Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 20th, ’06

[JackSpratts]

"All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design." – Douglas Jones


"Everyday consumers shouldn't be treated like copyright pirates. Copyright pirates should not be treated like everyday consumers." – Philip Ruddock


"All CVV are guaranteed: fresh and valid." – TalkCash.net ad for stolen credit card data


"Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA." – Jeff Battcher, BellSouth spokesman


"[Jeff Battcher] said he did not know whether BellSouth had a contract with the Department of Defense, which oversees the NSA." – Leslie Cauley, USA Today


"It would be a catastrophe for the music industry if something happened to that plant." – Peter Stroud


"So I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it." – A. O. Scott


























File-Sharers Are Our Friends

As was remarked on this page last week the Red Hot Chilli Peppers launched an anti-P2P tirade that would’ve embarrassed even Metallica. At times accusatory, at others petulant, band mate Flea demonized file swappers for corrupting his "sacred" music by leaking what he insisted were low quality files of his upcoming album. "If you down load it now off one of these file sharing sites you will be getting a pale imitation of the record," huffed the bassist. "It will be of the poor sound quality of the technique they used to get it on there and that will break my heart, it will break John Frusciante's heart, it will break Anthony Kiedis' heart and it will break the heart of Chad Smith." It was all so extreme and so dire one could be forgiven for thinking the band might be holding emergency auditions for cardiac specialists. Apparently he’d never heard of the awesome promotional power of radio delivered by its less than perfect audio. The rock star’s whiny rant continued with insults and even vulgarities hurled at the traders…

Fast forward to today and the music news from Hollywood: that new album from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers "topped the US charts for the first time in the band’s 22 year history."! With unit sales 56% higher than their previous best seller, P2P sent this new CD into the sales stratosphere and without a doubt greatly improved everybody’s circulation. Other musicians should be so lucky to have legions of excited listeners supporting their latest releases by sending promo copies flying around the Internet.

Flea, you are wrong about P2P. Don’t take it personally, you’re hardly alone; you live in an industry town that’s been in denial about this for 10 years, a town that’s been spending untold resources building and promoting an anti-P2P lie. File sharing is a constructive power for your industry and for you as an individual. You have the results right in front of you. Far from being flea powder, unregulated free and open peer-to-peer file-sharing has rescued careers and put untold funds directly into your pocket as well as exposing millions of potential customers to your artistry. You should be on your knees thanking file-sharers and the chances they take risking your corrupt industry’s disingenuous wrath to swap those songs.

Far from working against you, file sharing is working for you, and is a demonstrably positive force for musicians everywhere.


So Flea, repeat after me:

"File-sharers are my friends!

File-sharers are my friends!

File-sharers are my friends!"


Very good Flea.

Now apologize.

Thank you.

All is forgiven.















Enjoy,

Jack.




















May 20th, ’06






Chili Peppers Top US Music Charts For First Time
Dean Goodman

Funk-rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers topped the U.S. charts for the first time in its 22-year history on Wednesday, while Neil Young's tirade against President Bush failed to do much for his sales.

The veteran Canadian rocker's "Living With War" opened at No. 15 with sales of 60,000 units in the week ended May 14, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. His last album, "Prairie Wind," started at No. 11 last September with 72,000 copies sold its first week.

The Chili Peppers' two-disc set, "Stadium Arcadium," opened with sales of 442,500 copies, a record for the Los Angeles-based quartet.

Its previous best was 282,000 for its last studio release, "By The Way," which opened at No. 2 in 2002. The band's biggest commercial success was the 1999 album "Californication," with sales of 5.3 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

"Stadium Arcadium" was also tops in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, the band's spokeswoman said. In the United Kingdom, it marked the group's third No. 1. The band is more popular in Europe than at home.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Young both record for Warner Music Group Inc..

"Living With War," featuring the single "Let's Impeach the President," did do better than Young's 2003 concept album "Greendale," which opened at No. 22 with 42,000 copies.

In 2002, his September 11-related "Are You Passionate?" opened at No. 10, albeit with 56,000 copies sold. That marked his best start since 1995's "Mirror Ball," a collaboration with Pearl Jam, which debuted at No. 5 with 98,000 copies.

Another veteran had more to smile about. Paul Simon's latest album, "Surprise," opened at No. 14 with 61,000 copies. It marked his highest chart rank since Nielsen SoundScan began tabulating sales in 1991. He also records for Warner Music.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...ent+NewsNews-5





P2P Company Betting On Podcasts – And A Jury Of It’s Peers
Frank Ahrens

Morpheus, the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing software, is celebrating its fifth year in existence -- and a bumpy five years it's been -- with a new version allowing users to share podcasts.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) services, such as the original Napster, let Internet users swap files among themselves. They have been a target of the music and motion-picture industries over the past few years as users have employed them to illegally swap copyrighted material, such as songs and films.

The original Napster was shut down by the federal government in 2001. Emboldened, the entertainment industry sued Grokster and a number of P2P services, including Morpheus's maker, StreamCast Networks Inc., shortly thereafter. Last summer, the Supreme Court ruled that such services are liable for the criminal activity of their users. Grokster shuttered in November 2005. (An ominous warning on http://www.grokster.com/ reads: "Your IP address . . . has been logged. Don't think you can't get caught.") Other services settled with the industry and launched legal services. StreamCast also looked to settle but last month said the talks had collapsed and now seeks a jury trial.

During all this, StreamCast pushes onward, embracing podcasting -- recordings of everything from college lectures to garage-band music for use on MP3 players, chiefly, the Apple iPod. Podcasts let users download, say, Rush Limbaugh's daily radio show and play it whenever they want.

The new Morpheus 5.2 lets users upload their audio and video podcasts, search for others on the Web and download them.

For StreamCast, the benefits are obvious: Adding podcasts means more users, and more users means more ad revenue on the free version of its software. Also, perhaps more importantly: fewer copyright problems. Though podcasts are copyrighted like all music and movies generated by labels and studios, most amateur podcastsers do not forbid distribution of their work. Therefore, Morpheus should not get in legal trouble for facilitating their swapping around the Web.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051300186.html





Record Labels Sue XM Over Portable Device
Sue Zeidler

The recording industry on Tuesday sued XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., alleging its Inno device that can store music infringes on copyrights and transforms a passive radio experience into the equivalent of a digital download service like iTunes.

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, comprising major labels such as Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group Corp., EMI Group Plc and Sony BMG, said the suit was filed on Tuesday in New York federal court.

The suit accuses XM Satellite of "massive wholesale infringement," and seeks $150,000 in damages for every song copied by XM customers using the devices, which went on sale earlier this month. XM, with more than 6.5 million subscribers, said it plays 160,000 different songs every month.

"...Because XM makes available vast catalogues of music in every genre, XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings," the lawsuit says referring to the hand held "Inno" device.

The suit says that XM has touted its service's advantages over the iPod and cites XM's advertising literature that says "It's not a Pod. It's the mothership."

XM said the Inno, which is maufactured by Pioneer Corp., are legal devices that allow consumers to listen to and record radio just as the law has allowed for decades.

While the labels are asserting the device has transformed radio broadcasts into a download service, XM said the device does not allow consumers to transfer recorded content. XM also said that content recorded from radio broadcasts like XM's is not on demand, in contrast to the content people buy from online music stores like Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iTunes service.

XM said it will vigorously defend this lawsuit on behalf of consumers and also called the lawsuit a bargaining tactic.

The company's shares, which rose 4 percent to close at $17.63 on Nasdaq, were down 1.3 percent at $17.40 in after hours trading.

The labels are currently in talks with XM and its rival Sirius Satellite Radio, to renegotiate digital royalty contracts for broadcasts.

XM and the labels had also been in talks about the licensing of content for the digital portable player, but failed to reach agreement, according to sources familiar with the matter. The labels had pressed for licenses similar to those required for services like iTunes, the sources said.

Sirius earlier this spring came to an agreement with music labels over the ability to save songs to its S50 portable satellite receivers that double as MP3 players.

"XM Radio is the largest single payer of digital music broadcast royalties, and royalties paid by XM go to the music industry and benefit artists directly," the satellite radio company said.

"The music labels are trying to stifle innovation, limit consumer choice and roll back consumers' rights to record content for their personal use," XM added.

"It's a question of economic impact. Will these devices substitute for the purchase of a record? Everything is changing and the industry is petrified," said Jay Cooper, an entertainment lawyer.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060517/...nm/media_xm_dc





Transferring Music Ruled Legal In Australia
Kerry Anne Walsh

TRANSFERRING music from CDS onto iPods and other MP3 players will no longer be illegal after federal cabinet agreed to make sweeping changes to copyright laws.

But beware the trap of downloading from the internet. The Government will increase surveillance and fines on internet piracy in a package to be announced by Attorney-General Philip Ruddock today.

Once the new laws are passed, "format shifting" of music, newspapers and books from personal collections onto MP3 players will become legal. The new laws will also make it legal for people to tape television and radio programs for playback later, a practice currently prohibited although millions of people regularly do it.

Under the current regime, millions of households a day are breaking the law when they tape a show and watch it at another time.

Schools, universities, libraries and other cultural institutions will, in the future, be free to use copyright material for non-commercial purposes.

But the Government is giving police greater powers to tackle internet piracy, signalling that the days of downloading music from the internet danger-free may be limited.

Police will be able to issue on-the-spot fines and access and recover profits made by copyright pirates. Courts will be given powers to award larger damages payouts against internet pirates. Civil infringement proceedings will apply to copyright pirates who make electronic reproductions or copies of copyright material.

In a win for recording artists, the new package will include the removal of the legislative 1 per cent cap on copyright licence fees paid by radio broadcasters for playing recordings.

The Government is bracing for a stoush with commercial radio stations over the removal of the cap, which has been in place since 1968.

But Mr Ruddock believes the archaic provision was established to protect radio broadcasters who were facing a difficult economic environment at the time.

As they now operated in a "profitable and robust" industry, record companies and artists should be allowed to negotiate a fair market rate without legislative intervention, he will announce. If both sides cannot agree on fees, the Copyright Tribunal would be called upon to adjudicate.

The Australian Institute of Criminology will be asked to undertake research into the extent of piracy and counterfeiting in Australia and the best methods of responding to the problem.

"Copyright is important and should be respected," Mr Ruddock said. "Everyday consumers shouldn't be treated like copyright pirates. Copyright pirates should not be treated like everyday consumers."

The Government will ask the Australian Crime Commission to investigate reports that organised crime is infiltrating piracy and counterfeiting rackets in Australia.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/nation...940775897.html





France Debates Downloads, With Teenager as Top Expert
Thomas Crampton

In the current debate over laws governing music downloads here, some condemn Aziz Ridouan as an advocate of criminal piracy, while others say he represents the new generation of online consumers.

In either case, just about everyone involved listens to what Mr. Ridouan, an 18-year-old high school student, has to say.

"All sides must listen to Aziz because he has an entire generation behind him," said Julien Dourgnon, economic director of the Consumer's Federal Union, one of the largest consumer advocacy groups in France. "He may still be in high school, but Aziz has a more profound understanding of copyright law than most lawyers and members of Parliament."

New proposals to govern music piracy have faced a roller coaster ride through both the French legislature and public opinion here. The National Assembly passed legislation that could force Apple Computer and other companies to make songs purchased on their proprietary online services playable on any MP3 device. The Senate, responding to corporate arguments against such openness, appears ready to approve a weaker version of the law soon.

Mr. Ridouan, who began lobbying with protests against America Online when he was 12, first came to the national media's attention in 2004 as the founder of the Audionautes — which roughly translates as "the audio surfers." The Audionautes is a nonprofit association that provides legal assistance to those accused of illegally downloading music, many of whom were taken to court by the Civil Society of Phonographic Producers, the French equivalent of the Recording Industry Association of America.

"When I started raising the issue, many politicians didn't even know the term downloading," Mr. Ridouan said. "My role often involves telling politicians and audiences what high school students like me are doing today."

When he was on vacation from school in early May, Mr. Ridouan spent five days in Paris meeting members of Parliament and juggling more than half a dozen media appearances before leading several hundred protesters through the streets of Paris.

"Aziz has been courageous in fighting the medieval-style crusade the music industry runs against music downloaders," said Christian Paul, a member of the Socialist Party. "Sooner or later the music industry will learn they need to adapt to Aziz and his generation."

To adversaries, Mr. Ridouan merely offers facile rationalizations for theft.

"You might call him Robin Hood if he gave to the poor by only stealing from the rich. But downloading doesn't just take money from Tom Cruise and Madonna," said Pascal Rogard, the director general of the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers, a group dedicated to protecting authors' copyrights. "There are many smaller artists who live from the earnings that Aziz refuses to give them."

French-born of parents, now divorced, who immigrated from Morocco, Mr. Ridouan lives in a government-subsidized building in the central Loire region of France with his mother, who works as a cleaning woman. He introduced his association in 2004 by declaring his downloading habit in the middle of a news conference called by a music industry trade group to announce a crackdown on 50 Internet pirates.

"Until we started speaking out in public, downloaders were only shown on television like terrorists, with their face hidden and voice scrambled," Mr. Ridouan said.

At the news conference, where he held the Hewlett-Packard laptop computer he always seems to carry above his head, Mr. Ridouan added: "I am proud to tell anyone that I download and have plenty of music, movies and TV series on my computer."

The amount of media and consumer attention given to Apple Computer's iTunes service serves only to demonstrate how badly the entertainment industry has addressed young people, Mr. Ridouan said.

"The price for downloaded music is set at a level that includes the cost of making and shipping a compact disc," Mr. Ridouan said, pointing to the similarity of music prices in shops and online. "You can be certain that the money they saved is not going back to the artists."

Mr. Ridouan said he was eager and willing to compensate artists, but not at the rate that record companies demanded. As for the amount he can pay, Mr. Ridouan said that for a high school student living with his single mother, he cannot afford much.

"The Internet is a magnificent new way to distribute culture, and why should I be stopped because of my limited means?" Mr. Ridouan said. "The Internet serves my generation the same role as the library did for previous generations."

The solution advocated by Mr. Ridouan is to create a fund, financed by fees from Internet users and Internet service providers, to pay artists based on the popularity of their works, similar to the system used by radio stations.

Legalizing all Internet downloading for a small fee was briefly tagged onto the copyright law in December by the National Assembly, then discarded.

Mr. Ridouan, who intends to study political science in college, said his Audionautes-financed lobbying did not hurt his studies. He has missed some school but has a note from the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, excusing him from class when he meets with government officials.

"There's no need for me to fake notes to skip class ever since I got Sarkozy's written permission," said Mr. Ridouan. "I don't even have the note anymore because my teacher wanted to keep it as a souvenir."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/te...audionaut.html





French Digital Music Copyright Bill Advances
Thomas Crampton

Resisting pressure from business, French lawmakers have moved the country a step closer to a copyright law that would have wide-ranging effects on those selling or listening to digital music.

The Senate passed the bill on Wednesday after amending it to address concerns from companies like Apple that had called it "state-sponsored piracy."

The Senate version of what is being called the iPod bill softens some measures that could have forced Apple to open all music sold from its iTunes Music Store to play on portable devices other than the Apple iPod.

The change is the crucial difference from the version passed in March by the National Assembly.

The National Assembly's version permitted consumers to ask a court to force companies like Apple to let songs bought from iTunes play on other portable devices. The Senate version would accept such appeals only from companies.

The bill would guarantee that tunes could play on multiple devices in a way that preserves some copy protection and respects rights established when the work was purchased. The real-world application of all this to companies like Apple and Sony will come out of committee actions.

The latest vote comes amid global debate over patents and copyrights in a world where instant Internet distribution of perfect digital copies is being blamed for disrupting conventional media business models. "France has adopted an entirely new and unique approach to managing digital music and films that could be a model for other countries to follow," said Jonathan Arber, an analyst in London at Ovum, a consulting firm. "Everyone will be watching the impact six months down the line to see whether consumers or companies have benefited."

Government officials said differences between the versions of the bill would be worked out in the next few weeks, with the law taking force within several months.

Both versions reduce penalties for piracy to the equivalent of a traffic offense; require software makers to give the government details of the inner workings of their programs; and create an agency to rule on important digital copyright issues.

That agency will decide how many times a consumer can copy digital music files for personal use and, in the Senate version, will ensure that music bought from one online service can be played on any device.

"We have nothing to add at this point," Alan Hely, a spokesman for Apple in Europe, said in an e-mail message, "as the discussions and voting continues" until May 30.

Vivendi Universal and Time Warner joined Apple in lobbying against the bill. The government championed the law as a way of encouraging innovation in Internet distribution models and the diversity of offerings.

The law will set France apart from many Western countries, especially the United States, in its positions on copyright law, digital copying and piracy, several critics said.

"This law risks removing all deterrence against piracy," said Olivia Regnier, who represents record labels as the European regional counsel for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. "If you can download 1,000 films and songs and only face a 38-euro fine, that's not much of a penalty."

Software industry lobbyists went further in their criticism.

"This is clearly the worst software law in Europe," said Francisco Mingorance, director of public policy in Europe for the Business Software Alliance, which represents companies like Microsoft and Nokia.

Mr. Mingorance said software companies were worried about the potential of the law to force them to license their proprietary technology and to give the French government the underlying computer code for their copy protection technology.

The agency that would oversee digital copyright issues would take over many decisions now made by companies like Apple or Microsoft.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/te...y/12apple.html





Cheating Bittorrent

Bittorrent is believed to be one of the fairest P2P protocols. The built in tit-for-tat mechanism makes sure that you get what you give. But there are several ways to cheat and exploit bittorrent in order to increase your download speed.

But how vulnerable is Bittorrent?

Nikitas Liogkas, Robert Nelson, Eddie Kohler, Lixia Zhang from the UCLA Computer Science Department, tested three ways to cheat Bittorrent.

1. Download only from seeds
2. Download from fastest peers
3. Advertise false pieces

They conclude from their research:

“BitTorrent appears quite robust against this kind of exploit: selfish peers can sometimes obtain more bandwidth, and honest peers’ download rates suffer slightly in consequence, but we observe no considerable degradation of the system’s quality of service.”

Additionally they propose five mechanisms that they believe will contribute to Bittorrent’s robustness.

1. parallel downloading: maintain parallel interactions with multiple peers; enables adaptivity in dynamic conditions
2. client memory: the torrent client remembers where a piece comes from, and is able to punish cheating peers.
3. problem partitioning: decouple data needs from provided service; prevents manipulation by declaring false info
4. export minimal information: hide exploitable information, who’s a seed for example.
5. keep the network connected: random choice in optimistic unchoking prevents clustering and starvation

Link to the article for more info: pdf | html





Lawsuits Filed By Spector Can Proceed
AP

Record producer Phil Spector lost a bid Friday to delay court proceedings on lawsuits involving his former assistant until his murder trial is over.

Superior Court Judge Lee Smalley Edmon ruled that since Spector was first to file suit against Michelle Blaine he will have to live with the consequences of that decision.

Spector claimed in his lawsuit that Blaine siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from his accounts.

Blaine then countersued, claiming she never stole from Spector but was given large amounts of money to keep her from testifying against him in the death of actress Lana Clarkson.

Among Blaine's allegations was sexual harassment.

Spector, 66, is seeking repayment of money along with unspecified damages.

His murder trial was recently postponed until January. He has pleaded not guilty and is free on $1 million bail.

Spector's lawyers argued that the filing of Blaine's cross-complaint could allow prosecutors to obtain information for his criminal case that might not otherwise be available.

The judge suggested that Spector has the option of dismissing the civil suit if he wants to avoid discovery procedures.

A May 24 hearing was scheduled on a motion by Blaine to take Spector's deposition.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...05-12-21-26-30





Supreme Court Orders New Hearing for eBay
AP

The Supreme Court sided with eBay in a patent fight Monday, ordering a lower court to reconsider whether the Web giant should have been barred from using contested technology.

Justices, in an unanimous opinion, said that judges have flexibility to consider several factors before they impose court orders barring continued use of a technology after juries find a patent violation.

A judge must now consider whether an injunction is appropriate in the case involving eBay and a small company, MercExchange.

A jury sided with MercExchange, finding that its business method patents had been infringed, and awarded the patent-holder $35 million. A trial judge later reduced the award by $5.5 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...n er=homepage





Sony to Unveil First Blu-Ray Laptop
AP

Sony Corp. will release the first laptop capable of playing, editing and recording next-generation, high-definition videos in the Blu-ray DVD format.

Sony, which led the development of the Blu-ray format, said Tuesday the new VAIO AR Premium model will be available this summer for $3,500. Besides the Blu-ray DVD drive, the entertainment-oriented notebook computer features a 17-inch display, an integrated TV tuner, and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Center Edition operating system.

Blu-ray is one of two competing high-definition DVD formats that displays video in 1080p - the sharpest in high-definition quality.

The other next-generation format is HD DVD. Toshiba Corp., one of the HD DVD format's main developers, last week introduced the first laptop to play HD DVD discs. But unlike the Sony laptop, the $3,000 Toshiba laptop's HD DVD drive cannot record or edit in high-definition.

Sony's new laptop will be among a number of other Blu-ray compatible products Sony plans to begin selling later this year.

Adding to a growing crop of ultracompact notebooks in the computer industry, Sony also will introduce Tuesday a laptop that weighs 1.2 pounds and is roughly the size of a 4x6 photo print but is 1.5-inch thick.

The VAIO UX Micro PC features the Windows XP operating system, a 4.5-inch screen, a slide-out keyboard, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless technologies, and built-in cameras. It will be available in July at $1,800, Sony said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





TDK Develops 200GB Recordable Blu-Ray Disc With Six Layers

TDK Japan has developed a prototyped recordable Blu-ray disc with a stunning capacity of 200GB. This new disc boasts eight times the capacity of a single layer Blu-ray disc. TDK has used a signal processing scheme to increase the capacity per layer to 33GB. The prototyped medium has a layered structure in which the recording layers are formed from the bottom L0 layer to top L5 layer, and a 0.1 mm cover layer and a hard coat layer to protect the medium from scratches and dirt are stacked on these recording layers. As for the L0 layer, an inorganic material, i.e. a commercialized Si-Cu alloy layer is used. For the L1 to L5 layers, a novel inorganic material consisting of bismuth peroxide and germanium oxide is employed. When bismuth peroxide is irradiated with laser light, oxygen is deposited to form air bubbles when the temperature reaches 690 K. The presence or absence of these air bubbles is detected based on the difference in reflectance of the laser light.

Germanium oxide has a property that it can freely change the transmittance of the recording layers in the range between 73 and 88% by varying its concentration. Thus, the transmittance of the recording layers--a key factor in stacking technology--can be precisely set, which has led to the realization of six layers.
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/...six_layers.php





Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space
Katherine Shrader

A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil.

In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission.

He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he'd seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business.

"This was kind of a direct payback to the taxpayers for the investment made in this agency over the years, even though in its original design it was intended for foreign intelligence purposes," Clapper said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press.

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

After last year's hurricanes, the agency had an unusually public face. It set up mobile command centers that sprung out of the backs of Humvees and provided imagery for rescuers and hurricane victims who wanted to know the condition of their homes. Victims would provide their street address and the NGA would provide a satellite photo of their property. In one way or another, some 900 agency officials were involved.

Spy agencies historically avoided domestic operations out of concern for Pentagon regulations and Reagan-era executive order, known as 12333, that restricted intelligence collection on American citizens and companies. Its budget, like all intelligence agencies, is classified.

On Clapper's watch of the last five years, his agency has found ways to expand its mission to help prepare security at Super Bowls and political conventions or deal with natural disasters, such as hurricanes and forest fires.

With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up - and stores. Many are increasingly skeptical of intelligence agencies with recent revelations about the Bush administration's surveillance on phone calls and e-mails.

Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite "snapshot" from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one meter level, which is 3.3 feet.

Clapper says his agency only does big pictures, so concerns about using the NGA's foreign intelligence apparatus at home doesn't apply.

"We are not trying to examine an individual dwelling, for example, because what our mission is normally going to be is looking at large areas," he said. "It doesn't really affect or threaten anyone's privacy or civil liberties when you are looking at a large collective area."

When asked what additional powers he'd ask Congress for, he said, "I wouldn't."

His agency also handles its historic mission: regional threats, such as Iran and North Korea; terrorist hideouts; and tracking drug trade. "Everything and everybody has to be some place," he said.

He considers his brand of intelligence a chess match. "There are sophisticated nation states that have a good understanding of our surveillance capabilities," including Iran, he said. "What we have to do is counter that" by taking advantage of anomalies or sending spy planes and satellites over more frequently.

Adversaries who hide their most important facilities underground is a trend the agency has to work at, he said.

NGA was once a stepchild of the intelligence community. But Clapper said it has come into its own and become an equal partner with the other spy agencies, such as the CIA.

Experience-wise, the agency is among the youngest of the spy agencies. About 40 percent of the agency's analyst have been hired in the last five years.

"They are very inexperienced, and that's just fine. They don't have any baggage," said Clapper, who retires next month as the longest serving agency director. "The people that we are getting now are bright, computer literate. ... That is not something I lie awake and worry about."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors for Border Control
Eric Lipton

The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.

Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan — like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment — the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States.

It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders.

Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders — a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers.

"This is an unusual invitation," the deputy secretary of homeland security, Michael Jackson, told contractors this year at an industry briefing, just before the bidding period for this new contract started. "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."

The effort comes as the Senate voted Wednesday to add hundreds of miles of fencing along the border with Mexico. The measure would also prohibit illegal immigrants convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors from any chance at citizenship.

The high-tech plan being bid now has many skeptics, who say they have heard a similar refrain from the government before.

"We've been presented with expensive proposals for elaborate border technology that eventually have proven to be ineffective and wasteful," Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said at a hearing on the Secure Border Initiative program last month. "How is the S.B.I. not just another three-letter acronym for failure?"

President Bush, among others, said he was convinced that the government could get it right this time.

"We are launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history," Mr. Bush said in his speech from the Oval Office on Monday.

Under the initiative, the Department of Homeland Security and its Customs and Border Protection division will still be charged with patrolling the 6,000 miles of land borders.

The equipment these Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them — all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job.

