much damage. Still, several of his operating system files were deleted, several new files were created and several applications, including a program for recording audio, were crippled. Behind the scenes, the virus also managed to hijack his instant messaging program so the rogue file was blasted to 10 people on his buddy list. “A lot of Mac users are in denial and have blinders on that say, ‘Nothing is ever going to get to us,”’ said Neil Fryer, a computer security consultant who works for an international financial institution in Britain. “I can’t say I agree with them.” Fryer, also a Mac user, said he has begun taking additional precautions over the past year to make sure he doesn’t fall victim to an attack. He spends more time than in the past scrutinizing his security logs for signs of intruders, and he uses a firewall and additional security applications, just as he would with a Windows-based machine. Among the other signs Macs are a growing target: The SANS Institute, a computer-security organization in Bethesda, Md., added Mac OS X to its 2005 list of the top-20 Internet vulnerabilities. It was the first time the Mac has been included since the experts started compiling the list in 2000. This week, SANS updated the list to warn against flaws in Safari, the Mac Web browser, which the group said criminals were able to attack before Apple could fix it. The number of discovered Mac vulnerabilities has soared in recent years, with 81 found last year, up from 46 in 2004 and 27 in 2003, according to the Open Source Vulnerability Database, which is maintained by a nonprofit group that tracks security vulnerabilities on many different hardware and software platforms. Less than a week after Daines was attacked in mid-February, a 25-year-old computer security researcher released three benign Mac-based worms to prove a serious vulnerability in Mac OS X could be exploited. Apple asked the man, Kevin Finisterre, to hold off publishing the code until it could patch the flaw. The Mac’s vulnerability could also increase as Apple transitions to a product line that uses microprocessors made by Intel Corp., security experts said. With new Macs running the same processor that powers Windows-based machines, far more people will know how to exploit weaknesses in Apple machines than in the past, when they ran on the PowerPC chips made by IBM Corp. and Motorola Corp. spinoff Freescale Semiconductor Inc. “They have eliminated their genetic diversity,” said independent security consultant Rodney Thayer. “The fear is that we’re going to run into a new class of attacks.” Bud Tribble, Apple’s senior vice president of software technology, disagreed. “All the things we’ve been doing to make Mac OS X secure continue to be relevant on Intel,” he said. Mac OS X, he said, is designed to be Internet safe out of the box, without the need for firewalls or additional security software. He praised Mac OS X for making it easy for users to automatically install security patches. He noted that the operating system was derived from FreeBSD, open source software that was built from the ground up to provide security for computers networked together. Since its origins in the early 1990s, the Unix-based FreeBSD has continually been battle-tested by college students and computer security specialists. “The bottom line is we still feel more comfortable using a Mac than a (Windows) PC,” said Alan Paller, director of research for SANS. But as Daines can attest, there are no guarantees. “We’re all sort of waiting with bated breath to see if any problem will happen and the jury is still out,” said Thayer, the independent security consultant. “I don’t think you’ll find a consensus.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12537279/ An Evening with BitTorrent Thomas Mennecke BitTorrent as an organization, incorporated in the state of California, managed to swing from one end of the popular opinion spectrum to the other in a matter weeks. Precipitated by Bram Cohen’s deal with the MPAA, in which unauthorized material would be removed from his content search engine, public opinion subsequently degraded. BitTorrent’s reputation faired little better in the later months, as Bram Cohen’s views on certain issues met with widespread opposition from the community. With a floundering public opinion and an apparent disconnect with the community, is BitTorrent, Inc. becoming the George W. Bush of the file-sharing world? No stranger to the opinions of the file-sharing community, Slyck.com met with Ashwin Navin, President of BitTorrent, Inc., in New York City. In town for a panel discussion in Tribeca along with director Steven Soderbergh, Todd Wagner of 2929 Entertainment and Dean Garfield of MPAA, BitTorrent, Inc.’s participation stressed that what most of us already know – online movie distribution is coming – if not already here. Afterwards, Ashwin opened up about BitTorrent, BitTorrent Inc., and the misconceptions people have about the force behind the largest Internet revolution since the World Wide Web. “I sometimes lose the will to live after reading Slyck.com,” Ashwin joked. “The community can be brutal.” The brutality Ashwin speaks of is the discontent expressed not only within the Slyck.com forums, but the prevalent attitude throughout the file-sharing community. Once held high on the file-sharing pedestal amongst heroes such as Ares Galaxy, FrostWire and the now defunct “Audio Galaxy”, words of praise have turned into scorn, as “traitor” and “greed” are now used to describe BitTorrent, Inc. These words are often used by disenfranchised consumers and file-shares who often equate any dealings with the entertainment industry as treasonous. It didn’t help BitTorrent’s public relations when in November 2005, Bram Cohen announced a deal with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America.) The understanding between the two left the door open for future distribution arrangements, while guaranteeing BitTorrent.com’s search engine would abide by any takedown requests. However these criticisms aren’t dismissed by Ashwin or BitTorrent, Inc. Ashwin readily accepts them not only as valid, but also as an opportunity to address and correct many of the notions about his company. “It’s easy to come to that