More Border Patrol agents are part of the answer. The Bush administration has committed to increasing the force from 11,500 to about 18,500 by the time the president leaves office in 2008. But simply spreading this army of agents out evenly along the border or extending fences in and around urban areas is not sufficient, officials said.

"Boots on the ground is not really enough," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday at a news conference that followed Mr. Bush's announcement to send as many as 6,000 National Guard troops to the border.

The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear. That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Attached to the ground by a cable, the airship can hover overhead and automatically monitor any movement night or day. (One downside: it cannot operate in high winds.)

Northrop Grumman is considering offering its Global Hawk, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a wingspan nearly as wide as a Boeing 737, that can snoop on movement along the border from heights of up to 65,000 feet, said Bruce Walker, a company executive.

Closer to earth, Northrop might deploy a fleet of much smaller, unmanned planes that could be launched from a truck, flying perhaps just above a group of already detected immigrants so it would be harder for them to scatter into the brush and disappear.

Raytheon has a package of sensor and video equipment used to protect troops in Iraq that monitors an area and uses software to identify suspicious objects automatically, analyzing and highlighting them even before anyone is sent to respond.

These same companies have delivered these technologies to the Pentagon, sometimes with uneven results.

Each of these giant contractors — Lockheed Martin alone employs 135,000 people and had $37.2 billion in sales last year, including an estimated $6 billion to the federal government — is teaming up with dozens of smaller companies that will provide everything from the automated cameras to backup energy supplies that will to keep this equipment running in the desert.

The companies have studied every mile of border, drafting detection and apprehension strategies that vary depending on the terrain. In a city, for example, an immigrant can disappear into a crowd in seconds, while agents might have hours to apprehend a group walking through the desert, as long as they can track their movement.

If the system works, Border Patrol agents will know before they encounter a group of intruders approximately how many people have crossed, how fast they are moving and even if they might be armed.

Without such information, said Kevin Stevens, a Border Patrol official, "we send more people than we need to deal with a situation that wasn't a significant threat," or, in a worst case, "we send fewer people than we need to deal with a significant threat, and we find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned."

The government's track record in the last decade in trying to buy cutting-edge technology to monitor the border — devices like video cameras, sensors and other tools that came at a cost of at least $425 million — is dismal.

Because of poor contract oversight, nearly half of video cameras ordered in the late 1990's did not work or were not installed. The ground sensors installed along the border frequently sounded alarms. But in 92 percent of the cases, they were sending out agents to respond to what turned out to be a passing wild animal, a train or other nuisances, according to a report late last year by the homeland security inspector general.

A more recent test with an unmanned aerial vehicle bought by the department got off to a similarly troubling start. The $6.8 million device, which has been used in the last year to patrol a 300-mile stretch of the Arizona border at night, crashed last month.

With Secure Border, at least five so-called system integrators — Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop, as well as Boeing and Ericsson — are expected to submit bids.

The winner, which is due to be selected before October, will not be given a specific dollar commitment. Instead, each package of equipment and management solutions the contractor offers will be evaluated and bought individually.

"We're not just going to say, 'Oh, this looks like some neat stuff, let's buy it and then put it on the border,' "Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Skepticism persists. A total of $101 million is already available for the program. But on Wednesday, when the House Appropriations Committee moved to approve the Homeland Security Department's proposed $32.1 billion budget for 2007, it proposed withholding $25 million of $115 million allocated next year for the Secure Border contracting effort until the administration better defined its plans.

"Unless the department can show us exactly what we're buying, we won't fund it," Representative Rogers said. "We will not fund programs with false expectations."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/wa...rtner=homepage





US Files Motion To Intervene In AT&T Secrets Case

The U.S. government filed a motion on Saturday to intervene and seek dismissal of a lawsuit by a civil liberties group against AT&T Inc. over a federal program to monitor U.S. communications.

The suit filed in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California accuses AT&T of unlawful collaboration with the National Security Agency in its Surveillance program to intercept telephone and e-mail communications between the United States and people linked to al Qaeda and affiliated organizations.

The class-action suit was filed by San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of AT&T customers in January -- before reports this week that AT&T and two other phone companies were secretly helping the government compile a massive database of phone calls made in the United States.

In its motion seeking intervention, posted on the court's Web site, the government said the interests of the parties in the lawsuit "may well be in the disclosure of state secrets" in their effort to present their claims or defenses.

"Only the United States is in a position to protect against the disclosure of information over which it has asserted the state secrets privilege, and the United States is the only entity properly positioned to explain why continued litigation of the matter threatens the national security," said the motion, dated May 12.

A hearing is scheduled for June 21 before federal Judge Vaughn Walker.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has said in court filings that a former AT&T technician had approached the group in January to share details of the company's role in the surveillance program.

The revelation in December that the NSA was eavesdropping inside the United States without warrants on international calls and e-mails of terrorism suspects sparked an uproar.

On Thursday, USA Today reported that the NSA, helped by AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp., was secretly collecting phone records of tens of millions of people, and using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.

U.S. President George W. Bush denied the government was "mining and trolling through" the personal lives of Americans.
http://yahoo.reuters.com/stocks/Quot...06856&symbol=T.





Court Deals AT&T a Setback
Ryan Singel

A federal judge Wednesday shot down telecom giant AT&T's efforts to recover and suppress internal documents that a former AT&T technician says demonstrate the company's collusion in illegal government surveillance.
Inside the Secret Room

The documents, portions of which were published Wednesday by Wired News, are Exhibit A in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The EFF alleges that the company illegally turned over vast troves of phone-record data to the National Security Agency, and has wired its internet backbone to secret NSA surveillance equipment.

Last week the government formally asked U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to throw out the case for alleged national security reasons, a motion now scheduled to be heard June 23.

In the standing-room-only hearing Wednesday, the judge rejected the EFF's request that the documents provided to the organization by former company technician Mark Klein be unsealed in court records, and ordered EFF not to share the papers with anyone.

"It appears that there is a possibility that the documents contain significant trade secrets or proprietary information belonging to AT&T," said Walker.

But he rejected AT&T's motion asking the court to order EFF to return the documents to the company, noting, "Plaintiffs say they got the documents innocently, therefore, their possession is in no way improper and in no way illegal."

He also rejected AT&T's request for the judge to enjoin Klein from talking about the documents or providing them to others, saying that AT&T could sue the whistle-blower on its own.

The documents appear to show AT&T tapping into 16 fiber-optic cables connecting the company's WorldNet internet backbone to other internet service providers, and routing the traffic to a sophisticated data-analysis system made by California-based Narus.

In a written statement accompanying the pages, whistle-blower Klein says the Narus system was installed in a secret locked room inside an AT&T switching center in San Francisco that was off-limits to anyone without NSA clearance.

In court, AT&T attorney Bradford Berenson cast his client as a hapless victim, unable to defend itself while maintaining its national security obligations.

"The problem here is not just that the plaintiffs can't make their case, but that the defendants can't defend themselves," said Berenson, noting that some perfectly legal instruments of surveillance, like Patriot Act national security letters, come with binding secrecy requirements.

"AT&T is an innocent bystander, and the fight should be between private parties and the government that started these (surveillance) programs and ran them," Berenson told the court.

Walker made clear that he wants the case to move forward quickly -- so fast that EFF attorney Cindy Cohn resorted to begging for extra time to file briefs.

One of those briefs is due Monday, advising the judge on how he should approach reading the government's classified arguments as to why the case should be dismissed.

The classified filing is currently in Washington, D.C., but can be flown under protective custody to San Francisco for the judge's inspection, according to Justice Department lawyer Carl Nichols.

Nichols told the judge that the extraordinary secrecy was necessary, because unlike a hypothetical case about the disclosure of a fighter jet weapon design -- where the government can admit the design exists -- "this case involves national intelligence sources and methods."

"To tell you those things in open court where they will be in the public record is to disclose the very thing we are trying to protect," Nichols said.

Walker asked some pointed and skeptical questions about whether the nearly all-powerful state secrets privilege, a holdover from English common law, trumps the Constitution and Congress.

"It is an inherent Article II (executive branch) power which unfortunately trumps a private litigant's right to his day in court," Nichols said.

Walker's ruling on the government's motion to dismiss the case for national security reasons could come as early as the June 23 hearing, but his ruling either way is nearly certain to trigger an immediate appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

That's one reason the EFF asked the judge to first hear its motion for a preliminary injunction since, as Cohn argued, the "massive flow of information will continue during the appeal."

Walker called that "putting the cart before the horse," and will first rule on the government's and AT&T's motions to dismiss the case.

After the hearing, Klein addressed reporters on the courthouse steps.

"As you all know there is a big public debate going on about government surveillance," Klein said in a voice barely above a whisper. "I believe I have significant information to bring to the table, and I have been struggling for some time to bring it out in the light of day. And that's all I wanted to do -- is bring it out so that people can examine it and decide for themselves."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70916-0.html





Telecoms face billion dollar wiretap lawsuits: report

Verizon Sued For $50 Billion Over Wiretap Program
Leslie Wines

AT&T Corp., BellSouth Corp and Verizon Telecommunications are facing lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages for the decision to turn over calling records to the government, the New York Times reported Saturday.

A federal lawsuit was filed in Manhattan yesterday seeking as much as $50 billion in civil damages against Verizon on behalf of its subscribers.

Under telecommunications law, the phone companies are at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a court order, according to Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University

The telecommunications companies allegedly complied with an effort by the National Security Agency to build a vast database of calling records, without warrants, to increase its surveillance capabilities after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon Communications have insisted that they were vigilant about their customers' privacy, but did not directly address their cooperation with the government effort, the report said.

Verizon said it gave customer information to a government agency "only where authorized by law for appropriately defined and focused purposes," but declined comment on any relationship with a national security program that was "highly classified."

"Verizon does not, and will not, provide any government agency unfettered access to our customer records or provide information to the government under circumstances that would allow a fishing expedition," the company said in a statement on Friday.

A fourth telecommunications company, Qwest Communications International Inc. (Q: news, board) , rebuffed government requests for the company's calling records after 9/11 because of "a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," according to a statement released by an attorney on behalf of the company's former chief executive, Joseph Nacchio.

The legal experts said consumers could sue the phone service providers under communications privacy legislation that dates back to the 1930s. Relevant laws include the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, and a variety of provisions of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, including the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986.

The law governing the release of phone company data has been modified repeatedly to grapple with changing computer and communications technologies that have increasingly bedeviled law enforcement agencies, the report said.

Wiretapping has been tightly regulated by these laws. But in general, the laws have set a lower legal standard required by the government to obtain what has traditionally been called pen register or trap-and-trace information -- calling records obtained when intelligence and police agencies attached a specialized device to subscribers' telephone lines.

The restrictions still hold, said a range of legal scholars, in the face of new computer databases with decades' worth of calling records, according to the newspaper.
http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom...04BB4FAADD9%7D





In Statement, BellSouth Denies Giving Information To National Security Agency
Leslie Cauley

BellSouth said in a statement that it doesn't contract with the National Security Agency to supply customer calling information.

"As a result of media reports that BellSouth provided massive amounts of customer calling information under a contract with the NSA," it said Monday, "the company conducted an internal review to determine the facts. Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA."

Last Thursday, USA TODAY reported that the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon, people with direct knowledge of the program said. One of the nation's major telecommunication companies, Qwest, declined to participate, the story said, a fact confirmed Friday by Herbert Stern, the lawyer for former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio.

USA TODAY first contacted BellSouth five weeks ago in reporting the story on the NSA's program. The night before the story was published, USA TODAY described the story in detail to BellSouth, and the company did not challenge the newspaper's account. The company did issue a statement, saying: "BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority."

In an interview Monday, BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher said the company was not asking for a correction from USA TODAY.

Asked to define "bulk customer calling records," Battcher said: "We are not providing any information to the NSA, period." He said he did not know whether BellSouth had a contract with the Department of Defense, which oversees the NSA.

Spokesmen for AT&T and Verizon said Monday night they had no comment on BellSouth's statement. Verizon spokesman Bob Varettoni referred to a company statement Friday that said Verizon doesn't "provide any government agency unfettered access to our customer records or provide information to the government under circumstances that would allow a fishing expedition."

Last week, Verizon said it had complied with relevant laws and was "committed" to customer privacy. San Antonio-based AT&T said it respects customers' privacy but has "an obligation to assist law enforcement and other government agencies responsible for protecting the public welfare."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...a_x.htm?csp=34





Cheney Pushed To Widen Eavesdropping

Vice President Dick Cheney argued in the weeks after the September 11 attacks that the National Security Agency should intercept domestic telephone calls and e-mails without warrants as part of its war on terrorism, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions.

Cheney and his top legal adviser, David Addington, believed the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take such sweeping measures to defend the country, The newspaper said, citing two senior intelligence officials who spoke anonymously.

NSA lawyers opposed the move and insisted that any eavesdropping without warrants should be limited to communications into and out of the country, a position that ultimately prevailed, the Times said.

Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA at the time designed the eavesdropping program and is certain to face questions about it when he appears at a Senate hearing on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hayden persuaded wary NSA officers to accept the eavesdropping program and sold the White House on its limits, the Times said.

The newspaper said accounts by the two intelligence officials, as well as others it interviewed, placed Hayden as the man in the middle as President George W. Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act to prevent more attacks.

While intelligence agency lawyers and officials were concerned with avoiding accusations of spying on Americans, Cheney and Addington thought eavesdropping without warrants "could be done and should be done" if people suspected of links to Al Qaeda made calls inside the United States, one of the intelligence officials told the Times.

Another official described the debate as "very healthy," with Cheney's staff "pushing and pushing, and it was up to the NSA lawyers to draw a line and say absolutely not."

Cheney's spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, declined to discuss the deliberations about the classified program and said: "As the administration, including the vice president, has said, this is terrorist surveillance, not domestic surveillance ... " the Times reported.

People speaking for the NSA and for Hayden also declined to comment, the newspaper said.
http://today.reuters.com/News/newsAr...USA-CHENEY.xml





The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool
Robert Poe

The equipment that technician Mark Klein learned was installed in the National Security Agency's "secret room" inside AT&T's San Francisco switching office isn't some sinister Big Brother box designed solely to help governments eavesdrop on citizens' internet communications.

Rather, it's a powerful commercial network-analysis product with all sorts of valuable uses for network operators. It just happens to be capable of doing things that make it one of the best internet spy tools around.

"Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls."

Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It's renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps.

Internet companies can install the analyzers at every entrance and exit point of their networks, at their "cores" or centers, or both. The analyzers communicate with centralized "logic servers" running specialized applications. The combination can keep track of, analyze and record nearly every form of internet communication, whether e-mail, instant message, video streams or VOIP phone calls that cross the network.

Brasil Telecom and several other Brazilian phone companies are using Narus products to charge each other for VOIP calls they send over one another's IP networks. Internet companies in China and the Middle East use them to block VOIP calls altogether.

But even before the product's alleged role in the NSA's operations emerged, its potential as a surveillance tool was not lost on corporate America.

In December, VeriSign, also of Mountain View, chose Narus' product as the backbone of its lawful-intercept-outsourcing service, which helps network operators comply with court-authorized surveillance orders from law enforcement agencies. A special Narus lawful-intercept application does this spying with ease, sorting through torrents of IP traffic to pick out specific messages based on a targeted e-mail address, IP address or, in the case of VOIP, phone number.

"We needed their fast packet-detection and inspection capability," says VeriSign Vice President Raj Puri. "They do it with specialized software that can isolate packets for a specific target."

Narus has little control over how its products are used after they're sold. For example, although its lawful-intercept application has a sophisticated system for making sure the surveillance complies with the terms of a warrant, it's up to the operator whether to type those terms into the system, says Bannerman.

That legal eavesdropping application was launched in February 2005, well after whistle-blower Klein allegedly learned that AT&T was installing Narus boxes in secure, NSA-controlled rooms in switching centers around the country. But that doesn't mean the government couldn't write its own code to do the dirty work. Narus even offers software-development kits to customers.

"Our product is designed to comply (with) all of the laws in all of the countries we ship to," says Bannerman. "Many of our customers have built their own applications. We have no idea what they do."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70914-0.html





US Could Access EU Data Retention Information
Helena Spongenberg

US authorities can get access to EU citizens' data on phone calls, sms' and emails, giving a recent EU data-retention law much wider-reaching consequences than first expected, reports Swedish daily Sydsvenskan.

The EU data retention bill, passed in February after much controversy and with implementation tabled for late 2007, obliges telephone operators and internet service providers to store information on who called who and who emailed who for at least six months, aimed at fighting terrorism and organised crime.

A week later on 2-3 March, EU and US representatives met in Vienna for an informal high level meeting on freedom, security and justice where the US expressed interest in the future storage of information.

The US delegation to the meeting "indicated that it was considering approaching each [EU] member state to ensure that the data collected on the basis of the recently adopted Directive on data retention be accessible to them," according to the notes of the meeting.

Representatives from the Austrian EU presidency and from the European Commission said that these data were "accessible like any other data on the basis of the existing ... agreements" the notes said.

The EU representatives added that the commission would convene an expert meeting on the issue.

Under current agreements, if the FBI, for example, is interested in a group of EU citizens from a member state who are involved in an investigation, the bureau can ask for help with a prosecutor in that member state.

The national prosecutor then requests telephone operators and internet service providers for information, which is then passed on to the FBI.

This procedure opens the way for US authorities to get access under the EU data-retention law, according to the Swedish newspaper.

In the US itself meanwhile, fury has broken out in the US congress after reports revealed that the Bush administration covertly collected domestic phone records of tens of millions of US citizens since the attacks in New York on 11 September 2001.

President George Bush did not deny the allegations in a television statement last night, but insisted that his administration had not broken any laws.
http://euobserver.com/9/21580





Another Arrest in Webcam Pornography Case
Jeremy W. Peters

A 28-year-old computer consultant was arrested here Monday for his suspected involvement in the case of a California teenager who used a Webcam to start his own online pornography business.

The consultant, Ken Gourlay of Detroit, is being held on a $500,000 cash-only bail and faces 10 felony charges, including criminal sexual conduct, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and distributing child pornography. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

The arrest of Mr. Gourlay signals a new front in the government's response to the revelation that minors have been using Webcams to run their own child pornography Web sites, one that could have a crippling effect on this once-burgeoning business.

Justin Berry, now 19, has accused Mr. Gourlay of luring him to Michigan when he was 13, molesting him and setting up a Web site that charged a monthly fee for videos of him performing various sex acts.

In December, a front-page article in The New York Times described Mr. Berry's involvement in the underworld of Webcam child pornography, and the case has generated national interest. Last month, Congress held hearings on the issue.

Mike Cox, the Michigan attorney general, said Monday that after reading the Times article and learning that Mr. Berry had been abused in Michigan, he began investigating Mr. Gourlay.

Last week, law enforcement officials searched Mr. Gourlay's home in Detroit and seized multiple computers. One of them, state officials said, had thousands of pornographic images on it. That computer was owned by Edward Mulak II, 24, Mr. Gourlay's roommate, who was arrested on charges of possessing child pornography, they said.

"It's a parent's worst nightmare," Mr. Cox said. "An adult reaches into a home and pulls the child out."

The Times article on Mr. Berry revealed that at least hundreds of teenagers had created sites similar to his, with help from Web hosting companies that accept a lucrative cut of their revenue in exchange for access to the servers needed to operate the site. That is the service Mr. Berry said was provided to him for some of his earliest sites by Mr. Gourlay and his Web hosting company, Chain Communications.

The action by the Michigan attorney general has made clear that law enforcement officials could view a Web hosting company as being in the business of promoting and distributing child pornography. If such companies refused to provide support to child Webcam sites, most of them would probably vanish.

At the Congressional hearing, Mr. Gourlay took the Fifth Amendment and declined to comment. His lawyer, James C. Howarth, could not be reached on Monday.

Mr. Berry has identified as many as 1,500 men who gave him money and gifts to perform on camera. In January, one of the men, Gregory J. Mitchel of Virginia, pleaded guilty to four felony counts involving the production, sale, distribution and possession of child pornography.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/us/16porn.html





Do You Own Songs Bought Online? Well, Sort Of
Duncan Martell

Like millions around the world, you have an iPod, the market-leading digital music player made by Apple Computer Inc. and have spent perhaps a few hundred dollars buying songs from the company's iTunes music store.

But do you really own the tunes? Whether you do, however, depends on how you define ownership.

"Owning implies control and if you bought the tracks on iTunes you don't have complete control," said Rob Enderle, president of market researcher the Enderle Group.

Those songs you bought online from Apple play just fine, of course, so long you do so on the company's iTunes digital jukebox software, on an iPod, burn a CD (you can only burn the same "playlist," or collection of songs, seven times), or stream them wirelessly to your stereo using another Apple gizmo.

But Apple's FairPlay digital rights management, or DRM, software prevents you from listening to those purchased songs on a music player from Dell Inc., Creative, Sony, or others. The same thing goes for songs you've imported to your computer from CDs you already own.

The DRM software is Apple's way of preventing piracy and is a large part of the reason why the recording industry has so warmly embraced the iTunes Music Store.

"A lot of people would argue it's the closest thing you're going to get other than buying a CD," said analyst Mike McGuire of market research firm Gartner of the restrictions Apple and others place on music bought online.

To be sure, Apple rivals have their own DRM technology to protect against piracy, such as Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp., but none have been as successful so far as Apple. The Cupertino, California-based company has a 70-percent market share in the United States for digital music players, and higher than that for music purchased online.

Beyond just having songs you bought from iTunes "trapped" on the iPod and in iTunes, it's also not a snap to move songs from an iPod - whether you bought them or initially pulled them off a CD - back up to a computer. While it's possible to do so, Apple doesn't make it easy, right off the bat, because it's trying to discourage piracy.

"They do it to lock you in," Enderle said, noting an example of if you spent $500 on buying songs from iTunes. "You now have a $500 switching cost to pull out of iTunes."

But there are a number of different and perfectly legal reasons why you'd want to be able to do that.

For example, your computer suffers a disastrous crash, you lose data that includes your music library, and you want to recover your lost music library from your iPod and return it to your now-repaired computer.

There are programs that let you move songs from the iPod, up to a computer - such as Senuti and PodWorks - but, for the average user, it may be more than he or she is up for. There are some ways around companies' DRM technology, but those are far trickier to use and Microsoft and others frequently plug holes in their software to prevent converting DRM-protected songs into unprotected MP3 files.

As for how complicated it is to get around DRM protection, consider this quote from a Website: "Microsoft's DRM is actually, for a change, really well thought out. The XML content header at the top of every protected WMA file just can't be changed because it's digitally signed using either ECC or RSA. The same thing goes for the actual license files and corresponding keys."

That's language that is probably not readily understood by the average consumer.

"The average consumer hasn't run into the restrictions" that the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Sony have placed on online music purchases, McGuire said. "Certainly there's some interest in Apple wanting people to return to the iTunes store but these restrictions are really due to the rights holders and the labels."
http://yahoo.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Russian MP3 Sales Site 'More Popular In UK Than Napster'
Tony Smith

A Russian company labelled by the music industry as as an "unlawful" operation was nonetheless second only to iTunes as the favoured destination of UK digital music buyers during April 2006, figures from UK-based market watcher XTN Data reveal.

According to XTN, Apple's iTunes Music Store accounted for 44 per cent of music download purchases in the UK last month. AllofMP3.com came in second, with a 14 per cent market share. That puts it ahead of Napster (eight per cent), Wippit (six per cent) and MSN (six per cent) among the nation's top-five digital music suppliers.

XTN's figures are based on a regular poll of 1,000 British music buyers, it said. The methodology chosen highlights consumer activity rather than industry-supplied sales figures. Because of AllofMP3.com's uncertain legal status, it's generally not included in 'official', music industry-sourced statistics. Indeed, XTN has only recent begun counting use of the site in survey responses.

But whatever AllofMP3.com's legal status, XTN's Greig Harper, told us today, crucially a significant number of British digital music buyers are purchasing music from the Russian site.

AllofMP3.com first came to UK music consumers' attention in 2004. The site claims legality through a licence agreement struck between its parent company and two organisations, the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, and the Rightholders Federation for Collective Copyright Management of Works Used Interactively. Under Russian law, the licence permits the company to sell any song in any format, the site claims, without necessarily first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

That, says the music industry, puts the site beyond the pale. But while the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is certainly keeping its eye on the site, it has yet to take any direct action against it. Last year, it made a formal complaint to the Russian authorities, only to see Moscow prosecutors drop the case because a loophole in the country's copyright laws, which are geared toward the protection of content of physical media.

Despite the controversy, XTN's numbers show a good proportion of Britain's downloaders are using AllofMP3.com, which charges not by the track but the size of the download. Users can download songs in a variety of formats and at a range of bitrates. The higher the level of compression, the lower the audio quality, but the more you can download for the same amount of money. Typically, a four-minute song encoded at 192Kbps in the MP3 format costs just $0.11. No wonder the site is popular the same costs $0.99 on iTunes and other commercial music services.

How much of the 11 cents makes it back to the artist, however, is open to question, not matter how legal the site's sales may be.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05...wnload_demand/





In Our Post-PC Era, Apple's Device Model Beats the PC Way
Walter S. Mossberg

For many years, there have been two models of how to make computers and other digital devices. One is the component model, championed by Microsoft. The other is the end-to-end model, championed by Apple.

In the component model, many companies make hardware and software that run on a standard platform, creating inexpensive commodity devices that don't always work perfectly together, but get the job done. In the end-to-end model, one company designs both the hardware and software, which work smoothly together, but the products cost more and limit choice.

In the first war between these models, the war for dominance of the personal-computer market, Microsoft's approach won decisively. Aided by efficient assemblers like Dell, and by corporate IT departments employed to integrate the components, Microsoft's component-based Windows platform crushed Apple's end-to-end Macintosh platform.

But in the post-PC era we're in today, where the focus is on things like music players, game consoles and cellphones, the end-to-end model is the early winner. Tightly linking hardware, software and Web services propelled Apple to a huge success with its iPod. Microsoft, meanwhile, has struggled to make its component model work on these devices and, in a telling sign, is using the Apple end-to-end model itself in its Xbox game-console business. Now, Apple is working on other projects built on the same end-to-end model as the iPod: a media-playing cellphone and a home-media hub.

The jury is still out on whether the end-to-end model will prevail in the long term. Many at Microsoft, and some outside analysts as well, believe the new devices will eventually succumb to the component model, and that Apple's success with the iPod will fade, just as its early dominance of the PC market did. Apple officials say history won't repeat itself if the company continues to make great products and avoid the business blunders committed by its past management.

I think the end-to-end model can prevail this time, both for Apple and other companies. Consumers want choice and low prices. But they also crave the kind of simplicity and integration that the end-to-end model delivers best.

Sure, you can get more variety in music players and in online music services if you opt for the Microsoft-based music instead of the iPod system. But the iPod, Apple's iTunes software, and the iTunes Music Store work so well together that users can just relax and enjoy the music. By contrast, the hodgepodge of players, software and online music stores on the Microsoft side frequently have trouble synchronizing between computers and players. Apple sells as many or more songs than the many stores that use Microsoft software.

Critics attack the iPod and iTunes as "closed" and "proprietary," because the songs Apple sells at its iTunes Music Store play only on iPods, and iPods can't play songs purchased from other music stores. But both the iPod and iTunes handle the two most common open audio formats, MP3 and WAV, and the most common open video format, MP4. They work well even if you never buy a song from Apple. And iTunes and the iPod work on Windows computers, not just Macs. So how is that closed?

Even the Mac isn't as closed as its critics charge. It's still designed to work with Apple's own operating system and software. But it can handle all the common files Windows uses, can network with Windows machines, and can use all of the common Windows printers, scanners, keyboards and mice. The Mac gives you the same access to the Internet as Windows. Heck, the newest Macs can even run Windows itself.

You do get a choice of more software with Windows. And that's great for hard-core gamers and users of corporate, or niche, software. But for mainstream users doing typical tasks, the Windows choice advantage is illusory. Mac users can choose among thousands of third-party programs, including multiple Web browsers, word processors and email programs. They can run Mac versions of popular software like Microsoft Office and the Firefox browser. How much more choice do you need?

Microsoft is hedging its bets. It has, in effect, created a little Apple inside Microsoft with the Xbox group. The Xbox team shunned Windows and wrote its own operating system and user interface, and built its own hardware. (The new Xbox was even developed using Macintosh computers.)

Some Microsoft officials dismiss this anomaly by claiming that the game-console business is a special case. But now, Microsoft has assigned the Xbox team to create a portable music player it hopes can knock off the iPod. Why? Because the company is frustrated that the component model, which separates hardware and software, has failed in the music market. It's looking for more integration.

Still, the end-to-end model isn't a lock. If Apple can't keep churning out cool products at reasonable prices, it could crash and burn. Unlike Microsoft, it doesn't have much help from other companies to succeed. But the iPod experience has shown that the PC model may not be best for all digital devices.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





Maintaining your majorities with an easy hack

New Security Glitch Found In Diebold System

Officials say machines have 'dangerous' holes
Ian Hoffman

Elections officials in several states are scrambling to understand and limit the risk from a "dangerous" security hole found in Diebold Election Systems Inc.'s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines.

The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide.

Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways.

"This one is worse than any of the others I've seen. It's more fundamental," said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and veteran voting-system examiner for the state of Iowa.

"In the other ones, we've been arguing about the security of the locks on the front door," Jones said. "Now we find that there's no back door. This is the kind of thing where if the states don't get out in front of the hackers, there's a real threat."

This newspaper is withholding some details of the vulnerability at the request of several elections officials and scientists, partly because exploiting it is so simple and the tools for doing so are widely available.

A Finnish computer expert working with Black Box Voting, a nonprofit organization critical of electronic voting, found the security hole in March after Emery County, Utah, was forced by state officials to accept Diebold touch screens, and a local elections official let the expert examine the machines.

Black Box Voting was to issue two reports today on the security hole, one of limited distribution that explains the vulnerability fully and one for public release that withholds key technical details.

The computer expert, Harri Hursti, quietly sent word of the vulnerability in March to several computer scientists who advise various states on voting systems. At least two of those scientists verified some or all of Hursti's findings. Several notified their states and requested meetings with Diebold to understand the problem.

The National Association of State Elections Directors, the nongovernmental group that issues national-level approvals for voting systems, learned of the vulnerability Tuesday and was weighing its response. States are scheduled to hold primaries in May, June and July.

"Our voting systems board is looking at this issue," said NASED Chairman Kevin Kennedy, a Wisconsin elections official.

"The states are talking among themselves and looking at plans to mitigate this."

California, Pennsylvania and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to "sequester" their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with "trusted" software issued by the state capital. Then elections officials are to keep the machines sealed with tamper-resistant tape until Election Day.

In California, three counties — San Joaquin, Butte and Kern — plan to rely exclusively on Diebold touch screens in their polling places for the June primary.

Nine other counties, including Alameda, Los Angeles and San Diego, will use Diebold touch screens for early voting or for limited, handicapped-accessible voting in their polling places.

California elections officials told those counties Friday that the risk from the vulnerability was "low" and that any vote tampering would be revealed to voters on the paper read-out that prints when they cast their ballots, as well as to elections officials when they recount those printouts for 1 percent of their precincts after the election.

"I think the likelihood of this happening is low," said assistant Secretary of State for elections Susan Lapsley. "It assumes access and control for a lengthy period of time."

But scientists say that is not necessarily true.

Preparations could be made days or weeks beforehand, and the loading of the software could take only a minute or so once the machines are delivered to the polling places. In some cases, machines are delivered several days before an election to schools, churches, homes and other common polling places.

Scientists said Diebold appeared to have opened the hole by making it as easy as possible to upgrade the software inside its machines. The result, said Iowa's Jones, is a violation of federal voting system rules.

"All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design," he said.
http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_3805089





An Example Of Passionate Service From AT&T Wisconsin
Kristian Knutsen

I read with great interest the biggest issue burning up the internets today, a USA Today article about the National Security Agency (NSA) collecting a database of phone records with the assistance of AT&T, Verizon and Bell South. "For the customers of these companies," USA Today reports, "it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made -- across town or across the country -- to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others."

Having been an AT&T Wisconsin customer since it was named SBC, I take this news seriously and immediately thought of two questions I'd like my phone company to answer. Were records of my calls made via AT&T included in data provided to the NSA? If so, did this violate the company's privacy obligations as a service provider?

More importantly, would I be able to get a direct answer from the company?

The adjective Kafkaesque has become hackneyed, but there is no better way to describe my experience trying to get basic answers to my seemingly simple questions.

I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you
The first obvious step was to call AT&T's customer service line. While I was sure the representative wouldn't be able to give me much, I was curious to hear the scripted response the company is dispatching to its concerned customers.

I bypassed the touch-tone directory and was sent immediately into the queue for a human operator. "Due to the extraordinary interest in AT&T services," a recorded voice read, "the estimated wait time is six minutes."

After waiting about four, a man with a southern accent and a pleasant demeanor picked up. Giving him my account details to verify my status as a customer, I asked my question.

Were records of my calls included in the data dumps to the NSA?

"We don't give any information about matters of national security," was his response. Asking again with different wording, the representative replied similarly, saying "any information that we give to the federal government would be related to national security," and therefore he would not say anything more.

Are you saying my customer records are a matter of national security, I asked.

"I couldn't tell you if it was," he said.

All that was missing was the Scottish brogue.

Trying one more time to get something out of the guy, I asked if what he meant was that the company has no response to concerns about this issue by its customers.

"Exactly."

With this channel obviously exhausted, I decided to try another tack.

Local
Jim Maurer is the vice-president of AT&T Wisconsin, a 27-year employee of the regularly-renamed company, and works from an office in downtown Madison. In a late April interview with the State Journal, Maurer said "it's a good time to be in this business" before discussing his career and the ongoing changes in the telecom industry –- particularly the reemergence of Ma Bell.

Right off the bat, he responded to questions as a consummate salesman, promoting AT&T as an institution devoted to serving its customers. "We've always been very focused on our customers," he said. "Now I see us (as) passionate. We always work to satisfy our customers. I see us now doing things that we want our customers to be very satisfied. There's an incremental difference."

Mauer went on to talk about AT&T's ongoing growth, its hope "to be the No. 1 not only communications, but also entertainment company that our customers will ever need," and his beekeeping hobby. Neither the term network neutrality nor its relevance to AT&T's desired business model were mentioned.

Would Maurer be able to satisfy a customer by helping with this question? The short answer is no. As expected, he was fairly difficult to reach, with his phone line jumping quickly to voice mail through much of the afternoon. I was able to reach out and touch base with him eventually, though.

Bringing up the issue of AT&T providing call pattern data to the NSA, Maurer said that he was unfamiliar with the issue, having been busy with other concerns earlier in the day. He would not speak further on the issue, directing me to call Jeff Bentoff, the AT&T Wisconsin spokesperson.

Long-Distance
Based in Milwaukee, Bentoff previously worked as a press secretary for former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist before becoming a governmental affairs spokesperson for SBC, and subsequently AT&T. He, too, would not speak on the matter, saying that he does not speak for the corporation on all issues and would therefore not speak further on anything to do with this matter about AT&T's affairs with the federal government.

Bentoff did punt me up the chain, however, directing me to Walt Sharp.

All around the world...
Sharp, based out of AT&T's corporate headquarters in San Antonio, is a national spokesperson for the company.

Sharp immediately said, "We have a statement, I can give it to you and beyond that I cannot say anything." He immediately emailed me the statement, which read in full:

AT&T has a long history of vigorously protecting customer privacy. Our customers expect, deserve and receive nothing less than our fullest commitment to their privacy.

We also have an obligation to assist law enforcement and other government agencies responsible for protecting the public welfare, whether it be an individual or the security interests of the entire nation.

We prize the trust our customers place in us. If and when AT&T is asked to help, we do so strictly within the law and under the most stringent conditions. Beyond that, we don't comment on matters of national security.

These claims are instantly belied by the actions of Qwest, however, a competing company that did not comply with the NSA's data mining program. As reported in the USA Today:

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order -- or approval under FISA -- to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information -- known as "product" in intelligence circles -- with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.
Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

In other words, the statement provided by Sharp, and in effect provided by AT&T Wisconsin's primary public faces, are little more than a thin, coppery hiss and crackle.

"We're just not going to comment beyond the statement," Sharp said.

Local again
I don't need to be an AT&T customer to have a land line in Madison. There are competitors that offer their services.

One major alternative is TDS, which operates two services in the region under its 'Metrocom' and 'Telecom' banners. The company published a response on its website today addressing this very issue and its customers' concerns of privacy and freedom. The statement, dated May 11, reads:

TDS has a strong policy to protect our customer records and is in fact mandated by the Communications Act, section 222 to protect your records, and we do so with great care. TDS would only assist law enforcement or government agencies when requested via a valid subpoena. When these requests are made we do comply with state and federal laws.

Calls placed outside of our network which connect to one of the carriers that do participate in this program may become part their database, we are unable to restrict this activity. TDS does not have any authority over the other Carriers that complete your call.

We have no further information regarding the NSA program.

This statement doesn't cover all of TDS customers' potential concerns, however. As raised in discussion on TDPF, TDS Metrocom is a Common Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC), and as such leases phone lines from AT&T in order to provide its service. Are TDS customers' records being transmitted by AT&T to the NSA?

TDS spokesperson DeAnne Boegli says no:

TDS Metrocom does lease lines from AT&T. However, we have our own Switch.

Which means that if AT&T is using the Switch to collect data records, which is most likely; then no, our customers' records would not be in the AT&T data.

The data on the call record is held within our own Switch. The Switch is used to complete calls, collect billing and call data. We have our own Switches and do our own billing. Therefore AT&T would not have access, we simply lease the physical line.

If the person you are calling is a Verizon or AT&T customer, then the portion of that call record originating with them may be subject to the data collection.

There's one solution, then, for AT&T Wisconsin customers who are not satisfied with their service.

Representation
In statements issued today addressing this latest in a long train of abuses and usurpations, Sen. Russ Feingold calls for further information, while Sen. Herb Kohl states "the pattern troubles me and raises many grave questions."

Tammy Baldwin has not released a statement on the matter, and will likely not do so on Friday, according to her spokesperson Jerilyn Goodman. She is, however, an amici to a brief (PDF) filed Wednesday on behalf of 72 Democratic members of the House against the NSA, which "challenges the Bush Administration's illegal warrantless domestic spying," as described by Michigan representative John Conyers.

"We've always been very focused on our customers"
The answer to both of my original questions is certainly yes, as sure as the fact that Dick Cheney resembles Laventry Beria in more ways than one. But there was never any question about that. The real test here was whether or not AT&T representatives would respond directly when queried, both from the perspective of a customer and from someone seeking comment for publication.

All levels of AT&T failed. Its customer service representative, its regional officer, its regional spokesperson and its national spokesperson all begged off. But is anyone surprised to learn that?
http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/node/1482





On the hook for gigabucks

Telcos Could Be Liable For Tens of Billions of Dollars For Illegally Turning Over Phone Records
Peter Swire and Judd Legum

This morning, USA Today reported that three telecommunications companies – AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth – provided “phone call records of tens of millions of Americans” to the National Security Agency. Such conduct appears to be illegal and could make the telco firms liable for tens of billions of dollars. Here’s why:

1. It violates the Stored Communications Act. The Stored Communications Act, Section 2703(c), provides exactly five exceptions that would permit a phone company to disclose to the government the list of calls to or from a subscriber: (i) a warrant; (ii) a court order; (iii) the customer’s consent; (iv) for telemarketing enforcement; or (v) by “administrative subpoena.” The first four clearly don’t apply. As for administrative subpoenas, where a government agency asks for records without court approval, there is a simple answer – the NSA has no administrative subpoena authority, and it is the NSA that reportedly got the phone records.

2. The penalty for violating the Stored Communications Act is $1000 per individual violation. Section 2707 of the Stored Communications Act gives a private right of action to any telephone customer “aggrieved by any violation.” If the phone company acted with a “knowing or intentional state of mind,” then the customer wins actual harm, attorney’s fees, and “in no case shall a person entitled to recover receive less than the sum of $1,000.”

(The phone companies might say they didn’t “know” they were violating the law. But USA Today reports that Qwest’s lawyers knew about the legal risks, which are bright and clear in the statute book.)

3. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act doesn’t get the telcos off the hook. According to USA Today, the NSA did not go to the FISA court to get a court order. And Qwest is quoted as saying that the Attorney General would not certify that the request was lawful under FISA. So FISA provides no defense for the phone companies, either.

In other words, for every 1 million Americans whose records were turned over to NSA, the telcos could be liable for $1 billion in penalties, plus attorneys fees. You do the math.
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/11/telcos-liable/





FBI Searches Home Of Ex-CIA Official
Kevin Bohn

Kyle "Dusty" Foggo resigned this week from his job overseeing the CIA's day-to-day operations.

The FBI searched the home and office of former CIA Executive Director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo on Friday, the CIA said.

Foggo, who was the spy agency's third-ranking official, is part of a broad law enforcement investigation into allegations of corruption, according to officials familiar with the probe.

"The FBI and CIA's Office of Inspector General this morning executed search warrants for his agency workplace and residence," said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck.

"The agency is cooperating fully with the Department of Justice and the FBI."

The Associated Press reported that Foggo has been under investigation by the FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the CIA's inspector general and the U.S. attorney's office in San Diego, California, according to FBI spokeswoman April Langwell in San Diego.

Langwell told the AP that officials -- under a sealed warrant -- searched Foggo's Virginia home and his office at the CIA's Langley, Virginia, campus.

Foggo, who resigned this week from his job overseeing day-to-day CIA operations, is under investigation over his ties to a defense contractor linked to the bribery case against former U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-California.

Cunningham pleaded guilty in November to accepting $2.4 million in bribes. He is serving an eight-year prison sentence.

Intelligence sources said Monday that Foggo had decided to step down after the resignation last week of his longtime friend, CIA Director Porter Goss.

Goss announced he was leaving after what intelligence sources described as a power struggle with National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

Intelligence officials said Foggo's departure would be "pretty standard" because the executive director "tends to follow the CIA director's career trajectory."

Negroponte's chief deputy, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, is President Bush's nominee to replace Goss. (Full story)

The investigations stem from Foggo's relationship with defense contractor Brent Wilkes. The two men have reportedly been friends since childhood.

Legal filings in the Cunningham case allege that an unindicted co-conspirator gave the congressman $525,000 in bribes in return for $6 million in government contracts. Officials have identified the unindicted co-conspirator as Wilkes.

The CIA's inspector general is looking at a contract Wilkes had with the CIA, awarded by Foggo, to see if there was anything improper in the deal.

The contract, valued at $2.4 million, was for providing water and household items to CIA agents operating in war zones such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

In addition, federal law enforcement sources said the probe continues into "outstanding issues" in the Cunningham bribery case and that Foggo is part of those issues.

After reports surfaced last week alleging Wilkes provided Cunningham with limousines and prostitutes at two Washington hotels, Foggo said he had attended poker parties thrown by Wilkes there.

In a statement issued by the CIA, Foggo said he never saw prostitutes at the games and he said any allegation to the contrary would be "false, outrageous and irresponsible."

A CIA spokeswoman said Foggo maintains that any government contracts over which he had responsibility "were properly awarded and administered."

"If he attended occasional card games with friends over the years, Mr. Foggo insists they were that and nothing more," the spokeswoman said.

The FBI is investigating allegations that Wilkes contracted with a Virginia company, Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc., to procure prostitutes for Cunningham and deliver them to the hotels.

Through his attorneys, Chris Baker, CEO of the company, denied wrongdoing.

Shirlington holds a $21.2 million contract to provide shuttle buses and other transportation for the Department of Homeland Security. Baker has a criminal record that includes two felony convictions and a number of misdemeanors.

The Department of Homeland Security said the contract was properly awarded under a Small Business Administration program and that the criminal background of the company's CEO was not an issue.

While department does background checks on drivers, it does not have the resources to investigate company officials, spokesman Larry Orluskie said.

CNN's John Roberts contributed to this report.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/...ggo/index.html





TriWest Turns Identity Theft Crisis Into PR Award

TriWest Healthcare Alliance, the victim of a computer information theft in 2002, has won an award of excellence from the Public Relations Society of America for its campaign against identity theft.

The Phoenix-based company, which administers health care benefits for military personnel and families under a Department of Defense contract, ran a campaign titled "A Call to Arms: Fighting Identity Theft and Winning Legislation."

In announcing its award Friday, TriWest said that over the course of two years, company president and chief executive David McIntyre has become a central figure in a campaign to strengthen laws to allow consumers to better protect themselves against identity theft.

"When the information theft occurred against my company, we discovered that existing state and federal laws protecting consumers from identity theft had been surpassed by the individuals perpetrating the crimes, so I made 'identity theft' my fight," said McIntyre.

McIntyre said that amendments to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which went into effect last year, signaled that part of the task has been accomplished. However, he said, work remains to be done in the areas of penalties for those who perpetuate such crimes and in disclosure requirements for those organizations that are the victims.

Company officials said there have been no confirmed cases that any of the information stolen in the TriWest information theft has been misused.

TriWest provides access to health care for 2.7 million military personnel and their dependents in a 21-state area.
http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/s...ml?t=printable





Patoh Launches P2P Capable Storage Device

Peer-to-peer file sharing taken to another level... of hardware
Purav Sanghani

A company comes up out of the depths of the storage abyss to introduce a device that may get some dirty looks from those against sharing of files the illegal way. Patoh is a single-product-company that has announced the launch of a networked storage device that not only connects to other networked devices but also to a number of peer-to-peer file sharing protocols.

The RochiP2P-250 LinkStation is a 250GB network attached storage device which features a 10/100Mbps LAN interface and a couple USB 2.0 ports for connectivity to a networked environment or a single PC set up. In a sense it is similar to other network attached storage devices but what sets the RochiP2P-250 apart is the ability for it to interface with 6 file sharing protocols including eDonkey2000, Overnet, FastTrack, FileTP, Kad and the ever popular Bittorrent protocol.

The RochiP2P-250 also features a user interface to allow users to share files directly from the device instead of off a networked PC. This means a local PC is not even required to manage the connections and files on the NAS device. Additionally, the device supports managed backups, has a built-in print server, and can be scheduled to shut down.

The RochiP2P-250 has been launched in Europe for now with a price tag of €299, or about $380 USD. Because of the concern of file sharing we may never see
this device in the States, but don't be surprised if you see these show up on eBay.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2209





Connect your hard drive directly to new router

ASUS WL-500g Router Makes Downloads Easy

ASUSTeK Computer introduced the WL-500g Premium wireless router, which included features for convenient downloads and file storage, faster data transfer, broader coverage and smooth media streaming.

Keeps downloading even when you and your computer is gone Download Master, a unique technology found in ASUS wireless solutions. Turn the WL-500g Premium 802.11g router into a wireless storage center by attaching an external hard drive via USB 2.0. Download Master runs independent to the computer system, which means it takes up zero computing resource.

For laptop users, simply set download priorities then disconnect the laptop, and let the WL-500g Premium and Download Master take care of everything. At a remote location the WL-500g Premium also enables download queue setting via the Internet. When users return from home or office, the files they demanded will be neatly arranged in the external hard drive. Supporting BitTorrent, ftp and http protocols, the WL-500g Premium is a complete and versatile solution.

Sharing videos and songs stored through the WL-500g Premium wirelessly take high-speed data transfers and large coverage area. Two technologies take care of this issue.

BroadRange triples wireless signal coverage of 802.11g standard by enhancing reception sensitivity. For best result, the client device should support this technology as well. Enjoy smooth wireless connection in every corner of every environment.

Afterburner Technology increases data transfer speeds of 802.11g standard by 35%. Wireless sharing of digital content is now faster and easier than ever before.

The WL-500g Premium offers a host of Plug-n’-Share functions. Whether it’s hard drives, printers or webcams, just plug them in via the USB 2.0 ports to enable other devices in the network to share their functions.

Plug-n’-Share hard drive is especially worth highlight. It acts as a ftp server, which lets users backup data from their computers and use network neighborhood in Windows to browse external hard drive content. All these functions can be enjoyed without connecting the WL-500g Premium to any computer systems.

The WL-500g Premium supports UPnP protocol and automatically searches and recognises all digital media player in the network. It’s a piece of cake to share music and video stored through the WL-500g Premium to any 802.11b/g-applicable devices via smooth streaming from the external hard drive to digital media players. Bandwidth allocation management is also available to ensure an enjoyable listening and viewing experience without interruption from other bandwidth eating functions.
http://www.cpilive.net/v3/inside.asp...Asus,%20Router





Opposition Grows To US-Canada Border Passport Plan
David Ortiz

Five Canadian provinces and six Northeast U.S. states agreed on Saturday to fight U.S. legislation that would require passports or sophisticated ID cards to enter the United States from Canada.

The new rules to take effect from 2008 -- aimed at tightening security after the September 11 attacks -- would create a bureaucratic nightmare, damage trade and shake up border life, said the U.S. states and Canadian provinces.

"The impact would just be devastating," Quebec Premier Jean Charest told the annual Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers.

"This needs further thought before it's implemented. We need to bring a real sense of urgency to this," he said.

Porous in vast stretches and often invisible, America's 5,500-mile border with Canada is drawing closer scrutiny after President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper agreed in March to work together on border security.

Residents in some towns on the world's longest undefended border have long entered the United States with little more than a wave of a hand or a flash of a driver's license.

Under rules written by the U.S. State and Homeland Security departments designed to implement legislation passed by Congress in 2004, passports or credit card-sized PASS cards with biometric features will be required for anyone crossing into the United States from Canada by land starting on January 1, 2008.

Senior officials from the five Canadian provinces and U.S. border states said the rules could drive a wedge between border communities that are culturally and economically entwined, and strain the world's biggest trading relationship by slowing the $1.1 billion in trade flowing each day across the border.

More than 300,000 people travel between the United States and Canada each day. Only about 20 percent of U.S. citizens and 40 percent of Canadians hold passports, which cost nearly $100. The PASS cards would cost about half that price.

In a draft statement released at the end of the two-day conference, the governors or senior officials from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire, and the premiers of Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island said they would urge the U.S. Congress to delay implementation of the law.

They also agreed to explore other options that would have less negative economic and social impact. Only two states sent governors, although all sent representatives to the conference. Four of the five Canadian provinces sent premiers.

Vermont Gov. James Douglas said the new regulations would make daily life much more difficult along the border where children have long played sports in both countries.

Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri said: "We shouldn't be thickening the border, what we should be doing is working together, the two nations, to protect North America."

"I think a lot of Americans don't fully understand or appreciate what is at stake here," he said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...USA-CANADA.xml





Have You Seen The Da Vinci Code?

Hollywood wonders why Sony hasn't shown anyone its controversial movie.
Kim Masters

Executives at Sony Pictures are anxiously awaiting the Second Coming of Christ.

Tracking suggests that The Da Vinci Code will have a huge opening next weekend, and Sony could get a taste of the lucre pulled in by Mel Gibson's gore-fest (The Passion of the Christ). Presumably the two pictures won't be drawing the same crowds, since one is supposedly as blasphemous as the other was supposedly pious.

Sony's strategy with the film has been unusual in that so far, no outsiders have seen Ron Howard's two-and-a-half-hour opus. Sony has forgone the usual advance press screenings and a splashy stateside premiere, forfeiting some coverage in the interest of keeping the picture under wraps. The studio will unveil The Da Vinci Code at the Cannes Film Festival next week.

Several sources associated with the film said the studio knew this strategy might create bad buzz. If the potato isn't rotten, people might ask, why hide the potato? That concern was well-aired in internal discussions, according to these sources. But wedged between religious foes and book fanatics, the studio concluded that the risk was worth taking.

As it is, some Christian groups are calling for boycotts and protests of the film, sight unseen. And if the movie had been screened, the geeks would have gone into an online frenzy over any departures from the novel's text. "There is a feeling of entitlement to this title that is a little unreasonable," says an executive close to the film, adding, "It turned out people started writing about Tom Hanks' hair. Not the controversy that we expected."

Sony was aware of the backlash that ensued when Steven Spielberg declared that he was doing no interviews at all for Munich but forgot to mention that he was making an exception for Time magazine. But Sony has stayed so committed to its idea that the studio isn't even showing the film to exhibitors until today (Friday).