conclusion [about BitTorrent] when you see scary press releases from MPAA or RIAA that vilify us as consumers and customers of their product,” Ashwin said. “There are people within these organizations, within record labels, within movie studios, within the trade associations that question those tactics as well. So…by coming to [that] conclusion [about BitTorrent] isn’t an unreasonable thing to do. The content industry is on the verge of embracing these technologies. In the past the lawyers in these businesses governed the decision making with respect to peer to peer (P2P) and in the coming months the business people and the decision makers outside of the legal organization are going to weigh in and decide how they want to work with P2P developers in general.” Yet an understanding of the community’s concerns and progressively rectifying them are two different things. Many in the BitTorrent community have found it necessary to rely on alternative development resources to meet their file-sharing needs – especially end to end encryption, a result of traffic shaping and bandwidth throttling. It’s the practice of some reactionary ISPs (Internet Service Provider) to allocate a limited amount of bandwidth to the BitTorrent application, resulting in snail’s pace download and upload speed. But BitTorrent, Inc. can’t be reactionary as well, Ashwin argues, as it’s forced to wear more than one hat in the digital distribution world. “An all out war with the ISPs would result in a loss for BitTorrent, and a loss for the entire community.” Rather than code their way around the ISPs, BitTorrent, Inc. is seeking a diplomatic solution with the ISPs. Giving ISPs a reason to accept BitTorrent by articulating its legitimate potential is critical in allowing this protocol to survive. “We spent an extraordinary amount of time face to face with the largest ISPs in the world who now see anywhere between a third and up to 70% of all their traffic in the BT protocol. [We’re] trying to convince them there’s a better way to manage the BitTorrent protocol then to limit it and to shape it. We’ve been strong advocates of the caching solution in the next version of the (Main Line) BitTorrent client, what we are calling the Allegro release. There’ll be a protocol which allows ISPs to cache BitTorrent content which is a great thing for users. It improves the user experience for downloading with BitTorrent no matter what client it is as long as it’s implemented the Cache Discovery Protocol and it also offers ISPs a cost effective way to allow BT to exist on their networks. "A lot of ISPs did not even know there was a caching solution for the BT protocol, and as we’re taking it upon ourselves to educate them on behalf of our users and all the other developers of the protocol to implement a user friendly way to manage the cost.” Appealing to ISPs interests and demonstrating its business potential has also been influential in allowing BitTorrent’s existence. Pairing with CacheLogic and British broadband provider NTL, BitTorrent recently announced a movie distribution deal on the ISPs 100 MB NextGen network. Testing of the distribution platform have already begun, and will serve as a litmus test for other ISPs. The general theme of the meeting between Slyck.com and Ashwin was that of legitimacy. It ties into the BitTorrent, Inc’s deal with the MPAA, its stand on many of the issues facing the file-sharing community, and its position with the ISPs. By working with the entertainment industry and the ISPs, the future of BitTorrent is brighter for not just the business oriented, but for all parties. If BitTorrent were allowed to develop without any type of structure, it would be “easy to dismiss BitTorrent as a piracy protocol. It really has a much bigger role in the world and it’s important that there’s an organization that people can see, hear and touch.” Part the organization Ashwin describes is establishing BitTorrent.org as a resource that developers, programmers and the community can interact and determine BitTorrent’s course. A divided BitTorrent house, one in which several divergents of the original protocol establish themselves throughout the Internet, could have dire consequences for the overall prosperity and health of information sharing. “The number one priority for all for us as developers is to maintain the interoperability of the protocol. A forked protocol becomes difficult for ISPs to work with and to cache. All we require is better communication and understanding amongst all of us developers to set a direction for the protocol and to involve in a constructive way or to expose that discussion to the ISPs so that they don’t feel blind sided by the direction of our development. BitTorrent.org [is designed] for the purpose of creating a communication mechanism for all of us to hopefully constructively debate different directions, different extensions, the protocol can take. This includes things like encryption, cache discovery; a few of the new extensions that we’ve developed are things like Get Pieces Fast (resolves the sluggishness experienced while looking for peers) which will have dramatic performance improvements to the BT protocol.” In other words, try to imagine a world in where BitTorrent became forked with several variants. Instead of trying to accommodate one protocol, ISPs could potentially be confronted with dozens. ISPs are showing marginal tolerance of one BitTorrent protocol, but confronted with several would likely lead to all-out rejection. BitTorrent users in the end would loose and wind up with unilateral bandwidth throttling. In this respect, Ashwin states bringing legitimacy and unity to the BitTorrent protocol is vital for the community and its widespread userbase. Judging BitTorrent, Inc. in person and judging BitTorrent, Inc. from behind a computer screen are polar opposites. It’s easy to simply dictate that BitTorrent, Inc. is in it for the money, for the business, for the capitalist opportunity, however most of the discussion ultimately centered on the BitTorrent community and what’s best for the people who have driven it to the success it is today. http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1172

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