Studios are legally required in many states to screen pictures for theater owners before making a deal to book them. Usually, according to the distribution chief at a Sony rival, these screenings are held two or three weeks before a picture opens, leaving time to set terms and handle logistics. "It's not a digital world yet," this executive says. Thousands of prints have to be shipped. It would normally happen this late only if production problems had hampered completion of the film.

"I've never been this close to a release without having someone tell me what they thought," acknowledges a key player in the making of the film. Those big tracking numbers must provide some comfort that audiences will turn out. But another person involved with the picture remembers that the producers of Da Vinci at Imagine Entertainment had very high hopes for Cinderella Man and that turned into a pumpkin. So, until the box office numbers are in, producer Brian Grazer's hair will presumably be standing even straighter on end than usual.
http://www.slate.com/id/2141699/?nav=ais





'Da Vinci Code' Misses The Mark For Critics
David Germain

"The Da Vinci Code" drew lukewarm praise, shrugs of indifference, some jeering laughter and a few derisive jabs Tuesday from arguably the world's toughest movie crowd: critics at the Cannes Film Festival.

The year's most anticipated movie, "The Da Vinci Code" was a generally faithful adaptation of Dan Brown's monster best seller, spinning a murder thriller that stems from a cover-up of secrets about Christianity's roots.

While readers worldwide devoured the novel, reaction from Cannes critics ranged from mild endorsement of its potboiler suspense to groans of ridicule over its heavy melodrama.

"It's a movie about whether the greatest story ever told is true or not, and it's not the greatest movie ever screened, is it?" said Baz Bamigboye, a film columnist for London's Daily Mail. "As a thriller, well," he continued, shrugging.

"Maybe the next day I'll forget about it," said Igor Soukmanov of Unistar Radio in Belarus. "But today for two hours it was good entertainment. ... As a Hollywood movie, it's a very nice picture."

Critics got their first look at "The Da Vinci Code" a day before its world premiere at Cannes on Wednesday, when it also debuts at theaters in France and some other countries. The film opens worldwide over the following two days, including the United States on Friday.

Directed by Ron Howard, the movie stars Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou as strangers hurled together on a frantic quest for the Holy Grail after a series of murders is committed.

The filmmakers add some twists and variations here and there, but the general thrust of the novel remains intact, including its theory that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child, which has prompted denouncements from many Christians.

The Cannes audience clearly grew restless as the movie dragged on to two and a half hours and spun a long sequence of anticlimactic revelations.

"I kept thinking of the Energizer Bunny, because it kept going and going and going, and not in a good way," said James Rocchi, a film critic for CBS 5 television in San Francisco and the online outlet Cinematical. "Ron Howard makes handsome films. He doesn't make bad ones, but he doesn't make great ones."

One especially melodramatic line uttered by Hanks drew prolonged laughter and some catcalls, and the audience continued to titter for much of the film's remainder.

Some people walked out during the movie's closing minutes, though there were fewer departures than many Cannes movies provoke among harsh critics. When the credits rolled, there were a few whistles and hisses, and there was none of the scattered applause even bad movies sometimes receive at Cannes.

Critics singled out co-star Ian McKellen, playing a wry Grail enthusiast who joins the search, as the movie's highlight, injecting hearty humor and delivering the most nuanced performance. Paul Bettany added a seething mix of tragic pathos and destructive zealousness as a monk assassin who carries out the slayings.

Bamigboye said all the actors were solid, but enthusiastically added, "I've got to tell you, Ian McKellen steals it. He slices all the crap away."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=D EFAULT





BBC Falls For 'Expert' Cabbie's Banter
Jack Malvern

The driver was interviewed on TV after being mistaken for a specialist on music downloading

IT WAS not until midway through the live television interview that the BBC interviewer started to grow suspicious. The man whom she believed to be an expert on internet music downloads seemed to know precious little about his subject.

Not only that, but the stocky black man with the strong French accent bore little resemblance to the picture on the expert’s website, which showed a slim white man with blue eyes and blond hair.

The corporation’s News 24 channel apologised to its viewers yesterday and admitted that its interviewee was not Guy Kewney, the respected editor of Newswireless.net, but a local taxi driver.

The cabbie, who is better qualified to talk about traffic jams in Shepherds Bush, answered questions for several minutes on Apple Computer’s victory at the High Court against Apple Corps, the record label for the Beatles, The Times has learnt.

Karen Bowerman, the BBC’s consumer affairs correspondent, asked the driver what the implications were for Apple Computer, which is allowed to continue using its name and symbol for its iTunes music download service. He gave a rambling answer about how people would be able to download songs at internet cafés.

Ms Bowerman was nonplussed, but persisted. What about Apple? “I don’t know,” the driver replied. “I’m not at all sure what I’m doing here.”

It later emerged that the driver had been waiting for a client at the BBC Television Centre in West London, when a studio manager mistook him for the expert.

Confused but co-operative, he agreed to follow the manager to a studio, where he was promptly fitted with a microphone and placed in front of a camera.

Mr Kewney, meanwhile, was still waiting in reception when he saw the taxi driver being introduced under his name. “Anybody would have been fascinated to see me introduced live on air, as the expert witness in the studio,” he wrote on his weblog. “Me? Not fascinated; astonished! What would you feel, if, while you were sitting in that rather chilly reception area, you suddenly saw yourself — not sitting in reception, but live, on TV?” He added that it was especially surprising because the man, who spoke with a French accent, looked nothing like him. “I’m not black. I’m not-black on a startling scale; I’m fair-haired, blue-eyed, prominent-nosed, and with the sort of pale skin that makes my dermatologist wince each time I complain about an itchy mole.”

He was amused at first, but realised that anyone watching would think he knew next to nothing about Apple Computer, online music or The Beatles.

When the driver was asked how the interview went, he replied: “Well, it was OK, but I was a bit rushed.”

He had been waiting at reception when the studio manager arrived to ask for Mr Kewney. The driver, whose visitor’s badge was marked with Mr Kewney’s name, raised his hand. According to Mr Kewney, the stage manager said: “To be honest, I did think it couldn’t be you. I mean, I’ve seen your picture on your website, and he didn’t look like you. So I asked him who he was, and he said, ‘Guy Kewney’ and I said, ‘Are you really Guy Kewney?’ and he said, ‘Yes’.”

The driver’s sang-froid slipped only when Ms Bowerman introduced him. In a video clip, which BBC staff can access through the corporation’s Jupiter cuttings system, a moment of realisation flashes across the man’s face. “Unfortunately we did make a mistake and the wrong guest was briefly interviewed on air before we cut to our reporter,” a spokeswoman said. “We apologise to viewers for any confusion.”

It is not the first time that the BBC has been embarrassed by a case of mistaken identity. Last year Rhodri Morgan, the First Minister of Wales, was mistaken for a cast member of Doctor Who when he was due to appear on the BBC Wales political show Dragon’s Eye.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...S&attr=Britain





That’s data support cleanser to you pal

BBC News 'Wrong Guy' Is Revealed

Guy Goma faced questions about the Apple vs Apple court case

The true identity of a man who was mistakenly interviewed on BBC News 24 has been revealed.

Guy Goma, a graduate from the Congo, appeared on the news channel in place of an IT expert after a mix-up.

But Mr Goma, who was wrongly identified in the press as a taxi driver, was really at the BBC for a job interview.

Mr Goma said his appearance was "very stressful" and wondered why the questions were not related to the data support cleanser job he applied for.

The mix-up occurred when a producer went to collect the expert from the wrong reception in BBC Television Centre in West London.

This has turned out to be a genuine misunderstanding
BBC spokeswoman

The producer asked for Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net, who was due to be interviewed about the Apple vs Apple court case.

After being pointed in Mr Goma's direction by a receptionist, the producer - who had seen a photo of the real expert - checked: "Are you Guy Kewney?"

The economics and business studies graduate answered in the affirmative and was whisked up to the studio.

Business presenter Karen Bowerman, who was to interview the expert, managed to get a message to the editor that the guest seemed "very breathless and nervous".

Mr Goma was eventually asked three questions live on air, assuming this was an interview situation.

It was only later that it was discovered that Mr Kewney was still waiting in reception - prompting producers to wonder who their wrong man was.

'Happy to return'

Mr Goma said his interview was "very short", but he was prepared to return to the airwaves and was "happy to speak about any situation".

He added that next time he would insist upon "preparing myself".

He later told News 24 that he had not yet heard whether he had got the job he had applied for. "I really want to work for the BBC," he added.

A BBC spokeswoman said: "This has turned out to be a genuine misunderstanding.

"We've looked carefully at our guest procedures and will take every measure to ensure this doesn't happen again."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/4774429.stm





Groomer Launches Web Radio For Dogs

A Thai entrepreneur has launched an Internet radio station to put dogs in a better mood.

Anupan Boonchuen, director of a dog grooming school, said he launched Dog Radio Thailand this week because he has seen music improve the mood of dogs he grooms.

During classes, he turns on music for the dogs because "the music puts the dogs in a good mood and they're more willing to let the groomers handle them," he said.

The programming on dogradiothailand.com mainly comprises Thai pop music, but Boonchuen plans to expand offerings in which the disc jockey will "talk to the dogs in Thai," and the canine listener will be encouraged to respond.

"At 9 a.m., we may have a dog greeting show, in which we'll repeat 'sawasdee' ('hello') over and over... If we say 'sawasdee,' in some houses, the dog may lift both paws in response. In some houses, the dog may lift only one paw. It depends on how the dog was trained," Anupan said.

He said, "If we play a slow song, we may have the DJ howl... because dogs howl, too, when they hear sad sounds."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





In Case of Disaster, Have a Backup Plan for Your PC
Kate Murphy

HURRICANE KATRINA uprooted trees, knocked down power lines, flooded homes and obliterated possibly more than a terabyte or two of data. "In all the disaster evacuation check lists, there's nothing about making a copy of what's on your computer," said Janet England, a marketing executive in New Orleans who lost everything in the storm, including all the information stored on her personal computer's hard drive.

Backing up data — making a separate copy — is not only wise in case of a disaster. It's also insurance against mechanical failure, theft, computer viruses and accidental deletions. More backup options have become available in the last two years, priced according to storage capacity, ease of use and privacy protection.

With more people saving essential financial and personal information, not to mention pictures, music and video, on their computers, failing to back up a hard drive is asking for heartache. Imagine losing digitized daguerreotype photographs and genealogical research, as did Ms. England and her husband, Mike.

"I know it sounds silly, but I also lost my Christmas card list, which really upset me," Ms. England said. And if there is business information on a computer, the need to back up is even more critical. "It's pretty insane not to," said Ronald Kramer, a computer consultant in Portland, Me., whose company, All Computer Solutions Inc., specializes in safeguarding data.

There are several backup media and strategies. Now that CD/DVD burners are standard in most personal computers, copying important files onto disks is probably the least expensive choice. A blank 700-megabyte CD costs about 28 cents, and a blank 4.7 gigabyte DVD costs about 36 cents. They are good choices if you only want to save a lot of documents, for example.

But say you've got a modest music library of 50 songs, a dozen movies, five years of tax returns, several sets of vacation pictures — plus a lot of documents. That would add up to more than 100 gigabytes of data, which amounts to stacks of disks as well as a lot of time and patience identifying the files you want to save and then inserting and ejecting disks during the backup process.

"As we store more data on our computers' hard drives, it gets impractical to write everything to disk," said Jerrold M. Grochow, vice president for information services and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Alternatively, magnetic tape cartridges hold 50 to 150 gigabytes and cost about a dollar a gigabyte, but then you would need a tape drive, usually not standard equipment and costing $100 to $300. The drives usually come with software that automates the backup process. Magnetic tapes are less fragile than CD's and DVD's, which can be easily scratched and warped, but they are still prone to deterioration over time, especially if not stored under ideal conditions (about 70 degrees, and humidity of less than 70 percent).

Small "thumb" drives — also known as mini, pocket pen or flash drives — can hold up to 4 gigabytes at about $50 a gigabyte, and they are even more durable. "They won't break even if you step on them," Mr. Kramer said. They plug directly into a computer's U.S.B. ports, so there is no need for extra hardware. But like disks, they have a relatively small capacity, and the files you want to save must be selected individually.

Another popular choice is to back up to an external hard drive. Prices have come down considerably in the last year, with a 200-gigabyte drive now going for as little as $80. The latest designs plug into U.S.B. ports and are no larger than a videocassette. So, like disks, tapes and minidrives, external hard drives can easily be removed and stored at another location.

"What good is backing up if you keep it in the same place to go up in flames or be washed away with your computer in the event of a disaster?" said Patricia K. Galloway, who teaches digital archiving at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin.

Some external hard drives, like the Maxtor OneTouch ($200), allow you to back up preselected files by pushing a single button.

There are also a handful of software applications, like Symantec's LiveState ($100) and Intego Personal Backup X4 ($70), that will automatically keep a simultaneous replica of a computer's contents on an external hard drive. "That way, if you have a failure, you don't have to waste time reformatting your computer and reloading all your programs," Mr. Kramer said.

Other backup strategies usually save only files created within those programs. You can't actually read them until you reinstall the program, which can be a lengthy process. But with image-drive software, as it is called, you can seamlessly switch to the external drive and keep working as if nothing happened.

For about $1,000, there is network-attached storage, or NAS, which is essentially the melding of a server and an external hard drive (or a stack of external drives). Roughly the size of a four-slice toaster, NAS devices, like those made by Buffalo Technology, Iomega and Linksys, allow multiple users to back up to one location as well as have access to all the information stored there.

Such devices are convenient for families who want to share files and don't want their children's computers clogged with downloaded music and videos.

If you don't want to depend on a device or the limited lifespan of digital media, you might consider online storage. "This used to be something that was only available to large businesses," said Stephanie Balaouras, a senior technology analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, "but now we're seeing the emergence of a lot of niche players targeting individuals."

Computer users can subscribe to a service like Iomega, Iron Mountain or My Docs Online for $5 to $50 a month, depending on the amount of storage and the level of security desired.

This allows them to back up data via the Internet to remote storage facilities. Often, users can gain access to data from any computer, anywhere, anytime.

BUT Mr. Grochow at M.I.T. advised caution before using an online service. "You want to ask how long the company has been in business," he said, "and assess its financial situation to make sure it's going to be around for a while."

If backing up sensitive documents, consumers should ask whether their data will be digitally encrypted during transit and while stored at the online service.

Other relevant questions concern whether employees are subjected to background checks; whether the storage facility is located in, say, a flood plain; and whether the company's servers are backed up to a remote location.

When it comes to data storage, Mr. Grochow said, "Multiple redundancies are a good thing."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/bu.../14backup.html





Scan This Book!
Kevin Kelly

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

Brewster Kahle, an archivist overseeing another scanning project, says that the universal library is now within reach. "This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!" he shouts. "It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon." And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.

But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its "books" will be unlike any library or books we have known. Pushing us rapidly toward that Eden of everything, and away from the paradigm of the physical paper tome, is the hot technology of the search engine.

1. Scanning the Library of Libraries

Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you'll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what's taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

Technology accelerates the migration of all we know into the universal form of digital bits. Nikon will soon quit making film cameras for consumers, and Minolta already has: better think digital photos from now on. Nearly 100 percent of all contemporary recorded music has already been digitized, much of it by fans. About one-tenth of the 500,000 or so movies listed on the Internet Movie Database are now digitized on DVD. But because of copyright issues and the physical fact of the need to turn pages, the digitization of books has proceeded at a relative crawl. At most, one book in 20 has moved from analog to digital. So far, the universal library is a library without many books.

But that is changing very fast. Corporations and libraries around the world are now scanning about a million books per year. Amazon has digitized several hundred thousand contemporary books. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University (one of the five libraries collaborating with Google) is scanning its eight-million-book collection using a state-of-the art robot from the Swiss company 4DigitalBooks. This machine, the size of a small S.U.V., automatically turns the pages of each book as it scans it, at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour. A human operator places a book in a flat carriage, and then pneumatic robot fingers flip the pages — delicately enough to handle rare volumes — under the scanning eyes of digital cameras.

Like many other functions in our global economy, however, the real work has been happening far away, while we sleep. We are outsourcing the scanning of the universal library. Superstar, an entrepreneurial company based in Beijing, has scanned every book from 900 university libraries in China. It has already digitized 1.3 million unique titles in Chinese, which it estimates is about half of all the books published in the Chinese language since 1949. It costs $30 to scan a book at Stanford but only $10 in China.

Raj Reddy, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, decided to move a fair-size English-language library to where the cheap subsidized scanners were. In 2004, he borrowed 30,000 volumes from the storage rooms of the Carnegie Mellon library and the Carnegie Library and packed them off to China in a single shipping container to be scanned by an assembly line of workers paid by the Chinese. His project, which he calls the Million Book Project, is churning out 100,000 pages per day at 20 scanning stations in India and China. Reddy hopes to reach a million digitized books in two years.

The idea is to seed the bookless developing world with easily available texts. Superstar sells copies of books it scans back to the same university libraries it scans from. A university can expand a typical 60,000-volume library into a 1.3 million-volume one overnight. At about 50 cents per digital book acquired, it's a cheap way for a library to increase its collection. Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe's e-publishing business, says: "Some of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get Amazon.com to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books." It is these underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.

2. What Happens When Books Connect

The least important, but most discussed, aspects of digital reading have been these contentious questions: Will we give up the highly evolved technology of ink on paper and instead read on cumbersome machines? Or will we keep reading our paperbacks on the beach? For now, the answer is yes to both. Yes, publishers have lost millions of dollars on the long-prophesied e-book revolution that never occurred, while the number of physical books sold in the world each year continues to grow. At the same time, there are already more than a half a billion PDF documents on the Web that people happily read on computers without printing them out, and still more people now spend hours watching movies on microscopic cellphone screens. The arsenal of our current display technology — from handheld gizmos to large flat screens — is already good enough to move books to their next stage of evolution: a full digital scan.

Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability — the nifty translation of a book's full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic amateurs have written and cross-referenced an entire online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Buoyed by this success, many nerds believe that a billion readers can reliably weave together the pages of old books, one hyperlink at a time. Those with a passion for a special subject, obscure author or favorite book will, over time, link up its important parts. Multiply that simple generous act by millions of readers, and the universal library can be integrated in full, by fans for fans.

In addition to a link, which explicitly connects one word or sentence or book to another, readers will also be able to add tags, a recent innovation on the Web but already a popular one. A tag is a public annotation, like a keyword or category name, that is hung on a file, page, picture or song, enabling anyone to search for that file. For instance, on the photo-sharing site Flickr, hundreds of viewers will "tag" a photo submitted by another user with their own simple classifications of what they think the picture is about: "goat," "Paris," "goofy," "beach party." Because tags are user-generated, when they move to the realm of books, they will be assigned faster, range wider and serve better than out-of-date schemes like the Dewey Decimal System, particularly in frontier or fringe areas like nanotechnology or body modification.

The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. They get their initial wave of power when we first code them into bits of text, but their real transformative energies fire up as ordinary users click on them in the course of everyday Web surfing, unaware that each humdrum click "votes" on a link, elevating its rank of relevance. You may think you are just browsing, casually inspecting this paragraph or that page, but in fact you are anonymously marking up the Web with bread crumbs of attention. These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by search engines in order to strengthen the relationship between the end points of every link and the connections suggested by each tag. This is a type of intelligence common on the Web, but previously foreign to the world of books.

Once a book has been integrated into the new expanded library by means of this linking, its text will no longer be separate from the text in other books. For instance, today a serious nonfiction book will usually have a bibliography and some kind of footnotes. When books are deeply linked, you'll be able to click on the title in any bibliography or any footnote and find the actual book referred to in the footnote. The books referenced in that book's bibliography will themselves be available, and so you can hop through the library in the same way we hop through Web links, traveling from footnote to footnote to footnote until you reach the bottom of things.

Next come the words. Just as a Web article on, say, aquariums, can have some of its words linked to definitions of fish terms, any and all words in a digitized book can be hyperlinked to other parts of other books. Books, including fiction, will become a web of names and a community of ideas.

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power of relationships, which is all links really are. There are about 100 billion Web pages, and each page holds, on average, 10 links. That's a trillion electrified connections coursing through the Web. This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. The static world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of relationships, as each page in a book discovers other pages and other books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book.

When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity. Bookmarks can be shared with fellow readers. Marginalia can be broadcast. Bibliographies swapped. You might get an alert that your friend Carl has annotated a favorite book of yours. A moment later, his links are yours. In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world's only book.

3. Books: The Liquid Version

At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or "playlists," as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages. The ability to purchase, read and manipulate individual pages or sections is surely what will drive reference books (cookbooks, how-to manuals, travel guides) in the future. You might concoct your own "cookbook shelf" of Cajun recipes compiled from many different sources; it would include Web pages, magazine clippings and entire Cajun cookbooks. Amazon currently offers you a chance to publish your own bookshelves (Amazon calls them "listmanias") as annotated lists of books you want to recommend on a particular esoteric subject. And readers are already using Google Book Search to round up minilibraries on a certain topic — all books about Sweden, for instance, or books on clocks. Once snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection.

Libraries (as well as many individuals) aren't eager to relinquish ink-on-paper editions, because the printed book is by far the most durable and reliable backup technology we have. Printed books require no mediating device to read and thus are immune to technological obsolescence. Paper is also extremely stable, compared with, say, hard drives or even CD's. In this way, the stability and fixity of a bound book is a blessing. It sits there unchanging, true to its original creation. But it sits alone.

So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. Far out in the "long tail" of the distribution curve — that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of the books in the world live — digital interlinking will lift the readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.

Finally, the full, complete universal library of all works becomes more than just a better Ask Jeeves. Search on the Web becomes a new infrastructure for entirely new functions and services. Right now, if you mash up Google Maps and Monster.com, you get maps of where jobs are located by salary. In the same way, it is easy to see that in the great library, everything that has ever been written about, for example, Trafalgar Square in London could be present on that spot via a screen. In the same way, every object, event or location on earth would "know" everything that has ever been written about it in any book, in any language, at any time. From this deep structuring of knowledge comes a new culture of interaction and participation.

The main drawback of this vision is a big one. So far, the universal library lacks books. Despite the best efforts of bloggers and the creators of the Wikipedia, most of the world's expertise still resides in books. And a universal library without the contents of books is no universal library at all.

There are dozens of excellent reasons that books should quickly be made part of the emerging Web. But so far they have not been, at least not in great numbers. And there is only one reason: the hegemony of the copy.

4. The Triumph of the Copy

The desire of all creators is for their works to find their way into all minds. A text, a melody, a picture or a story succeeds best if it is connected to as many ideas and other works as possible. Ideally, over time a work becomes so entangled in a culture that it appears to be inseparable from it, in the way that the Bible, Shakespeare's plays, "Cinderella" and the Mona Lisa are inseparable from ours. This tendency for creative ideas to infiltrate other works is great news for culture. In fact, this commingling of creations is culture.

In preindustrial times, exact copies of a work were rare for a simple reason: it was much easier to make your own version of a creation than to duplicate someone else's exactly. The amount of energy and attention needed to copy a scroll exactly, word for word, or to replicate a painting stroke by stroke exceeded the cost of paraphrasing it in your own style. So most works were altered, and often improved, by the borrower before they were passed on. Fairy tales evolved mythic depth as many different authors worked on them and as they migrated from spoken tales to other media (theater, music, painting). This system worked well for audiences and performers, but the only way for most creators to earn a living from their works was through the support of patrons.

That ancient economics of creation was overturned at the dawn of the industrial age by the technologies of mass production. Suddenly, the cost of duplication was lower than the cost of appropriation. With the advent of the printing press, it was now cheaper to print thousands of exact copies of a manuscript than to alter one by hand. Copy makers could profit more than creators. This imbalance led to the technology of copyright, which established a new order. Copyright bestowed upon the creator of a work a temporary monopoly — for 14 years, in the United States — over any copies of the work. The idea was to encourage authors and artists to create yet more works that could be cheaply copied and thus fill the culture with public works.

Not coincidentally, public libraries first began to flourish with the advent of cheap copies. Before the industrial age, libraries were primarily the property of the wealthy elite. With mass production, every small town could afford to put duplicates of the greatest works of humanity on wooden shelves in the village square. Mass access to public-library books inspired scholarship, reviewing and education, activities exempted in part from the monopoly of copyright in the United States because they moved creative works toward the public commons sooner, weaving them into the fabric of common culture while still remaining under the author's copyright. These are now known as "fair uses."

This wonderful balance was undone by good intentions. The first was a new copyright law passed by Congress in 1976. According to the new law, creators no longer had to register or renew copyright; the simple act of creating something bestowed it with instant and automatic rights. By default, each new work was born under private ownership rather than in the public commons. At first, this reversal seemed to serve the culture of creation well. All works that could be copied gained instant and deep ownership, and artists and authors were happy. But the 1976 law, and various revisions and extensions that followed it, made it extremely difficult to move a work into the public commons, where human creations naturally belong and were originally intended to reside. As more intellectual property became owned by corporations rather than by individuals, those corporations successfully lobbied Congress to keep extending the once-brief protection enabled by copyright in order to prevent works from returning to the public domain. With constant nudging, Congress moved the expiration date from 14 years to 28 to 42 and then to 56.

While corporations and legislators were moving the goal posts back, technology was accelerating forward. In Internet time, even 14 years is a long time for a monopoly; a monopoly that lasts a human lifetime is essentially an eternity. So when Congress voted in 1998 to extend copyright an additional 70 years beyond the life span of a creator — to a point where it could not possibly serve its original purpose as an incentive to keep that creator working — it was obvious to all that copyright now existed primarily to protect a threatened business model. And because Congress at the same time tacked a 20-year extension onto all existing copyrights, nothing — no published creative works of any type — will fall out of protection and return to the public domain until 2019. Almost everything created today will not return to the commons until the next century. Thus the stream of shared material that anyone can improve (think "A Thousand and One Nights" or "Amazing Grace" or "Beauty and the Beast") will largely dry up.

In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn't find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn't know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world's libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark.

5. The Moral Imperative to Scan

The 15 percent of the world's 32 million cataloged books that are in the public domain are freely available for anyone to borrow, imitate, publish or copy wholesale. Almost the entire current scanning effort by American libraries is aimed at this 15 percent. The Million Book Project mines this small sliver of the pie, as does Google. Because they are in the commons, no law hinders this 15 percent from being scanned and added to the universal library.

The approximately 10 percent of all books actively in print will also be scanned before long. Amazon carries at least four million books, which includes multiple editions of the same title. Amazon is slowly scanning all of them. Recently, several big American publishers have declared themselves eager to move their entire backlist of books into the digital sphere. Many of them are working with Google in a partnership program in which Google scans their books, offers sample pages (controlled by the publisher) to readers and points readers to where they can buy the actual book. No one doubts electronic books will make money eventually. Simple commercial incentives guarantee that all in-print and backlisted books will before long be scanned into the great library. That's not the problem.

The major problem for large publishers is that they are not certain what they actually own. If you would like to amuse yourself, pick an out-of-print book from the library and try to determine who owns its copyright. It's not easy. There is no list of copyrighted works. The Library of Congress does not have a catalog. The publishers don't have an exhaustive list, not even of their own imprints (though they say they are working on it). The older, the more obscure the work, the less likely a publisher will be able to tell you (that is, if the publisher still exists) whether the copyright has reverted to the author, whether the author is alive or dead, whether the copyright has been sold to another company, whether the publisher still owns the copyright or whether it plans to resurrect or scan it. Plan on having a lot of spare time and patience if you inquire. I recently spent two years trying to track down the copyright to a book that led me to Random House. Does the company own it? Can I reproduce it? Three years later, the company is still working on its answer. The prospect of tracking down the copyright — with any certainty — of the roughly 25 million orphaned books is simply ludicrous.

Which leaves 75 percent of the known texts of humans in the dark. The legal limbo surrounding their status as copies prevents them from being digitized. No one argues that these are all masterpieces, but there is history and context enough in their pages to not let them disappear. And if they are not scanned, they in effect will disappear. But with copyright hyperextended beyond reason (the Supreme Court in 2003 declared the law dumb but not unconstitutional), none of this dark library will return to the public domain (and be cleared for scanning) until at least 2019. With no commercial incentive to entice uncertain publishers to pay for scanning these orphan works, they will vanish from view. According to Peter Brantley, director of technology for the California Digital Library, "We have a moral imperative to reach out to our library shelves, grab the material that is orphaned and set it on top of scanners."

No one was able to unravel the Gordian knot of copydom until 2004, when Google came up with a clever solution. In addition to scanning the 15 percent out-of-copyright public-domain books with their library partners and the 10 percent in-print books with their publishing partners, Google executives declared that they would also scan the 75 percent out-of-print books that no one else would touch. They would scan the entire book, without resolving its legal status, which would allow the full text to be indexed on Google's internal computers and searched by anyone. But the company would show to readers only a few selected sentence-long snippets from the book at a time. Google's lawyers argued that the snippets the company was proposing were something like a quote or an excerpt in a review and thus should qualify as a "fair use."

Google's plan was to scan the full text of every book in five major libraries: the more than 10 million titles held by Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library. Every book would be indexed, but each would show up in search results in different ways. For out-of-copyright books, Google would show the whole book, page by page. For the in-print books, Google would work with publishers and let them decide what parts of their books would be shown and under what conditions. For the dark orphans, Google would show only limited snippets. And any copyright holder (author or corporation) who could establish ownership of a supposed orphan could ask Google to remove the snippets for any reason.

At first glance, it seemed genius. By scanning all books (something only Google had the cash to do), the company would advance its mission to organize all knowledge. It would let books be searchable, and it could potentially sell ads on those searches, although it does not do that currently. In the same stroke, Google would rescue the lost and forgotten 75 percent of the library. For many authors, this all-out campaign was a salvation. Google became a discovery tool, if not a marketing program. While a few best-selling authors fear piracy, every author fears obscurity. Enabling their works to be found in the same universal search box as everything else in the world was good news for authors and good news for an industry that needed some. For authors with books in the publisher program and for authors of books abandoned by a publisher, Google unleashed a chance that more people would at least read, and perhaps buy, the creation they had sweated for years to complete.

6. The Case Against Google

Some authors and many publishers found more evil than genius in Google's plan. Two points outraged them: the virtual copy of the book that sat on Google's indexing server and Google's assumption that it could scan first and ask questions later. On both counts the authors and publishers accused Google of blatant copyright infringement. When negotiations failed last fall, the Authors Guild and five big publishing companies sued Google. Their argument was simple: Why shouldn't Google share its ad revenue (if any) with the copyright owners? And why shouldn't Google have to ask permission from the legal copyright holder before scanning the work in any case? (I have divided loyalties in the case. The current publisher of my books is suing Google to protect my earnings as an author. At the same time, I earn income from Google Adsense ads placed on my blog.)

One mark of the complexity of this issue is that the publishers suing were, and still are, committed partners in the Google Book Search Partner Program. They still want Google to index and search their in-print books, even when they are scanning the books themselves, because, they say, search is a discovery tool for readers. The ability to search the scans of all books is good for profits.

The argument about sharing revenue is not about the three or four million books that publishers care about and keep in print, because Google is sharing revenues for those books with publishers. (Google says publishers receive the "majority share" of the income from the small ads placed on partner-program pages.) The argument is about the 75 percent of books that have been abandoned by publishers as uneconomical. One curious fact, of course, is that publishers only care about these orphans now because Google has shifted the economic equation; because of Book Search, these dark books may now have some sparks in them, and the publishers don't want this potential revenue stream to slip away from them. They are now busy digging deep into their records to see what part of the darkness they can declare as their own.

The second complaint against Google is more complex. Google argues that it is nearly impossible to track down copyright holders of orphan works, and so, it says, it must scan those books first and only afterward honor any legitimate requests to remove the scan. In this way, Google follows the protocol of the Internet. Google scans all Web pages; if it's on the Web, it's scanned. Web pages, by default, are born copyrighted. Google, therefore, regularly copies billions of copyrighted pages into its index for the public to search. But if you don't want Google to search your Web site, you can stick some code on your home page with a no-searching sign, and Google and every other search engine will stay out. A Web master thus can opt out of search. (Few do.) Google applies the same principle of opting-out to Book Search. It is up to you as an author to notify Google if you don't want the company to scan or search your copyrighted material. This might be a reasonable approach for Google to demand from an author or publisher if Google were the only search company around. But search technology is becoming a commodity, and if it turns out there is any money in it, it is not impossible to imagine a hundred mavericks scanning out-of-print books. Should you as a creator be obliged to find and notify each and every geek who scanned your work, if for some reason you did not want it indexed? What if you miss one?

There is a technical solution to this problem: for the search companies to compile and maintain a common list of no-scan copyright holders. A publisher or author who doesn't want a work scanned notifies the keepers of the common list once, and anyone conducting scanning would have to remove material that was listed. Since Google, like all the other big search companies — Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo — is foremost a technical-solution company, it favors this approach. But the battle never got that far.

7. When Business Models Collide

In thinking about the arguments around search, I realized that there are many ways to conceive of this conflict. At first, I thought that this was a misunderstanding between people of the book, who favor solutions by laws, and people of the screen, who favor technology as a solution to all problems. Last November, the New York Public Library (one of the "Google Five") sponsored a debate between representatives of authors and publishers and supporters of Google. I was tickled to see that up on the stage, the defenders of the book were from the East Coast and the defenders of the screen were from the West Coast. But while it's true that there's a strand of cultural conflict here, I eventually settled on a different framework, one that I found more useful. This is a clash of business models.

Authors and publishers (including publishers of music and film) have relied for years on cheap mass-produced copies protected from counterfeits and pirates by a strong law based on the dominance of copies and on a public educated to respect the sanctity of a copy. This model has, in the last century or so, produced the greatest flowering of human achievement the world has ever seen, a magnificent golden age of creative works. Protected physical copies have enabled millions of people to earn a living directly from the sale of their art to the audience, without the weird dynamics of patronage. Not only did authors and artists benefit from this model, but the audience did, too. For the first time, billions of ordinary people were able to come in regular contact with a great work. In Mozart's day, few people ever heard one of his symphonies more than once. With the advent of cheap audio recordings, a barber in Java could listen to them all day long.

But a new regime of digital technology has now disrupted all business models based on mass-produced copies, including individual livelihoods of artists. The contours of the electronic economy are still emerging, but while they do, the wealth derived from the old business model is being spent to try to protect that old model, through legislation and enforcement. Laws based on the mass-produced copy artifact are being taken to the extreme, while desperate measures to outlaw new technologies in the marketplace "for our protection" are introduced in misguided righteousness. (This is to be expected. The fact is, entire industries and the fortunes of those working in them are threatened with demise. Newspapers and magazines, Hollywood, record labels, broadcasters and many hard-working and wonderful creative people in those fields have to change the model of how they earn money. Not all will make it.)

Kevin Kelly is the "senior maverick" at Wired magazine and author of "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World" and other books. He last wrote for the magazine about digital music.

Correction: May 14, 2006

An article on Page 42 of The Times Magazine today about the future of book publishing misstates the number and type of libraries in China from which a Chinese company, Superstar, has made digital copies of books. It is 200 libraries of all kinds, not 900 university libraries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/ma...ublishing.html





What Happened to the Fortune Michael Jackson Made?
Timothy L. O'Brien

This article was reported by Jeff Leeds, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Timothy L. O'Brien and written by Mr. O'Brien.

SEATED in a $9,000-a-night luxury suite in the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, Michael Jackson played the role of a wealthy pop star as he met with two senior executives of the Sony Corporation last December. From the opulent setting to Mr. Jackson's retinue of advisers, there was little indication that Sony's troops were paying a visit because they were concerned that he was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy proceedings.

Sony was worried because Mr. Jackson was the company's partner in a lucrative music publishing business that included songs by the Beatles and other musicians. If Mr. Jackson became insolvent, his 50 percent share of that $1 billion business would be up for grabs to the highest bidder, leaving Sony to confront the uncomfortable possibility that it would be forced into a new, unpredictable partnership not of its own choosing.

With the waters of the Persian Gulf and a teeming, prosperous emirate splayed out far beneath them, the group got down to business. According to those who attended the meeting and requested anonymity because confidential financial matters were discussed, Mr. Jackson was pensive and cooperative, seemingly well aware of the gravity of his situation despite the grandeur of his surroundings. He only chirped up occasionally to remark on what a wonderful investment the catalog had been.

After listening to Mr. Jackson, Robert S. Wiesenthal, a senior Sony executive, eventually proposed that Sony would help the singer find a bank to lend him more than $300 million to pay off his debts. In exchange, Mr. Jackson would possibly forfeit a portion of his half of the Beatles catalog.

Just last month, Mr. Jackson — still swamped in debt, with his musical career in stasis and his personal life limned by scandal — agreed to that financial overhaul. It is likely to strip him of about half of his remaining stake in the catalog, which he has relied on as a financial lifeline for about a decade. According to executives involved in the restructuring talks, Mr. Jackson used the catalog, as well as copyrights to his own songs, as collateral for roughly $270 million in bank loans he took out to fund a spending spree that includes upkeep for his sprawling California ranch, Neverland, and other exotic luxuries.

Given how precarious Mr. Jackson's financial situation appears to be, it is unclear how long he will be able to retain his remaining stake in his prized music catalog. A reckoning appears near, and Mr. Jackson's ability to hold onto his fortune has proven to be as fleeting as stardom itself.

The arc of Mr. Jackson's career, and his management of his business and financial affairs, tracks some of the timeworn truisms about the realities of the entertainment industry and those who inhabit its upper tiers: a child star unwittingly beholden to others who control his bank account; a more mature adult who is savvy about packaging and marketing himself but who grows increasingly undisciplined about his spending; and, finally, a reclusive caricature locked inside a financial and emotional fantasyland of his own making.

For those without access to Mr. Jackson's personal accounts, assessing exactly how much money has passed through his hands over a career that spans decades is impossible. Sales of his recordings through Sony's music unit have generated more than $300 million in royalties for Mr. Jackson since the early 1980's, according to three individuals with direct knowledge of the singer's business affairs. Revenues from concerts and music publishing — including the creation of a venture with Sony that controls the Beatles catalog — as well as from endorsements, merchandising and music videos added, perhaps, $400 million more to that amount, these people believe.

WHATEVER portion of those earnings actually ended up in Mr. Jackson's wallet is also difficult to assess because it would have to account for hefty costs like recording and production expenses, taxes and the like that would have reduced income from his business endeavors. Mr. Jackson could not be reached for comment.

"I think that Michael never had any concept of fiscal responsibility, or logical fiscal responsibility. He was an individual that had been overindulged by those that represented him or worked for him for all of his life," said Alvin Malnik, a former financial adviser to Mr. Jackson and a former lawyer for Meyer Lansky, the late mob kingpin. "There was no planning in terms of allocations of how much he should spend. As a businessman, you can forecast your spending for the next six months to a year. For Michael, it was whatever he wanted at the time he wanted.

"Millions of dollars annually were spent on plane charters, purchases of antiques and paintings," Mr. Malnik continued. "If you want to take a trip to London, that's one thing. If you want to continue that trip and have your entourage of 15 or 20 people go with you, it gets expensive."

Others close to Mr. Jackson say that the performer's finances have not deteriorated simply because he is a big spender. They say that until the early 1990's, he paid relatively close attention to his accounting and kept an eye on the cash that flowed through his business and creative ventures. After that, they say, Mr. Jackson became overly enamored of something that ensnares wealthy people of all stripes: bad advice.

"Some people can go to a person like Michael and say, 'Listen, this is out of hand.' Other people would much rather say, 'Whatever you want,' and they don't care," said Frank Dileo, who was Mr. Jackson's manager from 1984 to 1989. "I think after me, there were a lot of people that didn't care. All they were interested in was what they were getting. And they killed the golden goose."

Michael Jackson has spent a lifetime surprising people, in recent years largely because of a surreal personal life, lurid legal scandals, serial plastic surgeries and erratic public behavior that have turned him — on his very best days — into the butt of late-night talk-show jokes and tabloid headlines. But when his career began to take off nearly four decades ago as a member of the pop group the Jackson 5, fans and entertainment industry veterans recognized something else about the pint-size musical dynamo that was unusual: He was in possession of an outsize, mesmerizing talent.

Deke Richards, a writer and producer who worked closely with Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, in shaping the earliest stages of Mr. Jackson's career, recalls watching the singer in one of his earliest performances in Los Angeles. It was 1969 at the Daisy Club, a Beverly Hills venue located on Rodeo Drive, and while the entire Jackson entourage impressed Mr. Richards, Michael was the star.

"It was almost evident that it was something special, it was like the reincarnation of Frankie Lyman," said Mr. Richards, referring to the 1950's teenage vocalist who turned "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" into a hit. "Nobody had seen anything like that since Frankie, a kid with chops like that who could sing like that. It was like a 30-year-old man was inside this little boy."

Although Mr. Gordy promoted Mr. Jackson as an 8-year-old wunderkind in advance of the Daisy Club appearance, the singer was just weeks shy of his 11th birthday when he performed there. Even so, he had already spent years in talent shows and performing in seedy Midwestern clubs under the aegis of Joe Jackson, his dictatorial and ambitious father. Joe Jackson and Mr. Gordy were the singer's twin mentors during Michael's early career; neither of them could be reached to comment for this article.

Despite Michael Jackson's youth, Mr. Gordy and others recognized that in addition to the singer's talent he also was an observant, diligent understudy keen to learn all that he could about the workings of the music business.

"Michael had a knowingness about him," Mr. Gordy recalled in a 1994 interview with Billboard magazine. "He paid close attention to every single thing I said. Even when my back was turned, I knew he'd be watching me like a hawk. The other kids might have been playing or doing whatever they were doing, but Michael was dead serious. And he stayed that way."

Mr. Jackson had his own recollections of those years. "When you're a show-business child, you really don't have the maturity to understand a great deal of what is going on around you. People make a lot of decisions concerning your life when you're out of the room," he wrote in "Moon Walk," his 1988 autobiography. "Berry insisted on perfection and attention to detail. I'll never forget his persistence. This was his genius. Then and later, I observed every moment of the sessions where Berry was present and never forgot what I learned. To this day, I use the same principles."

Mr. Gordy paid many of Motown's most successful acts, including the Jackson 5, far stingier royalty rates on their albums than they might have earned in a later era, and certainly lower than what Mr. Jackson himself earned during his heyday in the mid-to-late 1980's. According to J. Randy Taraborrelli's 1991 biography, "Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness," Motown paid the Jackson 5 a royalty rate that was just a fraction of what Mr. Jackson secured for himself later in his career.

"There was a lot of pressure on Michael as a youngster to perform for the family," said Shelly Finkel, a former rock 'n' roll promoter who currently manages professional boxers and who periodically intersected with the Jackson family when Mr. Jackson was a child. "You get a kid like Michael Jackson and he's unsophisticated with his money and people take advantage. It's not a real upbringing. He didn't mature as a human in all directions."

The Jackson 5 jumped from Motown to CBS Records in 1975, and the company rewarded them with better contracts. They also received guaranteed fees of at least $350,000 per album, according to Mr. Taraborrelli's book, well above their Motown fees but still not approaching the stratospheric, multimillion-dollar guarantees Mr. Jackson would begin getting in the 1980's. Concerts offered another source of income, but it was still income that Mr. Jackson shared with his siblings and upon which his father kept a tight rein.

Mr. Jackson eventually broke with his father and the Jackson 5, a move toward creative and financial independence marked by his collaborations with Quincy Jones on a trio of albums. The most memorable of those is 1982's "Thriller," which eventually racked up sales of 51 million copies globally, according to the Guinness World Records, making it the best-selling album in history. Yet "Thriller" took a heavy toll, Mr. Jackson's associates say, setting a benchmark of success that the entertainer never stopped chasing.

Mr. Jackson's pre-expense share of the "Thriller" bounty — including the album, singles and a popular video — surpassed $125 million, according to a former adviser who requested anonymity because of the confidential nature of Mr. Jackson's finances. Those who counseled him in the "Thriller" era credit the pop star with financial acumen and astute business judgment, evidenced by his $47.5 million purchase of the Beatles catalog in 1985 (a move that served to alienate him from Paul McCartney, the Beatles legend who imparted the financial wisdom of buying catalogs to Mr. Jackson during a casual chat, only to see Mr. Jackson then turn around and buy rights to many of Mr. McCartney's own songs).

John Branca, an attorney who structured the purchase for Mr. Jackson and represented him from 1980 to 1990 and periodically after 1993, said he saw no signs of wayward financial behavior in the years straddling the release of "Thriller." "I think Michael was brilliant for a good part of his career — savvy, involved, on top of everything," Mr. Branca said. "I also think he was a marketing genius."

In the midst of the "Thriller" phenomenon, Mr. Jackson's appetites were still relatively modest by celebrity standards, and he had just begun to experience the possibilities of riches he had never known in his childhood. Acquaintances from that period say that he would occasionally borrow gas money, and he still lived in the Jackson family home in the suburban Encino section of Los Angeles.

Although he made an unsuccessful attempt in 1987 to buy the bones of Joseph Merrick, more famously known as "The Elephant Man," for $1 million, it wasn't until the end of the 1980's that he began to exhibit more baronial tendencies. In 1988, he made his $17 million purchase of property near Santa Ynez, Calif., that became Neverland.

At the same time, Mr. Jackson was redefining the concept of spectacle in pop music. He hired Martin Scorsese, the film director, to direct a video for his album "Bad," a clip that one adviser with direct knowledge of the production budget said cost more than $1 million. The same adviser said that Mr. Jackson netted "way north" of $35 million from a yearlong "Bad" tour that began in 1987, and that heading into the 1990's Mr. Jackson was in sound shape financially.

While Mr. Jackson began to routinely rotate through different teams of advisers in the 90's, and pour more of his own money into pricey projects like videos, at least one of his advisers from the period contends that Mr. Jackson kept a lid on his spending until even the late 1990's.

"I didn't ever see him take all kinds of people all around the world," said James Morey, who served as one of Mr. Jackson's personal managers from 1990 to 1997 (when Mr. Jackson fired him and turned for advice instead to the Saudi sheik Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal). "Michael is very bright, and Michael pretty much knew — even when he was advised something was too expensive — if he felt it was right for the art, he had the means to pay for it. He wasn't oblivious to what budgets were."

Other events, however, suggest that Mr. Jackson's finances were already under strain by the mid-90's. He retreated from working regularly after the release of "Dangerous" in 1991 and settled a child-molestation lawsuit for about $20 million. More significantly in terms of his finances, he had to sell Sony a 50 percent stake in the Beatles catalog in 1995 for more than $100 million, which one adviser said helped shore up the singer's wobbling accounts.

Mr. Jackson wouldn't produce another studio album of completely new material until 2001, yet whenever he surfaced with other works that were compilations of previously released material he still expected promotions and spectacles beyond anything done before. For his 1995 album, "HIStory," for example, he sought to shoot an extravagant "teaser" video to promote it. He shot the video in Hungary for millions of dollars and hired Hungarian soldiers to march in it.

"When they were shooting this thing in Hungary, the production company would call me in the middle of the night and say, 'Michael wants more troops,' " said Dan Beck, a senior marketing executive who worked on the video. "He dreamed the big dream. It was P. T. Barnum."

MR. JACKSON indulged in other pricey vanity projects, including what one adviser believes to be the most expensive — a 35-minute film called "Ghosts" that he co-wrote with the novelist Stephen King and shot in 1997 with Stan Winston, a special-effects whiz that cost well above $15 million. One person with direct knowledge of Mr. Jackson's spending said that the star paid a substantial portion of as much as $65 million on video projects in the mid-90's — outlays that contributed significantly to his financial problems.

Mr. Jackson also came under the sway of an assorted rotation of new advisers who apparently convinced him to make heavy bets on risky investments that never panned out. In late 1996, according to court papers, he met Myung Ho Lee, a Korean adviser who emerged as a central figure in the performer's debt binge.

Documents indicate that by late 1998, Mr. Jackson had already taken out and depleted a $90 million bank loan and Mr. Lee arranged a new, $140 million loan from Bank of America that was collateralized by the Beatles catalog and used to pay off earlier debts. Just several months later, the $140 million had evaporated and Mr. Jackson, fresh off of his divorce settlement with Lisa Marie Presley, obtained another $30 million line of credit from Bank of America. Mr. Lee said in court papers that in late 2000 he raised the original $140 million bank loan to $200 million, using part of that loan to pay down the $30 million credit line, which had been entirely tapped.

Although documents indicate that Mr. Lee brought at least two risky investment opportunities to Mr. Jackson, Mr. Lee still managed to castigate the performer in court papers for a lack of financial discipline in 1999 and 2000. "Jackson became fixated on obtaining expensive possessions and feeding his ego by listening to the advice of hucksters and imposters," Mr. Lee noted.

All the while, Mr. Jackson's spending ramped up. As described by several of Mr. Jackson's former associates, he routinely borrowed large sums of cash to pay for things he may not have been able to afford. Marc Schaffel, who formerly served as an adviser on Mr. Jackson's television projects, alleges in a lawsuit scheduled for trial next month that Mr. Jackson failed to reimburse him for outlays of more than $2.2 million, much of it in cash.

THESE expenses included $46,075 in August 2001 for appraisals and architectural work done as Mr. Jackson considered buying a home in Beverly Hills; a $1 million fee paid to Marlon Brando in September 2001 so that the film star would appear at a Madison Square Garden event and in a video honoring Mr. Jackson; more than $380,000 for the purchase of a Bentley Arnage sport sedan and a custom Lincoln Navigator sport-utility vehicle; and $250,000 in June 2003 for antique shopping in Beverly Hills.

Mr. Malnik, who began advising Mr. Jackson a few years ago, said in an interview that the entertainer had spent about $8 million annually on plane charters, antiques, paintings, hotel rooms, travel and other personal expenses, and that the annual upkeep for Neverland and its staff was about $4 million. A forensic accountant who testified in Mr. Jackson's criminal trial last year said that the singer's annual budget in 1999 included about $7.5 million for personal expenses and $5 million to maintain Neverland. None of this explains the scale of Mr. Jackson's borrowing, however, or the rapidity with which he burned through those funds.

The leading drain on Mr. Jackson's ample resources may have been monumentally unwise investments that apparently produced equally colossal losses. Mr. Malnik estimates that some of Mr. Jackson's advisers squandered $50 million on deals that never panned out — what he describes as amusement-park ideas and "bizarre, global kinds of computerized Marvel comic-book characters bigger than life." Mr. Malnik said that he had loaned Mr. Jackson $7 million, part of which was used to settle various lawsuits related to deals gone awry.

It's possible that Mr. Jackson's biggest costs may have shifted in early 2000 away from his shopping sprees to simply shouldering enormous monthly interest payments on his debt. According to one executive involved in his affairs, Mr. Jackson was making monthly payments of about $4.5 million in 2005 on $270 million in debt. That works out to an annual interest rate of about 20 percent, a toll more familiar in the worlds of credit cards, subprime lending and loan sharks and not commonly encountered by wealthy people with substantial assets. But Mr. Jackson's wildly errant spending had forced him to confront harsher realities.

By the time Mr. Jackson finally met with the Sony executives in Dubai last December, his onerous interest payments had left him in a bind. Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based investment group that specializes in distressed debt, bought Mr. Jackson's loans from Bank of America in 2003 after the singer missed some payments. It then began levying high interest rates. Fortress, which did not respond to an interview request, threatened to call its loan on Dec. 20 last year because of Mr. Jackson's delinquency. What especially concerned Mr. Jackson about that, said one person familiar with the talks, was that it was just five days before Christmas.

TO keep Mr. Jackson afloat, Sony arranged an extension with Fortress and brought in Citigroup and other potential lenders to arrange new financing at a lower rate. At a meeting in London on Valentine's Day earlier this year, Citigroup offered Mr. Jackson a new loan with a 6 percent rate. Citigroup struck a deal because Mr. Jackson agreed to give Sony the right to buy half of Mr. Jackson's 50 percent stake in the Beatles catalog at a future date for about $250 million, providing a backstop for Citigroup if Mr. Jackson defaulted.

To the amazement of others involved in the talks, Fortress then offered Mr. Jackson the same terms — a measure of how desirable the Beatles catalog has been and continues to be to the various financiers and advisers who have hovered around Mr. Jackson since he bought it two decades ago. By April, a final deal was in place. Citigroup ended up providing a $25 million mortgage on Neverland, most of which Mr. Jackson used to buy back a 5 percent stake in the catalog held by one of his early advisers, Mr. Branca.

For his part, Mr. Malnik said he thought Mr. Jackson might have been able to continue to afford his lifestyle and errant spending if he had continued to work, but, of course, Mr. Jackson chose to work less and less. "For Michael, it was, whatever he wanted at the time he wanted," Mr. Malnik said. "This was perpetuated over a great number of years. Ultimately, if you don't change the course of things, you get to the end of the day."

Even at the end of the day, however, some people still remember the beginning. When put on hold, telephone callers to Mr. Gordy's office are treated to the 1971 ballad "Got to Be There," Mr. Jackson's hit on his first album as a solo artist for Motown.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/bu...14michael.html





At an Industry Media Lab, Close Views of Multitasking
Sharon Waxman

In a sleek media lab hidden in a Los Angeles high-rise, some of the country's biggest media companies and their prominent clients are seeking to understand the state of the divided American attention span.

The space looks like the most advanced of homes: the living room is outfitted with the latest in video technology, and in the kitchen, the refrigerator has a television monitor for leaving notes for the children, and for looking up recipes on the Internet.

The installation, the Emerging Media Lab in Los Angeles, is run by the Interpublic Group of Companies, a holding company for ad agencies as well as media buyers like Universal McCann and Initiative. Since February, clients like Sony, L'Oréal and Microsoft have been using it to figure out a central question vexing marketers: how do you reach consumers who seem to be doing so many things simultaneously?

People now surf the Internet while watching television. Their children instant-message friends while listening to music. They all talk on the phone and check their e-mail while they cook.

"Our research showed that people somehow managed to shoehorn 31 hours of activity into a 24-hour day," said Colleen Fahey Rush, executive vice president for research at MTV Networks, which worked with an online research company, OTX, last year. "That's from being able to do two things at once."

As media companies plunk down billions of dollars in advertising at the major networks' fall presentations this week, market researchers are still struggling to understand the realities of what has been called "concurrent media usage."

Thus far, the researchers have found some common ground, but differ widely in crucial areas of interpretation. They do seem to agree on two points: that this kind of multitasking does not apply only to young people and that the amount of time spent multitasking is rising across the board.

For advertisers, the challenge is getting their message across in one medium while the consumer is active at the same time in several others. The buzzword these days is "engagement" — as in how engaged, or involved, the consumer is in a particular activity, a notion that is still relatively new in a media world that has for decades relied on stable indicators like the Nielsen ratings.

The question for programmers is whether it is possible to break through the clutter and offer material that commands more of their viewers' attention, and perhaps more advertising as a result.

In the Emerging Media Lab, major advertisers can observe engagement for themselves, watching consumers try new technologies or use old ones, through cameras that feed back into an observation room.

"Multitasking is not quantified yet," said Greg Johnson, the lab's executive director. "The metrics of all this is a big piece of what our clients want to know, and they want to know desperately. They don't know where their customers are, and it's our job to find them again and what they're doing."

Using the lab themselves, media executives can assess how their ads or other content appear on devices like portable video game players or cellphones.

"You can see things here in context," explained Lori Schwartz, the director of the lab project. Standing in the living room, she wielded a wireless mouse to navigate a media center, a flat-screen monitor on the wall that fed into the Internet, television channels, a DVD player, an Xbox 360 and a stereo system.

"For a lot of our clients, it is hard to keep up," Mr. Johnson said. "It's hard for them to know what to do next when every day there is something new — a blog, a site. They know to move their dollars, but they don't know how much or what media to pick."

Last week, 40 executives from the Sony Corporation of America came to explore the lab's possibilities after one division had tested its video-on-demand service there. "It's another way for us to further understand how consumers are using new media," a Sony spokeswoman, Lisa Davis, said. "We expect the learning here to benefit all of our businesses."

David Sklaver, president of KSL Media, who buys advertising time for clients like Western Union and Bacardi, said multitasking was either "a blessing or a curse" for advertisers. "If someone is watching a TV drama and has CNN News on the Internet," he said, "it's most likely you don't have an engaged viewer." But on the other hand, someone watching a sports event on television could enhance the experience by simultaneously surfing the Internet for game statistics.

A widely cited study conducted last year at Ball State University in Indiana observed 400 people over a broad age range for a day, and found that 96 percent of them were multitasking about a third of the time they were using media. A university white paper recently estimated that consumers spend about nine hours a day in media use, most of it watching television.

The OTX study for MTV used an online sample of 4,213 people, and found that those responding engaged in 15.6 hours of leisure activity a day, which included nonmedia activities like shopping, socializing or eating. Almost a third of that time involved doing more than one thing at a time, the study found.

Most of the multitasking involves television plus another activity, whether reading a newspaper, surfing the Internet or talking on the phone. And when that is the case, which activity is getting primary attention?

On this crucial point, the research differs. In a summary of its latest work on the topic in March, Forrester Research noted that only 11 percent of consumers who went online while watching television said they paid the greatest attention to TV. Some 61 percent paid more attention to the Internet, while 28 percent said they gave equal attention to both. Forrester used on-line surveys of 12,000 people as the basis for its findings.

Ms. Fahey Rush said her research showed something different. "TV is considered the primary media activity when you're doing two things at a time," she said. But when asked how she assessed what people were paying attention to while multitasking, she paused for nearly a minute. "We certainly asked people about how they feel about our brands on a variety of platforms," she said.

David Poltrack, the president of CBS Vision, the network's research arm, said that in the age of multitasking, it was hard to evaluate levels of engagement. "We know people are watching with shared attention," he said. "But we don't know to what degree it's less-than."

It does seem certain, though, that a viewer who is multitasking is not doing those activities with equal interest. "Terms like multitasking imply equal attention," said Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment at Ball State. "But cognitive science tells us this isn't possible. You have to give priority to one in order to absorb the messages."

Industry experts say it will be some time before this kind of research results in changes in the pricing of advertisements. IAG Research, a company that measures engagement, has slowly been bringing the television industry around to its measurement approach. In daily online surveys, the company asks respondents substantive questions about the programs and advertisements they watched. The viewer's attentiveness is graded on a scale of 0 to 100, and is not formally used to set advertising rates, but Alan Gould, IAG's chief executive, wonders how long that will last.

"When you have a small but attentive audience, that information can be very important," he said, citing the UPN hit show "Everybody Hates Chris." He said viewers of the program were 27 percent more attentive than those of a normal program. One day, that could mean higher ad rates for such shows that command a greater portion of its viewers' concentration.

"Over time," he said, "I don't see how it doesn't get baked into the equation."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/te...5research.html

[JackSpratts]

P2PNet Founder and Editor Sued
Jack

Canadian advocacy journalist Jon Newton revealed this week he is being sued for facilitating libel. While tight lipped on the details, a search of court documents by eagle-eyed supporters revealed the plaintiffs in the case may include none other than Nikki Hemming, the president of Sharman Networks, which owns the former file sharing giant Kazaa. Hemming is herself involved in seemingly endless litigation over copyrights and assets improprieties and present bete-noir of the Australian music industry.

The defendants are said to include P2PNet owner Newton and several John Does allegedly accused of further disparaging the already suffering reputations of certain company officials.





Can TV's and PC's Live Together Happily Ever After?
Richard Siklos

HOLY Grails, swirling myths and big lies seem to be in the air these days — and we're not just talking about a certain heavily publicized movie opening this week that is based on a certain megaselling novel. Rather, consider the much-ballyhooed convergence between television and personal computers (a k a the grail), which seems to edge ever closer with every week.

Slowly but surely, it seems that TV programs and movies are finding their way onto the Internet through a growing array of distribution outlets.

Just in the last few weeks, for example, Warner Brothers announced it would make hundreds of its hit films and shows available this summer for paid download via the file-sharing site BitTorrent; Fox Entertainment has joined the other major networks on iTunes with downloadable episodes of "24" and "Prison Break"; TiVo announced a deal with the Web video outfit Brightcove that intends to give people with TiVo boxes access to Internet fare on their TV sets; and ABC and CBS have begun streaming replays of some of their most popular shows on their Web sites, offering a new advertising-supported way to tune in.

Even though no one seems to be making much money yet on these ventures and there are still chewy legal and rights issues to sort out, there is palpable excitement — a sense that the TV and movie industries are going to head off the pirates and file-sharing teens by making their products widely available online in legal ways.

In doing so, it seems the ultimate no-brainer that anyone with a fancy TV monitor and a broadband Internet connection will next be able to pluck their favorite TV programs and movies off the Web (and eventually choose to disconnect their cable or satellite provider, or, as I've written previously, at least force the cable operators to offer smaller and more appealing packages of channels).

Now, this is the kind of convergence that people could really get behind — it makes a whole lot more sense than some of the "benefits" promised earlier, like surfing Web sites on a 60-inch plasma screen or answering e-mail messages while sitting in the La-Z-Boy. All the elements are falling into place: sales of high-definition TV's that can also be used as computer monitors are soaring — they are already in 19 percent of American homes — and, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, sales of digital sets will surpass the sale of analog sets this year for the first time. Meanwhile, more than 40 percent of households in the United States have signed up for high-speed connections, and the number continues to rise.

The consumer electronics industry and technology giants like Microsoft and Intel are working double-time to concoct the next generation of gadgets that will bridge the gap between computers and televisions. Some companies, among them Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems, already have products that make watching Web video on TV possible, though they are cumbersome to use.

Sharp announced last month that it would soon introduce an LCD-screen TV for the Japanese market that will let viewers watch high-definition television, use the remote control to surf the Internet, and store data and TV programs on a built-in hard drive. (One studio executive said he expected these machines would be the rage by this time next year, and that Apple is believed to have the most promising version in development.)

But here is the swirling myth — or is it The Big Lie? — about convergence: It's not as close as all of that activity suggests. For various reasons, watching TV programs delivered by the Internet on regular TV looks like it will remain tantalizingly out of reach for all but the most enthusiastic gadget junkies for some time.

The point of all these new video-content deals being struck by networks and studios is, of course, to avoid making the mistakes of the music industry, which focused too much on rear-guard actions like lawsuits and not enough on figuring out new ways to give the fans what they wanted.

The music analogy only goes so far, however. The way music is promoted and sold and listened to bears scant resemblance to TV and video products. Ventures like the one announced by Warner and the big networks are not really an alternative way of receiving conventional TV, but rather an alternative to buying or renting DVD's coupled with an intriguing new market opportunity to reach viewers on their desktop or mobile devices.

David G. Sanderson, who heads the media consulting practice at Bain & Company, offers four reasons most people won't be downloading their favorite shows onto their TV's any time soon: limitations in broadband infrastructure, the degree of readiness among electronics makers to provide a product with mass appeal, the behavior of consumers and the agenda of the players in the TV ecosystem.

"If you started from scratch, you'd do it differently," Mr. Sanderson said of the fitful process of making television shows available on the Internet. "But we have an entrenched structure in how programming is brought to consumers."

Mr. Sanderson's first two points — basically whether the Internet-based network and devices are ready for prime-time — are where most of the action is and where things could change if businesses keep investing and innovating. Still, for now, there are logjams associated with delivering large quantities of video over the Web and the unresolved "net neutrality" debate over whether heavy users should pay more to telecommunications carriers for the large amount of bandwidth they use.

His second two points — about consumer behavior and the entrenched players — are actually more complex. The consumer question boils down to whether enough people want to give up access to the dozens or hundreds of channels they pay for through their cable providers to buy programs over the Internet. And that is closely related to his point about the industry structure, which is a function of the willingness of cable networks to risk giving up their guaranteed monthly subscription fees in favor of a free-wheeling Internet alternative.

"The reality is that I don't think you're going to see the current cable offering — hundreds of linear channels — replicated on the Internet," Glenn A. Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, told me recently. "One reason is the Internet isn't physically capable of handling that volume, but obviously, with a lot of money and time, that can be alleviated. But the second thing is that we actually provide a very important economic function in the TV distribution chain."

CABLE networks are not about to jeopardize the millions they receive from guaranteed subscription fees each month — and it is probably no coincidence that the versions of TV programs sold through iTunes or Google Video are inferior in picture quality to what is offered by cable companies (while the growing popularity of high-definition TV shows that viewers want higher quality). Even Sharp's new Japanese TV, the Internet Aquos, only accesses online video material from a closed-circuit service, and displays it at inferior quality.

Mr. Britt said his industry was not ignoring the enormous amount of effort being poured into providing alternative ways to get video material delivered to the TV set. But, as he put it, "it's very complicated to set up unless you have a 13-year-old son."

Those seeking true convergence may have to keep the faith for a while yet. On the other hand, those seeking grails don't tend to give up easily.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/bu.../14frenzy.html





High-Definition Video Could Choke Internet
Peter Svensson

Every day, it seems, a new service pops up offering to send you video over the Internet. "Desperate Housewives," Stephen Colbert heckling the president, clips of bad dancers at wedding parties: It's all there.

You may be up for it, but is the Internet?

The answer from the major Internet service providers, the telephone and cable companies, is "no." Small clips are fine, but TV-quality and especially high-definition programming could make the Internet choke.

Most home Internet use is in brief bursts — an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV — for hours at a time — that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet's capacity to prevent that will be expensive.

To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example.

Internet activists and consumer groups are vehemently against those plans, saying they amount to tilting the Internet's level playing field, one of the things that encourages innovation. They want legislation to guarantee a "neutral" Internet, but prospects appear slim.

At the heart of the debate is a key question: How much would it really cost the Internet carriers to provide a couple of hours of prime-time TV over their networks every day?

The carriers are playing their cards fairly close to their chest, but there are ways to get close to an answer.

One data point: As a rough estimate, an always-on, 1 megabit-per-second tap into the Internet backbone in downtown Atlanta, bought wholesale, costs an ISP $10 to $20 a month, according to the research firm TeleGeography Inc. An ISP's business is carrying data from that tap to the customer.

One megabit per second doesn't sound like that much, but ISPs spread that bandwidth out over their subscribers. Analysts estimate that ISPs sell around 30 times more bandwidth to their end users than they can connect simultaneously to the Internet (the figure probably varies widely from provider to provider).

In this sense, broadband is like old-fashioned telephone service, where there are always more lines leading from homes to the local switching station than there are going from the station out of the neighborhood. If everyone in a neighborhood picks up the phone at once, some calls won't go through because there aren't enough outgoing lines. But that rarely happens, so the system works.

On the broadband network, the oversubscription means that one megabit-per-second connection to the Internet is enough to serve 40 DSL accounts, each at a maximum speed of 768 kilobits per second, typical for low-end DSL. So the cost of providing data to each DSL is about 25 cents to 50 cents a month per customer.

Of course, the carrier also needs to pay for the equipment that brings data from the Internet connection point to the subscriber, first through fiber-optic lines and then through DSL or cable.

Oversubscription doesn't present a problem as long as people are using the Internet for Web surfing, e-mail and the occasional file download. But if everyone in a neighborhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time, it's not going to work.

"The plain truth is that today's access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect," according to Tom Tauke, Verizon Communications Inc.'s top lobbyist.

The solution, of course, is to make the pipes connecting to the Internet fatter. To illustrate what that would mean, BellSouth Corp.'s chief architect, Henry Kafka, uses the assumption that the cost of providing a month's worth of data to the average user, about 2 gigabytes, costs the company $1. That's a fairly small amount compared to the $25 to $47 a month BellSouth charges for DSL, but then the company has to pay for sales, support, maintenance and a host of other costs.

If that same user were to start downloading five TV-quality movies per month, BellSouth's data cost, not including the cost of maintaining the DSL line, would go up to $4.50 a month. Higher, but perhaps not high enough to break BellSouth's business model.

But if the customer starts watching Internet TV like the average household watches regular TV, 8 hours a day, BellSouth's cost would go up to $112 a month, according to Kafka.

"We don't expect to get to the point where we're charging anyone those kinds of prices for Internet service, but it does reflect the kind of impact that high-quality video could have on the network and business models for providing the Internet," Kafka said.

To deal with that, Kafka said says BellSouth might put caps on the amount of data that a residential user gets for free, and charge extra if the user goes over, much like cell phone users pay overages. Other options include charging content providers extra for guaranteed delivery, the kind of model that has raised the hackles of Internet content providers and activists.

However, Kafka's estimates for these costs aren't really BellSouth's. Like other telephone companies, they don't disclose their actual costs. Instead, Kafka's base figure of $1 for 2 gigabytes of data per month is based on an estimate by Dave Burstein, editor of the DSL Prime newsletter, and Burstein thinks Kafka has it wrong.

"Traffic just isn't moving up that fast," Burstein said. "It will go up and it will go up faster, but not fast enough to be dollars and cents that really matter."

Internet video is still just a small fraction of the total amount of video people watch, and that's unlikely to change overnight, in Burstein's opinion.

In fact, he said, Internet traffic has increased much more slowly than the prices of Internet-carrying equipment like switches and routers have fallen, and that trend is likely to continue.

Burstein believes the danger of letting the carriers charge extra for guaranteed delivery is that they'll put the spending for upgrades into creating that extra "toll lane," and won't reduce oversubscription in the rest of the network even though it would be cheap to do so.

Both Verizon and AT&T Inc. have said they won't degrade or block anyone's Internet traffic. But it's impossible to tell what goes on inside their networks.

The message: Stay tuned, and watch your download speeds.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060514/...net_neutrality





Huawei Unveils Gigabit Broadband Download Technology
Richard Wilson

Huawei Technologies is turning up the pressure as a supplier of next generation broadband telecoms networks with the announcement of a Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) with a 1Terabit data switching capacity.

When deployed the GPON system, called SmartAX OFA5920, will allow users to have voice, data, and video services at a downlink rate of up to 2.5Gbit/s and an uplink rate of 1.25Gbit/s.

“This super-large capacity GPON solution provides abundant bandwidth which not only help operators address the requirements of existing services such as IPTV and Triple Play, but more importantly guarantees an evolution towards future high bandwidth services.” said Li Jian, v-p of Huawei’s access network product business.

The Chinese telecoms supplier claimed it is the first passive optical network with terabit non-blocking switching capability and full redundancy design.

In February, Huawei joined with Nortel in a plan to set up a joint venture to develop next generation broadband access technologies such as PONs.

The telecoms firm is looking to increase its telecoms market share outside China, and particularly in Europe. Last year it acquired UK manufacturer Marconi which will help to support its business as a future supplier to BT for its 21st Century Network project.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Art...technology.htm





Web Video Compression Could End Congestion
Brian Bergstein

With more and more video surging across the Internet not just to computers but also televisions and handheld devices, something that could relieve the congestion or improve the quality would be a huge breakthrough.

That is inspiring multiple efforts to chase a long-sought — and often unachieved — goal of better compression, the trick of shrinking a movie, song, picture or other large file so that it can be whisked over the Internet without anyone noticing a difference.

Some compression companies are making some eyebrow-raising promises, such as the ability to squeeze a video file tight enough to facilitate high-definition television over the Internet. Others say their compression schemes will enhance existing video applications such as medical imaging.

"We stand a tremendous chance of becoming a de facto standard," boasts Daniel Kilbank, who founded Bethesda, Md.-based compression-technology vendor Qbit LLC with former Apple Computer Inc. CEO John Sculley in 2003.

Qbit's compression system is considered "loss-less," meaning it can shrink a file without losing a detail from the original file. It uses pattern-recognition algorithms to spot recurring aspects of a scene rather than sending them multiple times.

In contrast, today's top method of video compression, MPEG-4, is considered "lossy" because some quality is sacrificed in shrinking the file. If you see fuzzy or pixelated images online, the faults could lie in the compression.

Consequently, even if Qbit merely matches MPEG-4's ability to shrink files but can do so losslessly, Kilbank argues that his technology "really creates a business argument" for new kinds of portable devices and Internet services with high-definition content.

Qbit figures to find its best success in "professional imaging fields" that generate huge files, such as medicine, defense, movie production and oil exploration, In-Stat analyst Gerry Kaufhold believes. Eventually, however, Qbit expects to be able to shrink files that already have been compressed with MPEG — potentially a boon to cable, satellite and phone-companies pumping out video content.

A different compression approach is in the works at Euclid Discoveries LLC, based in this proudly historic Revolutionary War town.

Euclid recently announced that it can dramatically improve on MPEG-4's ability to render faces, while also shrinking files up to 10 times more efficiently. By focusing on faces first, Euclid hopes to spur "talking head" services, such as news broadcasts or videoconferences, on portable devices.

The compression is not lossless, but Euclid founder Richard Wingard argues that mathematical tricks will make the loss essentially unnoticeable.

For now, it appears Euclid still has far to go. In an April demonstration for The Associated Press, the system presented clearer facial images than files compressed with MPEG-4. But the edges weren't smoothly integrated into the picture, as if the face had been glued on the background for a collage.

Wingard said those problems will soon be fixed. And he said rendering faces is one of the hardest aspects of image manipulation, so having already solved that puts Euclid close to essentially removing bandwidth constraints for high-quality video. Euclid pledges to eventually get a two-hour movie down to 50 megabytes — small enough to fit 20 on a portable USB drive, for example.

Indeed, In-Stat's Kaufhold believes that Euclid has "something valuable at its core" that might lead to delivering HDTV over the Internet.

But other observers are far more skeptical. For one thing, innumerable compression claims have been made over the years only to fizzle.

And while there have been notable compression advancements over the years from such players as Divx Inc. and On2 Technologies Inc., those technologies power niche applications.

One reason is that existing, lossy compression — such as the MPEG-2 format that encodes DVDs — is usually good enough for entertainment purposes, said Predrag Filipovic, an analyst with The Diffusion Group.

He also notes that a startup compression scheme always faces an uphill fight. It must attract the interest of equipment makers who are reluctant to stray from industry standards, and it has to overcome rival offerings from full-service providers such as Microsoft Corp.

"Is there a need for yet-better compression? Yes, you can argue that there is," Filipovic said. "The question is how much better somebody has to be in order to justify the huge cost of marketing this thing and the huge cost to the provider. Those equations usually do not end up in a revolution."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060514/...hkBHNlYwMxNjk1





In Japan, a Provider of Cable Ups the Ante
Ken Belson

The Japanese are among the most avid television watchers on earth, yet most are still pulling their favorite shows out of the air. Just one in five homes here subscribes to a cable or satellite service.

Jupiter Telecommunications, the nation's biggest cable provider, is out to change that. Jupiter, which sells services under the brand name J:COM, has been aggressively signing up customers for its television, broadband lines and digital phones — even going so far as to pitch its wares door to door.

In March, J:COM also started selling mobile phone service, an offering that American cable companies like Comcast are only just developing.

This "grand slam" bundle has made J:COM the company to beat in Japan and is typical of how the company's American owners — led by the cable tycoon John C. Malone — are experimenting with both the latest technology and age-old salesmanship.

J:COM, which is partly owned by Sumitomo, looks like a local company from the outside. But behind its Japanese exterior, J:COM has a heavy American imprint, thanks to its majority owners at Liberty Global, which was formed last year when UnitedGlobalCom merged with the international holdings of Liberty Media International. Microsoft owns a small share in the company, too.

J:COM brings in almost one-third of the sales at Liberty Global, whose overseas holdings stretch from Japan to Chile to the Netherlands, and its advanced services are providing a road map for cable companies in other corners of the globe.

But to sell those services to a public used to getting their TV for free, J:COM must do some hand-holding. The company has 1,900 sales agents who go door to door, signing up new customers and providing technical support.

That extra effort might appear excessive to Americans, who have been buying cable and satellite services for years. But J:COM reckons that the personalized attention is crucial, because about 40 percent of Japan's population is over 50 and reluctant to order new services on their own.

"We have to explain to people why cable TV is important, and face-to-face interaction lets us do that," said Hiroyuki Nakatani, J:COM's manager in charge of sales and marketing.

In addition to offering video-on-demand, digital video recorders and other products that are mainstays in American homes, J:COM is expanding by aggressively buying rivals. Last year it took over cable companies in Kobe and Tokyo to raise its market share above 30 percent. J:COM, which is nearly five times as large than the second-biggest competitor, plans to keep buying some of the hundreds of remaining Japanese cable providers.

The acquisitions, combined with new products, have helped J:COM's sales grow by more than one-third in the last three years and an additional 20.4 percent in the first quarter this year, to 51.1 billion yen, or $464.1 million. Profits in the quarter surged 30.4 percent, to 4.37 billion yen.

"With our new services, we want the entire home entertainment budget to come our way," said Tomoyuki Moriizumi, J:COM's chief executive. "We want to make a one-stop shop for consumers."

J:COM hopes that its extra bulk and new services will help it fend off new kinds of competitors. Companies like Softbank are offering television over the Internet, and Japan's biggest phone companies are building vast fiber optic networks and teaming up with satellite providers like SkyPerfect to offer their own television services.

SkyPerfect, which has more than four million subscribers for its satellite services, is working with NTT, the country's largest carrier, to bundle its television with NTT's phone and broadband services for as much as $18 a month less than J:COM charges. The arrangement is similar to the relationship that Verizon and other American carriers have with DirecTV and Dish.

The fresh competition is a big reason investors remain skeptical about J:COM's prospects. The stock of the parent company of J:COM rose 21 percent in the three months after its debut in March last year, but it has lost all of that in the last few months. On Friday, it closed 5.5 percent below its initial offering price.

Yoshiyuki Kinoshita, an analyst at Merrill Lynch here, said "excessive concerns regarding the company will disappear" once investors focus on the company's growing profits and expanding market share.

All Japanese pay-television providers, though, still must grapple with the country's broadcasters, including the government-owned NHK. Like ABC, CBS and NBC decades ago, they dominate the television industry with big-budget dramas, game shows and sports. Growing numbers of shows are broadcast in high definition.

These networks win most of the advertising dollars spent on television, forcing cable and satellite to rely more on monthly subscriptions than their American counterparts.

Cable and satellite providers also face structural barriers. Many Japanese live in cramped apartments that lack the clear views of the sky needed to hang satellite dishes. The cable industry is dotted with dozens of tiny family-run or municipally owned companies. In big cities, trading companies, electronics makers and utilities and railroads often hold control.

With so many competitors spread across the country, J:COM has a hard time getting large enough to win deeper discounts from set-top box makers and programmers.

Still, J:COM has done a better job than most at selling new services to generate revenue. Almost 40 percent of its 1.8 million television subscribers have digital cable services that allow them to use digital video recorders, video on demand and other premium services. Nearly 23 percent of its customers order their television, broadband and phone service from J:COM.

"Other companies like NTT are trying to offer a triple play with satellite companies," Mr. Moriizumi said. "What's the point? We have one company, and we can give volume discounts of about 1,500 yen to customers with all three products."

Naoki Hiratsuka, a 58-year-old father of two, has had J:COM's triple play for four years. In addition to a basic television package, he gets a digital phone line and a broadband connection with a top speed of 30 megabits a second, about six times as fast as that offered by most American cable companies. He pays about $130 a month for the three services and some premium channels.

"When I saw the price of the package, I had to switch to J:COM," said Mr. Hiratsuka, who used to buy his phone and Internet line from NTT.

Mr. Hiratsuka is also considering whether to get a cellphone from J:COM once the company adds more models. J:COM does not operate its own cell network, but uses the one run by Willcom, a local carrier, an arrangement similar to what American cable companies are developing with Sprint.

In its first two months, J:COM's wireless service attracted 7,000 customers, many of them older consumers and teenagers who prefer a basic, inexpensive service. The company, which hopes to sign up 50,000 subscribers by the end of the year, charges $25 a month for a fixed-rate calling plan that lets J:COM customers call each other free.

Like American cable companies, J:COM wants to develop phones that work on the cellular network outdoors and wireless networks indoors and, ultimately, will let subscribers program their digital video recorders from their phones.

J:COM tailors its offerings for its audience with interactive services like mah-jongg and karaoke for older customers and daily recipes and workout programs for housewives. In a country known for its personal touch, J:COM and its American owners appear to have gone local.

"To the Japanese consumer, it's not only the cost, but also the convenience, so that if something breaks down, there will be a face to call," said Jane Buenaventura, a telecommunications analyst at Pyramid Research. "It's a market that is used to the retail approach, and J:COM knows that very well."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/te...y/15cable.html





Plan for Porn Domain Voted Down
Walaika K. Haskins

ICANN, the Internet's key oversight body, has canned a proposal to create an .XXX domain for pornographic Web sites. The controversial proposal had faced considerable opposition from both conservative groups and Internet porn companies.

The nine-to-five vote by the ICANN board brings to a close a six-year effort by ICM Registry to create and operate the domain. According to ICM, a porn-specific domain would produce a clearly identifiable area of the Internet for purveyors of adult content, and would therefore make it easier to prevent kids from inadvertently accessing that material.

Having a porn domain, ICM has argued, also would help the multibillion-dollar adult industry put an end to some of the major problems plaguing the Internet, including porn-related spam.

Playing Politics

The vote was a 180 degree reversal for the ICANN board, which had given the proposal preliminary approval in June 2005. However, ICANN postponed making a final decision last August after U.S. government officials voiced opposition to the plan. Another vote, scheduled for December, was deferred once again.

The U.S. government's reaction to the plan created the perception that the process has become politicized and had many critics questioning ICANN's independence as a neutral, nonpolitical oversight body.

During the past six months, pressure on ICANN has increased from several fronts, with groups opposing the domain flooding ICANN's public discussion board with posts critical of the plan.

"The board was certainly very conscious of that [controversy] ... but the heart of the decision today was not driven by a political consideration," Paul Twomey, chief executive of ICANN, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying.

Twomey said the vote was based on whether the creation of the domain would put the organization between the proverbial rock and a hard place, compelling it to enforce hundreds of country-specific laws governing pornography.

Porn Segregation

Mukul Krishna, a Frost & Sullivan analyst, said the vote showed that ICANN was willing to stand up to pressure against those who supported the creation of the domain. Right now, Krishna said, the issue is simply too controversial for anyone to approve a plan such as this.

The porn industry doesn't want it and governments don't want it, Krishna said. "ICANN doesn't want it because it doesn't have the resources," he said. "But there are a lot of powerful special-interest groups that kept the proposal alive for a long time."

Krishna expects that the issue will fade into the background, at least for a few of years.

A better idea than creating a special domain for porn, according to Krishna, would be to establish a Web site rating system analogous to the kind used for rating movies and TV programming. "That would arguably be less contentious than confining adult sites [to a specific part of the Internet]," Krishna said.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...11/tc_nf/43246





Porn Maker Allows Downloads for TV Viewing
Gary Gentile

Hollywood has been tiptoeing its way toward letting consumers buy a movie online, burn it onto a DVD and watch it on a living-room TV. While the studios hesitate, the adult film industry is taking the leap.

Starting Monday, Vivid Entertainment says it will sell its adult films through the online movie service CinemaNow, allowing buyers to burn DVDs that will play on any screen, not just a computer.

It's another first for adult film companies that pioneered the home video market and rushed to the Internet when Hollywood studios still saw it as a threat.

"Leave it to the porn industry once again to take the lead on this stuff," said Michael Greeson, founder of The Diffusion Group, a consumer electronics think tank in Plano, Texas.

"The rest of Hollywood stands back and watches and lets the pornography industry work out all the bugs," he said.

There are business and technology factors that make it easier for adult film companies to embrace new technology faster than traditional media.

On the business side, Hollywood makes more money offering films on DVDs than in theaters. As a result, studios are hesitant to anger large retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Blockbuster by selling DVD-ready downloads directly to consumers.

Recently, most of the big studios have started selling films over the Web, including on CinemaNow, which is partly owned by the film studio Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and Blockbuster Inc. Consumers can burn a backup DVD, but it can only be played by a computer, not a DVD player.

The adult film industry doesn't face the same business challenges.

"We don't have to divvy up the pie," said Bill Asher, co-chairman and co-owner of Vivid Entertainment, the largest distributor of adult entertainment. "We sell in smaller stores, mainstream chains, but no one dominant component where we're going to get that phone call."

There are also technical issues for Hollywood to resolve.

To prevent piracy, studios now use what's known as the "content scrambling system," or CSS, to keep consumers from copying DVDs and sending the files around the Internet.

The system, which is easily circumvented, is built into every DVD player to block the playing of movies on discs burned by a computer.

That obstacle has been overcome in the design of high-definition DVDs, which are just now becoming available.

Both rival high-def brands, HD DVD and Blu-ray, use new protection schemes that allow DVDs burned in a computer to play on a DVD player. But it will be years before new players that accommodate those discs replace older models.

The studios say they are preparing to allow the online burning of DVDs for playing on TVs once the new high-definition players become widely adopted.

Vivid says its downloads, which will cost $19.95, do not use CSS. Instead, online retailer CinemaNow is using an alternate, proprietary system that it says will protect the adult movies by preventing the burned DVD from being copied to other discs.

"They built a better mousetrap," Asher said of CinemaNow.

Despite the challenges, mainstream studios are taking some risks and inching toward downloadable DVDs.

Both Warner Bros. and Universal Studios have launched hybrid programs overseas in which consumers who download films also get a DVD in the mail.

But the real goal, analysts say, is to pipe major Hollywood movies and TV shows over the Internet directly to TV sets, bypassing DVDs altogether.

"How about I just turn my set on and press 'go,'" Greeson said. "That's the holy grail."

Hollywood is moving slowly in that direction but must first devise ways to placate retailers, broadcast affiliate partners, movie theaters and others with bottom lines threatened by the move.

"The more they champion Internet distribution directly to the consumer, the more it seems they're turning their back on their old media partners, which they can't afford to do," Greeson said.

So yet again, unencumbered by such business roadblocks, the adult film industry could lead the way.

"The vanguard here is porn," Greeson said. "They made a tremendous amount of money on the Web, but they know they can make more if they get to the living room."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060515/...hkBHNlYwMxNjk1





In Tokyo, the New Trend Is 'Media Immersion Pods'
Virginia Heffernan

At the Bagus Gran Cyber Café customers rent so-called media immersion pods. It's not just a solo pursuit; pods for couples, are available too.

ALL cities takes a toll, and at times all city dwellers have to take their leave. When life in Istanbul gets too stressful, people can head to the baths. In Rio there's the beach. In Tokyo, though, the antidote to urban overload is more of the same. In the world's most media-saturated city, people take a break by checking themselves into media immersion pods: warrens cluttered with computers, TV's, video games and every other entertainment of the electronic age.

The Bagus Gran Cyber Cafés are Tokyo's grand temples of infomania. Situated well above retail level, on the odd floor number where in Manhattan you might find tarot readers or nail salons, these establishments contain row after row of anonymous cubicles. At first glance the spread looks officelike, but be warned: these places are drug dens for Internet addicts.

The first Gran Cyber Café opened in 1999. Today there are 10, serving some 5,000 people a day. Each has a slightly different orientation — some are geared to teenagers, some to salarymen — but the atmosphere is the same throughout the franchise: equal parts lending library, newsstand, arcade, Kinko's and youth hostel. An inspired extension of the basic Internet cafe, the Gran Cyber Cafés shift their meaning the more you study them, as if by a trick of their trademark low light.

Sometimes they look like nothing special, only marginally cooler than carrels you might find at a college library. But at other times, especially late at night, they seem visionary, an architectural realization of the social and personal life of the future.

"The Japanese love liminal spaces and gray zones," explained Con Isshow, a writer who has published widely on youth culture, including a collection of letters by abused children called "Letters to Japan's Worst Parents."

"In both the anonymity and role-playing games on offer at the Gran Cyber Café, you don't have to exist in tight social norms," Mr. Isshow told me. "Your identity can be in flux. You go to these places not to present yourself, but to lose yourself. Lose your name, your position, your pride."

Mr. Isshow spoke through a translator, but here he introduced some English: "No-face-man, no-ID-man, no-pride-man."

Although the services offered by Bagus, a company that also runs billiard halls, karaoke dens and spas, are aboveboard, the Gran Cyber Cafés are enshrouded in the urgent, furtive atmosphere of a hot-sheet motel. Eyes averted, customers sign in, head to the library of entertainment options, and load up on fashion magazines, video games and DVD's of "24" as if stocking up on Jim Beam. Then they beetle-brow it to their solitary pods.

What they do there is up to them. Some people channel-surf. Others trade stocks. You can download music, read novels, watch pornography, play video games, have sex, go to sleep.

According to Mr. Isshow, Japan's "petit iede," or little runaways, come for downtime, free lattes and smoothies, and, at some branches, showers. They use the places as trial separations from home — staying a few hours, overnight or a few days, long enough to scare their parents. (A "night pack" allows use of the pod from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. for about $10; some places sell toothbrushes and underwear too.) Periodically the management will remind a customer that the cafe is not a hotel, but above all Bagus respects people's privacy.

ON a recent afternoon, at around 5:30, I visited the Gran Cyber Café in the Shinjuku neighborhood for the first time, to read e-mail and visit a news site or two. Checking in, I was assigned to pod 16-A.

I loved 16-A the instant I saw it. I closed the door, slipped into a low-slung leatherette seat and surveyed the all-you-can-eat tech feast, which includes VHS and DVD players, satellite and regular television on a Toshiba set, PlayStation 2, Lineage II and a Compaq computer loaded with software, all the relevant downloads and hyperspeedy Internet. In the nearby library were thousands of comic books, magazines and novels. On the desk was a menu of oddball snacks, like boiled egg curry and hot sandwich tuna.

The atmosphere is airless and hot, with a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke. Over all the effect is of a low-wattage, low-oxygen casino.

When I spoke to Japanese cultural critics about the Gran Cyber Cafés, most gave high-flown theoretical accounts of their appeal. But Takami Yasuda, a professor at the School of Informatics and Sciences at Nagoya University who writes about virtual reality, shrugged. "I do not know exactly why people, young guys in particular, love to stay in such a dark place," he said.

I don't know exactly why I stayed either. But 10 books, two DVD's, seven magazines, two newspapers and a video game later, I found that eight hours had elapsed.

On my second visit I brought Shizu Yuasa, a married 31-year-old Japanese friend who stays overnight at Gran Cyber Cafés whenever she wants time to herself.

Shizu, the director of 2DK, an arts and media production company, is an avid reader of the Japanese graphic novels known as manga. But because she can read one in about 15 minutes, she doesn't believe in buying them. So she heads to the Bagus shelves and picks out 20 or so.

Around 8 p.m. the place filled up with a reticent and largely male crowd of loners. One nameless man told me he comes on breaks from work, to read the sports news. Naomi Iwasaki, a 28-year-old manager of an Internet portal site, said he was there to read manga. Two boys with hair dyed strawberry blond companionably watched their screens: one was tuned to a cooking show, the other to Yahoo.

Back in the stacks I met Reiko Ishii, a 25-year-old student at Hosei University who lives with her parents in Tokyo. She had tea-colored hair, wore a horn-shaped amulet around her neck, and dressed in the clingy style of early Nicole Richie. She told me she comes to Bagus often, but I was the only other customer she had ever spoken to. There are so few places, she said, where a woman can go out alone, late at night, without having to be sociable. I asked if she'd ever spent the night.

"Sure," she said, looking unfazed. "My parents know I stay here, and it's fine with them." She retreated to her pod. I went to mine too, hit the button that changed the keyboard from Chinese characters to QWERTY, and answered some e-mail.

Shizu was catching up on manga. One was "The Monetary System of Osaka," a left-wing chronicle of graft and usury among the suits of Japan's second city. Another was "Inu," or "Dog," by Haruko Kashiwagi. It's considered clever, fairly high-toned and mainstream, which is surprising because, in part, it's about a woman who has sex with her dog.

The extensive manga library also includes pornography for every taste. But sex at the Gran Cyber Café is not just in the fiction. All around me, couples were making out. Some were watching sex videos. They seemed blasé. Still, in the cubicles that seat two, the walls are a little lower, and the seats don't have a massage option. Meanwhile other customers have taken a more professional approach. The Japanese Web site Tanteifile.com published an article about a freelance prostitute — a "delivery health" girl — who moved into a Gran Cyber Café after her workplace was raided.

Shizu and I got tea and calpis, a sweet, summery drink, and returned to our pod. I leafed through teenage fashion magazines while a Japanese movie about gay samurai, "Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san," played. Shizu, in the meantime, checked out Mixi, the Japanese Friendster. Some people, I had been told, use the site to communicate with other customers who might be just a few pods away, to communicate without having to introduce themselves in person.

Finally an attractive 30-something couple, Kaori Karasawa and Naoya Ohada, settled in the pod across from us. "Will this article be on the Internet?" Ms. Karasawa asked me. "People at the office don't really know we're dating."

"But now they will," Mr. Ohada said, laughing.

He appeared eager to impress her; he held forth about manga, while she listened. They Googled subjects that came up in conversation, showing each other favorite sites, using the Internet as a kind of third party in their relationship: chaperon, entertainment, common ground. Over their pod the light at the Gran Cyber Café seemed not dim but soft, flattering, romantic.

CHECKING out wasn't going to be easy. I had come to appreciate the shared solitude the Gran Cyber Café provides, as well as the fast, infallible Internet connection.

Hidenori Kimura, a sociologist who writes about intercultural encounters, said he believes the Gran Cyber Cafés fulfill a deep and persistent cultural longing. The Japanese system of competition for education, career and social esteem, Dr. Kimura explained, forces young people to obsess over self-presentation, which costs them both fantasy and anonymity, the privileges of childhood. What Japanese young people want, in his view, are opportunities to be free of their social status.

"Traditionally," he explained, "tea ceremonies and festivals have been fulfilling this role of depriving people of their social status and thus help them become 'nobody.' Tea ceremonies deprived the feudal elites of their status and made them just a person enjoying tea ceremony and tea, while festivals among farmers offered an enclave of anarchy during the festivals where they were free of norms and rules of feudal eras."

The Gran Cyber Cafés now serve this purpose, he said. "Nobody cares what you do, which enables you to be absorbed in whatever fantasy you want to indulge in through Net surfing, Web games or manga. Yet you can satisfy your timid desire to belong." Staying in the Gran Cyber Cafés, he concluded, is now part of jibun-sagashi, or the search for the true self.

Nevertheless there's something a little shameful about spending a solo hour, or two, or seven, on a wanton media bender. It was in Japan that I first heard the word "infomania," a 2005 coinage by Hewlett-Packard, whose study last May showed that compulsive e-mailing and text-messaging do more damage to the I.Q. than regular marijuana use. But, as I read about the study in my pod, I came to doubt that such warnings would ever make people temper their infomaniac ways; maybe these are the I.Q.'s we're stuck with now.

And, really, what's so wrong with getting lost on the Internet; watching soccer or baseball on satellite television; devouring Us Weekly or Time Asia; and organizing solo marathons of Tim Burton or Kurosawa movies? The craving for media sprees runs deep, and, like so many Internet-era developments, Gran Cyber Cafés seem to answer an almost carnal need for uninterrupted access to pixels and screens and Web sites and instant-messaging and iTunes. And when that need is satisfied, you can always return to life in the city, at least for a while.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/ar...pagewanted=all





The Net's Not-So-Secret Economy Of Crime

The people who want to rip you off are very polite with each other when they're buying and selling credit card numbers.
David Kirkpatrick

Raze Software offers a product called CC2Bank 1.3, available in freeware form - if you like it, please pay for it. Raze's attractively designed Web site, registered in Belarus, may suggest a shaky command of English -"I shall pleased any estimation in respect of my programs and this page," it reads - but it displays the classic characteristics of web commerce, like visitor statistics, advertising, and links to Web sites of partners.

But CC2Bank's purpose is the management of stolen credit cards. Release 1.3 enables you to type in any credit card number and learn the type of card, name of the issuing bank, the bank's phone number and the country where the card was issued, among other info.

The ad on Raze's site, in Russian, leads to another Belarus address that appears to be a market for stolen products.

The Internet economy, as we journalists like to write, has a lot to do with sharing. And commerce, at sites like eBay, is based largely on trust. But until recently I didn't realize that these same principles govern online dealmaking among criminals.

My naiveté was alleviated with an eye-popping tour of underground Web sites, conducted by two executives from RSA Cyota, an online security firm that works for banks like Barclays (Research), Citibank (Research) and Washington Mutual (Research). They showed me a variety of sites frequented by people who steal and trade credit card numbers and then use them to steal money.

This infrastructure for online crime is far more multi-layered and sophisticated than I ever imagined.

Says Marc Gaffan, a marketer at RSA: "There's an organized industry out there with defined roles and specialties. There are means of communications, rules of engagement, and even ethics. It's a whole value chain of facilitating fraud, and only the last steps of the chain are actually dedicated to translating activity into money."

This ecosystem of support for crime includes services and tools to make theft simpler, harder to detect, and more lucrative.

Gaffan and his colleague Yohai Einav showed me, for example, a site called TalkCash.net. It's a members-only forum, for both verified and non-verified members. To verify a new member, the administrators of the site must do due diligence, for example by requiring the applicant to turn over a few credit card numbers to demonstrate that they work.

It's an honorable exchange for dishonorable information. "I'm proud to be a vendor here," writes one seller.

'A very nice person'

"Have a good carding day and good luck," writes another seller, who notes "I do replace new cards in case any died." In response, a different poster comments "He delivers fast and he is a very nice person to deal with!" It's as if he was talking about a local florist.

These sleazeballs don't just deal in card numbers, but also in so-called "CVV" numbers. That's the Creditcard Validation Value - an extra three- or four-digit number on the front or back of a card that's supposed to prove the user has physical possession of the card.

On TalkCash.net you can buy CVVs for card numbers you already have, or you can buy card numbers with CVVs included. (That costs more, of course.)

"All CVV are guaranteed: fresh and valid," writes one dealer, who charges $3 per CVV, or $20 for a card number with CVV and the user's date of birth. "Meet me at ICQ: 264535650," he writes, referring to the instant message service (owned by AOL) where he conducts business.

Other discussants on the TalkCash forums politely request login IDs and passwords for accounts at HSBC and National Bank of Canada.

Gaffan says these credit card numbers and data are almost never obtained by criminals as a result of legitimate online card use. More often the fraudsters get them through offline credit card number thefts in places like restaurants, when computer tapes are stolen or lost, or using "pharming" sites, which mimic a genuine bank site and dupe cardholders into entering precious private information. Another source of credit card data are the very common "phishing" scams, in which an e-mail that looks like it's from a bank prompts someone to hand over personal data.

Also available on TalkCash is access to hijacked home broadband computers - many of them in the United States - which can be used to host various kinds of criminal exploits, including phishing e-mails and pharming sites.

RSA's Einav says there are about a dozen marketplace sites like TalkCash in operation at any given time. Unfortunately, he and Gaffan suggest it's unlikely this nefarious activity will end anytime soon (though of course that's good for their business).

"When the FBI shuts down a site they just move to another site," says Einav, "The URL changes but the community stays intact."

RSA doesn't even bother trying to shut down such sites, because by monitoring them it can help banks protect themselves. Says Einav: "If you see abnormal demand for accounts from a specific bank, you can assume an exploit is underway."

That's when it goes into action. RSA Cyota claims to have shut down 10,000 phishing and other schemes since Cyota was formed in 1999. (RSA Security bought Cyota last December.) The company maintains a blacklist of sites, which partners use to warn customers.

Microsoft's (Research) new Internet Explorer 7 browser, for example, uses the blacklist data to warn users that a site they have requested is likely to be fraudulent. RSA also works with ISPs to get them to shut down fraudulent sites.

Don't visit any of these sites. Tapping into them could lead to unpleasant consequences. I only looked at them via the safety of RSA's computers.

But it's worth knowing this ecosystem exists, if only as a cautionary reminder of how woefully unprotected our financial systems remain in the age of the Internet.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/11/tech...rward_fortune/





Never mind the goo

How to Pirate Vinyl

So you thought you've pirated everything huh?

Step 1

Using the wooden strips, make a box around the glass plate. Seal off the edges using the window cement. Make sure everything is air tight.

Step 2

Place your record inside the box making sure that the portion to be copied is facing upward. Squeeze in some window cement to mark where the hole in the record is.

Step 3

Mix the silicone (Smooth On OOMOO 30 or OOMOO 25) for about 3 minutes before pouring in to the mold.

Step 4

Pour in the mixture. Start from one corner and let it fill-up the mold to about half a centimeter. Make sure it's even. Let it dry for 6 hours.

Step 5

Peel off the silicone from the cast. Cut off the excess using a cutter.

Step 6

Pour the liquid plastic (Smooth On Task #4) on top of the silicone cast.

Step 7

Make sure that nothing spills over the round form. You can also brush off any air bubbles that might occur.

Step 8

Carefully loosen the plate from the silicone form. Using a drill press, bore a hole through the center of the plate. You can use the silicone form as a template to make more copies.

There you have it. Your very own pirated record.

Complete with pics
http://gadgets.qj.net/How-to-Pirate-...g/49/aid/39381





MTV Launches Online Music, Video Store
Alex Veiga

For years, MTV Networks Inc. sat on the sidelines while Apple Computer Inc., RealNetworks Inc. and others racked up sales of music downloads. Now the cable network group that helped popularize music videos two decades ago is entering the online music fray with URGE, a new service that makes its public beta debut on Wednesday.

URGE comes integrated into the newest version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Player, which users of Microsoft's Windows will receive in coming weeks as an upgrade. Prior to that, the player upgrade will be available for download at the URGE and Microsoft Web sites.

At launch, URGE will have more than 2 million tracks, which can be purchased individually at 99 cents or as full albums starting at around $9.95.

The service also will offer unlimited downloads at a monthly rate of $9.95, or $14.95 for the ability to transfer songs to any of more than 100 compatible portable music players.

Initially, URGE will also feature streaming videos, with video downloads becoming available for purchase later this year.

URGE will also be the featured music service on Microsoft's media player, which will continue to have built-in links to several other services.

The company has begun clearing content from its vault of exclusive appearances by recording artists on staples such as "TRL" and "MTV Unplugged" for sale on URGE, said Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks Music Group.

The tie-in to MTV should also help URGE sell consumers on the upside of subscription services better than others have to date, said analyst Phil Leigh with Inside Digital Media.

"The thing that works to their advantage is they have a well-recognized brand that is popular to a demographic that is going to be receptive to purchasing digital music," Leigh said.

Still, URGE enters an online music market struggling to compete with online piracy and the dominance of Apple's iTunes Music Store and its market-leading iPod digital music player.

And like established rivals RealNetworks' Rhapsody and Napster Inc., URGE is not compatible with Apple's Macintosh computers or its market-leading iPod digital music player.

That incompatibility, combined with the availability of music on Internet file-sharing networks, has made subscription music plans a tough sell.

Earlier this year, Napster said it had more than a half-million subscribers. RealNetworks, which doesn't break out the number of Rhapsody subscribers, says it has more than 1.7 million paying customers for the service and its cadre of radio streaming plans combined.

Apple's iTunes Music Store, which doesn't offer a subscription plan, has sold more than 1 billion songs since its launch three years ago, while more than 50 million iPods have been purchased since 2001.

"Whether the consumer really wants a service that's only compatible with non-iPod players is going to be the big issue," said Steve Gordon, entertainment attorney and author of "The Future of the Music Business."

Toffler acknowledges the popularity of Apple's store and player, but argues both the a la carte singles model and the subscription business are still in their infancy.

"Only 5 percent of music sales happen digitally," he said. "Hopefully, through the TV channels we have and the dot-com sites ... we can educate people about the virtues of subscriptions. It's not about selling a million singles."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Alice Cooper Gets Key To Namesake City

ALICE, N.D. (AP) -- The key to this city, with just a feed store, fire hall and a bar, won't open much for rock legend Alice Cooper.

Officials from this town of about 60 people presented the aging shock rocker with a marble plaque and a gold-plated key Sunday to commemorate Cooper's visit to the city that bears his name.

"There's not a whole lot of buildings to unlock with that key," Mayor Dan Lund said. "But Alice is a cool guy and Alice is a cool city - so it's a fun thing to do."

Cooper arrived in Alice the day before he was scheduled to perform at the Fargo Civic Center. About 1,000 people cheered as his limo rolled into the town, one of several in southeast North Dakota named for the daughters of a railroad surveyor.

"This is bigger than if the governor was coming out here," Councilman Ron Mulder said.

Mulder and his wife, Jill, contacted Cooper's manager a few weeks ago about coming to Alice.

"He shook hands and signed autographs," Jill Mulder said. "He was here 30 minutes tops but it was well worth it. He was grateful."

Lund said the city had not seen so much excitement - or people - since the town's centennial celebration in 2000. But Lund, who at 58 is the same age as Cooper, said he prefers country music.

"He rocked a little too hard for me," the mayor said. "I wasn't quite angry enough to be into his music."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...05-14-23-28-54





Deal Book
Andrew Ross Sorkin

The fund run by George Soros revealed many holdings large and small, but we noticed at least one interesting change in the past three months. Whereas on Dec. 31, Soros Fund Management held about 320,000 shares of Apple Computer, on March 31 that position had changed to put options — a bearish position that pays off if the stock declines — on about 222,000 Apple shares.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=3085





From Russia, With Dread
Andrew E. Kramer


Mike Matthews

Mike Matthews, a sound-effects designer and one-time promoter of Jimi Hendrix, bought an unusual Russian factory making vacuum tubes for guitar amplifiers. Now he has encountered a problem increasingly common here: someone is trying to steal his company.

Sharp-elbowed personalities in Russia's business world are threatening this factory in a case that features accusations of bribery and dark hints of involvement by the agency that used to be the K.G.B.

Though similar to hundreds of such disputes across Russia, this one is resonating around the world, particularly in circles of musicians and fans of high-end audio equipment.

Russia is one of only three countries still making vacuum tubes for use in reproducing music, an aging technology that nonetheless "warms up" the sound of electronic music in audio equipment.

"It's rock 'n' roll versus the mob," Mr. Matthews, 64, said in a telephone interview from New York, where he manages his business distributing the Russian vacuum tubes. "I will not give in to racketeers."

Yet the hostile takeover under way here is not strictly mob-related. It is a dispute peculiar to a country where property rights — whether for large oil companies, car dealerships or this midsize factory — seem always open to renegotiation. It provides a view of the wobbly understanding of ownership that still prevails.

In Russia's early transition days, amid the collapse of authority and resulting lawlessness, organized crime groups wielded great influence. Teams of armed thugs used to carry out takeovers, arriving at a businessman's door with little to back them up but the threat of violence, even murder. Indeed, contract murders reached a frequency of more than one a day in the mid-1990's.

Later, law enforcement, from the tax police to special forces units, played a role in forcing transfers of property in the scramble for assets of the former Soviet state.

In what became known as "masky shows," police officers, their faces often hidden behind ski masks, swarmed into a business to intimidate employees and force concessions from owners. The headquarters of the Yukos oil company, for example, were the scene of a series of high-profile masky shows. .

Now, the trend in business crime in Russia is decidedly white-collar — with the faking of documents, hiring of lawyers or payoff of judges — but no less insidious, Mr. Matthews and other business owners say.

In a puzzling case in Moscow in April, for example, thieves stole a shipping container with thousands of files on company registrations from the yard of a tax inspectorate office, using a crane and a flatbed truck.

"It cannot be excluded that so-called independent raiders, those who seize others' businesses, showed an interest in the tax documents," an article in Gazeta reported.

The article suggested the theft was a coup by corporate raiders who intended to use the papers much as identity thieves in the United States turn documents rifled from trash cans into profits through fraudulent credit card operations. In this type of crime, however, entire companies are at stake.

The tax authorities act as a registrar for small businesses. With the files gone, ownership is anybody's guess, the newspaper reported. Another common tactic of the new takeover artists is faking sale agreements for company shares and then voting out the legitimate management. Tracking down the true owner can be impossible if the authorities have been bribed — or the original papers are mysteriously missing.

The problem has become so pervasive among small and medium-size businesses that it has been discussed in the Parliament, where a committee on state security addressed the issue and cited more than 1,400 cases of fraudulent takeovers in 2005.

Across Russia, the Interior Ministry has opened investigations into the theft of 346 enterprises.

"Dozens of major deals for the purchase and sale of companies take place in Russia every month," Yuri Alekseyev, a chief ministry investigator, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. "The process is ever more frequently accompanied by gross violations of the law."

"Those seizing enterprises are usually not interested in production, and just steal or sell the most liquid assets, in the first place real estate," he added.

Foreigners are not immune. Recently, the Canadian owners of the Aerostar Hotel and the French owners of an auto dealership in Moscow were maneuvered out of their businesses.

Here in Saratov, a river town on the rolling southern steppe, the battle began last autumn when Mr. Matthews received a letter with an offer. For $400,000, a company called Russian Business Estates, or R.B.E., would buy Mr. Matthews's 930-employee factory, called ExpoPul, with a turnover of $600,000 or so a month. Mr. Matthews quickly refused.

Next, a letter arrived warning that the factory would have troubles with its electricity; in March, the power went off. Intruders then came and used jackhammers to raise dust that entered the factory's clean rooms. Strange young men in leather jackets loitered outside the factory gate.

Mr. Matthews, a legend among guitarists as the inventor of the Big Muff guitar pedal, rallied makers of musical equipment who rely on tubes from Russia and promised a fight.

R.B.E.'s director in Saratov, Vitaly V. Borin, said he wanted to buy Mr. Matthews's factory for the building it occupies and then sell it to an unidentified investor. He acknowledged that his company was pressuring Mr. Matthews, but he said it was using only legal tactics. If Mr. Matthews does not agree to sell, Mr. Borin said in an interview, the factory might run afoul of national security rules.

"We have instructions of the F.S.B, where it is written in black and white that a military factory cannot exist beside a company with foreign capital," he said, referring to the Federal Security Service, a successor to the K.G.B. Just near ExpoPul is a factory that makes electronic components for military hardware.

"The F.S.B. hasn't gotten involved only because we haven't gotten them involved," he said. Writing a letter to Moscow would be all he needed to shut the factory, Mr. Borin said, as he pretended to write a letter on a napkin.

For Mr. Matthews, more is at stake than property.

In the hulking pile of brick wrapped in pipes and smokestacks that is the building, most of the employees are women. Dressed in blue robes and hair nets, they join together delicate bundles of wire, wafers of rare metal and glass bulbs with fingers trained by years of work.

"No man would want to make a tube," Lyudmila V. Afanasieva, 54, said, nimbly sliding wires into a glass cylinder. She worked on the same tube model when it went into nuclear submarines that prowled off the coast of the United States.

ExpoPul makes two-thirds of the world's vacuum tubes used for music. Outside the old Communist bloc, the technology nearly became extinct. Vacuum tubes are made on an industrial scale only in China, Russia and Slovakia.

Tuned in to the music industry's needs, Mr. Matthews increased sales to 170,000 tubes a month in 2005, from 40,000 in 1999. The company has more than doubled its work force. It sells to Fender Musical Instruments, a maker of guitar amplifiers based in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the Japanese keyboard maker Korg.

While most of the Soviet electronics industry has disappeared, rendered obsolete by Japanese makers and Silicon Valley, ExpoPul, which opened in 1953, is thriving. It is a rare example of a Soviet-era factory that became a success without painful reforms. Hidden in this provincial town, its 1950's vintage technology survived long enough to become a worldwide hit.

If the tube factory dies, so will the future of a rock 'n' roll sound dating back half a century, the rich grumble of a guitar tube amplifier — think of Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" — that musicians say cannot be replicated with modern technology.

"It's nice and sweet and just pleasing sounding," Peter Stroud, the guitarist for Sheryl Crow, said in a telephone interview from Atlanta. "It's a smooth, crunchy distortion that just sounds good. It just feels good to play on a tube amp."

He added: "It would be a catastrophe for the music industry if something happened to that plant."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/bu...s/16cheat.html





Deadline Set for Wireless Internet in Parks
Sewell Chan

New York City officials set a July deadline yesterday for a city contractor to have a wireless network up and running in Central Park, in what would be a major expansion of free Internet access that the city plans to replicate across its vast ribbons of parkland during the next several years.

The effort is part of a larger initiative that would also set up wireless networks by summer's end in parts of three more large parks: Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

All told, the commitment by the Department of Parks and Recreation, which announced the timetable at a City Council hearing, represents a major leap forward for a three-year-old project that has been hobbled by technical difficulties and a lack of interest by major Internet providers. However, it remained far from clear yesterday whether the deadlines could be met.

In pushing ahead, New York is, perhaps, trying to catch up with other cities, including Philadelphia and San Francisco, which have vowed to create citywide wireless networks and to treat Internet access as a broadly available public utility.

While New York's effort is limited to its parks, it is expected to have a huge impact, given the number of parks across the five boroughs and the density of the neighborhoods surrounding them. In many instances, residents and businesses near city parks are likely to be able to tap into the services.

The city is following an example set by private groups like the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, which activated a network in Bryant Park in June 2002, and the Alliance for Downtown New York, which did the same in eight Lower Manhattan sites from 2003 to 2005, including City Hall Park, Bowling Green and the new Wall Street Park.

NYC Wireless, a nonprofit group that did the technical work for those projects, has also set up networks at Union Square, Tompkins Square and Stuyvesant Cove Parks, and is building a network at Brooklyn Bridge Park this year.

So far, the city's own efforts have paled compared with those achievements by private groups.

In June 2003, the Parks Department sought bidders willing to design, build, operate and maintain Wi-Fi networks in all or part of Battery, Central, Flushing Meadows-Corona, Pelham Bay, Prospect, Riverside, Union Square, Van Cortlandt and Washington Square Parks, as well as Orchard Beach in the Bronx.

Three companies responded — Verizon Communications and two tiny start-up companies. Verizon was selected in April 2004, but a month later it backed out of the deal.

The contract was then awarded that October to one of the two smaller companies, Wi-Fi Salon, which is based on the Upper East Side. While the company installed a network last summer at Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, it missed a deadline last fall to finish the work at the other parks.

At the City Council hearing, Robert L. Garafola, the department's deputy commissioner for management and budget, said that the city had extended the deadline to August.

"We expect Central Park to be launched in July, and the rest of the parks in the late summer," he said.

After the hearing, however, doubts began to emerge. Asked about the deadlines, Marshall W. Brown, the owner of Wi-Fi Salon, said: "That's the timetable set forth by Parks. Let's see if that's attainable." Later he added, "It's obviously going to be tight, but I'm confident we'll be able to pull it off."

The parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, said his department would probably have to pick another contractor if Mr. Brown could not meet the new deadline.

"All of us want to see it happen," Mr. Benepe said in a telephone interview. "We'll have to make an honest assessment to see, if we can't get it done with this operator, if there's another operator who can and wants to. The technology exists; the willingness to invest in that technology up front may or may not exist."

Mr. Benepe defended the decision to rely on the private sector for the project. "We're not paying for this service and the city is not investing any money in it, so we expect the operator to pay for it."

A wireless network involves a complex system of cables, radios, antennas and nodes that allow users to tap into the Internet without a cable. Mr. Brown said he hoped to make money by partnering with a big communications company that would promote its products and also through limited advertising that park visitors would have to read before being able to browse the Web.

Under the agreement, Mr. Brown promised to pay the city the greater of $30,000 a year for three years or 10 percent of gross receipts from the park-based networks.

But since reaching the deal with Mr. Brown, the city has all but abandoned that model for future wireless contracts. In a new request for proposals in February, the city asked for bids to create wireless networks in additional parks — with almost no revenue for the city.

For instance, it has selected a partnership of the Friends of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and NYC Wireless to create a network in the plaza, which is near the United Nations. The partnership will pay the city $1 a year.

Expert Communications/TravelNet Technologies, a Long Island company, has been chosen to build networks at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and at Columbus Park in Downtown Brooklyn. The city expects to receive just $700 a year for each site.

Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer of Manhattan suggested that the city was finally realizing that to put wireless systems in place, it could not expect to make money from the effort.

"I don't mean to say 'I told you so,' but we did have this conversation," Ms. Brewer told Mr. Garafola at the hearing.

Other parks to be covered under the new plan are Carroll, Fort Greene and Cobble Hill Parks, all in Brooklyn.

At one point during yesterday's hearing, Councilman Joseph P. Addabbo Jr. of Queens asked whether wireless service could be established at beaches and pools some day. (He did not get a clear answer.) In any case, Councilwoman Helen D. Foster of the Bronx said she did not look forward to such a day. "I would hope I would never have to have my laptop at the beach," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/nyregion/16wifi.html





Vigilante Trojan Attacks Other Malware
John E. Dunn

A "vigilante" Trojan, that attempts to protect infected PCs from the effects of malware caught while using peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, has been discovered.

The Windows Trojan/Erazer-A Trojan looks at default folders for downloading MP3, AVI, MPEG, WMV, Gif, Zip graphic and video files, and wipes anything it finds with these extensions in the target locations.

The assumption is that because the Trojan is only deleting certain file types in specific download directories used by P2P programs -- one of the main sources of inadvertent malware infection -- it is attempting to protect those it manages to infect.

The catch is that the program also attempts to subvert certain security programs to aid its activities, which opens the user to a more general risk of infection or program instability. It also appears to steal information.

The company that first uncovered it spreading among its customers, Sophos, has dubbed it as a "vigilante" Trojan, making it an extremely rare type of malware that could have some beneficial effects.

"The Erazer Trojan is a vigilante worthy of a Charles Bronson movie, taking the law into its own hands. However, it's perfectly possible for the Trojan to aim poorly and wipe out innocent files too," commented Graham Cluley of Sophos.

Vigilante it might be, but the Trojan spreads in the same way as those pieces of malware it appears to be targeting -- via P2P file sharing. It can also, of course, be used for malicious purposes, so this is a beneficial program most users would probably not want help from.

"I don't think this was written with good intentions because it attempts to turn off security," said Cluley. There would be nothing more dangerous than for people to become accustomed to the idea of "beneficial malware" because that might create a false sense of security.

Or is Trojan/Erazer-A the ultimate social engineering Trojan, one which fools people into accepting its beneficial promise, only to cause major problems when in its next incarnation as Trojan/Erazer-B or C?
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index....39;fp;2;fpid;1





MPAA Offers To Settle (Again)
Shawn

There is an "Early Neutral Evaluation Conference" on May 23, 2006 to determine if this matter can be settled. Personally, it seems like an utter waste of time because at this point about the only thing I would settle for is if they dropped the case, paid my attorney fees and then dissolve their whole organization.

They offered me an initial settlement of $2,500 (before they decided to take it to court), which was rejected on the basis of principal. Then today I talked to my attorney and they are offering a settlement of $3,500.

Bahahahahahaaha! So if I refused your $2,500 out of principal, what exactly makes you think I'm going to give you $3,500 now? That's comedy.

From everything I've read online, the MPAA (and RIAA) has been pretty much extorting everyone simply because they can't afford to fight it. This certainly will give me something interesting to blog about. I just pray it goes to a full trial, where they will lose and then give everyone else that is being sued a nice lawsuit they lost as a reference for their lawsuit... "MPAA vs. Shawn Hogan" That has a nice ring to it. Maybe this loss will be the start of their demise. (Hmmm... I seem to have quite the aspirations, eh? haha)

From a purely business standpoint, I think all the lawsuits that the MPAA and RIAA are throwing out are only hurting them in the long-run. From everything I've read, it does not curb piracy at ALL. I would even argue it increases it because all of a sudden people that weren't aware you could download music/movies now realize you can (and some will start). Then you are going to compound this by everyone talking about it and reading other's blogs. I'm a perfect example... from talking my attorney and then researching stuff online as a result of that, I now know that if you have the proper software installed, you can download pretty much any movie (or anything else) you want.

Not only that, but you would think they would be wiser about who they choose to extort.

For as big of an organization they are, my website gets roughly 10,000 times more traffic than theirs (hell, this stupid blog gets more traffic than their site). Then again, digitalpoint.com more traffic than buy.com or adobe.com.. hehe

So what just happened? Well now a few hundred thousands people per day were just educated about 1. about their general extortion and 2. they also now know that you can download whatever you want. I'm starting to think maybe the MPAA might actually kill the movie industry (which this dude shares my viewpoint). If they were smart, they certainly would choose their racketeering targets a little wiser (like maybe someone without the resources to fight and a captive audience of 80 million people per month that will read my viewpoint). This could turn out to be some good/interesting reading though. Reminds me a bit of the Winn and Sims fiasco.

Wanna see something else funny? Check Google's top 10 results for "MPAA"... It seems I'm not the only one that thinks the MPAA is looney.

http://www.google.com/search?q=mpaa

Oh, and just as a side note, they are utter liars... They told me they identified the specific computer that did whatever they claimed and they traced it back to me (of course I knew that was a lie since it never happened). But now they are saying they don't have any such information (MAC address basically). {rolls eyes}
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2...tle-again.html

Preparing For Early Neutral Evaluation Conference
by Shawn

It's amazing how no matter how many times you tell someone something, they don't seem to "get it". Someone from my attorney's office called me letting me know they are preparing whatever paperwork they have to file for next weeks Early Neutral Evaluation Conference. They keep letting me know they are working on getting the issue settled.

But here's the problem... It's not about the money for me, it never was. I've already spent more in legal fees than what I could have settled for.

I will never sign any sort of admission that I did anything (since I didn't) in exchange for them to drop it. There is nothing the MPAA/Universal Studios could say or do that will make me settle (I wouldn't settle for $1). I know technically I can't prevent them from dropping the case, but if I could, I would force it to go to a full trial with final judgement. As far as I've been able to research, out of the tens of thousands of RIAA and MPAA lawsuits, not a single one has gone to a final judgement. Does that seem odd to anyone else? (If anyone knows differently, please let me know.)

The bottom line is I would gladly prefer to spend $1M out of my own pocket, rather than just hand over the $2,500 in extortion money they wanted. Regardless of the money spent, there is always a way to indirectly recoup the costs. For example paid advertising displayed to people reading about my case (which at this point is well over 100,000 people, and we haven't even really begun). Another idea I had was why not put together a website where people could use it to defend themselves from the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits. The only reason people settle with them is because they can't afford the cost of going to court. Maybe put together a site that generates all the filings/forms they need to defend themselves for a couple hundred bucks or something. BTW, if any lawyer(s) want to do a joint venture on something like that, please let me know.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2...onference.html





Screw the Digital-Rights Bugaboo
John C. Dvorak

I have mixed feelings about so-called digital-rights management and its benefits. My concerns don't stem solely from DRM itself, but from the fact that it's not only illegal to crack DRM systems—it's essentially illegal even to think about cracking them. This, of course, stems from the onerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It and other laws and structures were pushed into play by lobbyists for the movie and record industries.

These lobbyists argue that this somehow serves the public, by making it safe to put content on new digital media without fearing that one copy can turn into 100,000 copies through P2P copying or whatever. When you look into it, these folks do not even like the idea of personal backups, because they believe that personal backups are nothing more than bootleg copies!

The record industry needs DRM more than the movie industry does, because it needs a surefire way to keep people from copying the one good song from an album. It needs the leverage of that one good song to continue to gouge the public with high prices. In many instances, the one good song per album actually amounts to the user spending $15-$18 for one song, since the other ones are junk. The record industry folks hate iTunes and other single-song distribution mechanisms for this reason. They've even suggested that certain singles be sold for more money than usual. They are trying to recoup all the money they would have made selling albums with one good song and 13 pieces of crap.

For the people who run the movie industry, these DRM systems are important so they can carefully orchestrate the worldwide marketing campaign for a movie and not have to worry about it getting into the hands of, say, the Germans months before its theatrical release in Germany. That would ruin the marketing campaign. Movie-business executives also see themselves as being in the music business, with they themselves being the orchestral directors. They pose as conductors wearing tails, directing a marketing symphony.

The Irony of It All. Now it's fairly well known that each time a new medium comes along for the distribution of content, the sales of that content increase. Book publishers who actually put books online for free, for example, see an increase in book sales. The Grateful Dead during their long heyday became one of the top live acts in the world, making millions on their concert tours. The group allowed and encouraged fans to bring recording gear to tape their shows.

When executives are confronted with these sorts of examples, they brush them off as anomalies. Here's where I like to mention that CD sales actually increased during the heyday of Napster. When Napster was shut down, CD sales fell. Recording executives will tell you that CD sales would have increased even more without Napster and they fell later because, uh, they just did.

Let's not forget the VCR and the fact that the recorded movie ended up becoming the most profitable aspect of the movie business. That happened despite efforts by executives to ban VCRs when they were introduced. So here's the deal: Screw these jokers. They won't listen to reason. They do everything they can to ruin their own business by refusing to change anything and making it difficult for the consumer to do what he or she wants to do.

These industries already make too much money and obviously have too much corruptive influence. Besides that, the products that come from them generally stink. So why give them any more of an edge with logic and good advice? Generally speaking, there is nothing all that important about any particular movie released in any given year. Yeah, this or that product might be fun once in a while, but there are other ways of being entertained. How about having dinner with friends and talking? Or how about going for a walk?

Can't we find alternative ways to be entertained? Do you really need to listen to music all day long? Try classical music. You'll find genuine and sincere musicians who are not there to crank out pop junk. Move to indie bands if you need a dose of rock. Stop going to the movies and go see some plays—even a high-school play. These kids need your money more than anyone in Hollywood. Do you really need to watch a movie? Find an art theater and watch something thoughtful, if you must.

Above all, let's stop complaining about the P2P situation with our mouths, and start complaining with our pocketbooks.
http://www.pcmagazine.com/article2/0...1962437,00.asp





Google Inc. Tweaks Its Video Service
AP

Internet search leader Google Inc. is making it easier to post and share online videos on its site, hoping to widen the appeal of a service that so far has been eclipsed by upstart YouTube.com.

Until the system was changed late Tuesday, uploading a video to Google's site required a special piece of software to be installed on a computer. The Mountain View-based company has retooled its service so that step is no longer required.

Google also is shortening the wait for uploaded videos to appear on its site.

Users occasionally have had to wait as long as 24 hours for a video to show up on the service, said Peter Chane, a product manager for Google Video. Videos should now be available to share shortly after they are transmitted to Google, Chane said.

As online video becomes more popular, Google is trying to gain ground on much smaller company in San Mateo, Calif-based YouTube.

Since its debut a year ago, the video-sharing site has blossomed into a cultural phenomenon. YouTube says viewers watch more than 40 million videos daily on its site.

Google doesn't disclose how many videos are watched on its site.

In April, YouTube attracted 12.5 million unique U.S. visitors, surpassing all other video services, according to Nielsen/NetRatings Inc. Google is ranked fourth in the video category with 7.3 million visitors, trailing Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and News Corp.'s MySpace.com besides YouTube.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Hope, Saved on a Laptop
Dan Barry


An undated picture of Ann Nelson

For a long time, Ann Nelson's laptop computer remained dark.

It had been returned to her family in North Dakota, along with the other belongings she left behind in that great city 1,750 miles to the east. She was 30, lively, working near the very top of the World Trade Center, and — you already know.

In the small town of Stanley, halfway between Minot and Williston, a fog thick enough to blur time's passing enveloped the Nelson home. Amid the many tributes to Ann, amid the grieving and the absence, it became hard to remember just when and how the laptop wound up in the basement of the one-story bank that the family owned.

There the laptop sat, for years, tucked away from sight in a black case. It was a Dell Inspiron 8000, bought shortly before Ann called home that day in early 2001 to say she had gotten a job as a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald — in New York! Soon she was living near the corner of Thompson and Spring, and working in an office 104 stories in the air.

Ann's parents, Jenette and Gary Nelson, say the laptop remained unopened because they are not computer savvy. But it was more than that, Mrs. Nelson admits. "To tell you the truth, it was just too painful."

Three summers ago, during an art class Mrs. Nelson was teaching in that basement, a couple of students showed her how to use the computer. After the class, she says, "I just left it there."

Who knows why never becomes someday, and someday becomes today. One day last fall — "when I got to feeling stronger," she says — Mrs. Nelson finally opened her daughter's computer. She pushed its power button and started by looking at the photographs stored in its memory.

Soon Mrs. Nelson was learning how to play the computer's games, including solitaire and hearts. These distractions both relaxed her and reminded her of the games she used to play with Ann. Somehow, this little black machine made Ann seem present, there beside her.

Getting lost in the computer became part of Mrs. Nelson's after-work ritual, though she never bothered to open a file that said "Top 100"; probably some music, she figured. Then, two months ago and who knows why, click.

What she found was a catalog of goals, humanly incomplete: a list that reflected a young woman's commitment to the serious, to the frivolous, to all of life. That night, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson sat down with the list, and were with their daughter again.

1. Be healthy/ healthful. 2. Be a good friend. 3. Keep secrets. 4. Keep in touch with people I love and that love me. 5. Make a quilt.

Mrs. Nelson used to sew all the time, until it simply became too hard to guide a needle properly with a joyous little girl frolicking in her lap. Then, when Ann grew older, mother and daughter decided to sew a tablecloth.

"I don't think we ever finished," Mrs. Nelson says, laughing. "She had to be doing 100 things at a time, and consequently some of them didn't get finished."

As for this goal of making a quilt, she adds, "I'm sure that I would probably have been deeply involved in this process."

6. Nepal. 7. Buy a home in North Dakota. 8. Get a graduate degree. 9. Learn a foreign language. 10. Kilimanjaro. 11. Never be ashamed of who I am.

"Ann was in many environments where being a girl from North Dakota may not have been the most sophisticated label to wear," Mrs. Nelson says, recalling that her daughter had traveled to China and to Peru, and had worked in the high-powered environments of Chicago and New York.

Even so, Ann always conveyed pride in who she was, who her parents were and where they came from — though never in a boastful way. "It's an important point about her personality," her mother says.

12. Be a person to be proud of. 13. Always keep improving. 14. Read every day. 15. Be informed. 16. Knit a sweater. 17. Scuba-dive in the Barrier Reef. 18. Volunteer for a charity. 19. Learn to cook.

By her late 20's, Ann had actually become a fairly decent cook. Still, her mother laughs in recalling late-night calls, like the one that began: "Mom, what's drawn butter?"

20. Learn about art. 21. Get my C.F.A. 22. Grand Canyon. 23. Helicopter-ski with my dad.

Then Ann Nelson's list repeats a number.

23. Spend more time with my family. 24. Remember birthdays!!!!

Birthdays loomed large in Ann's life. She would celebrate her birthday not for a day, but for a week — in part because her father's birthday came the very next day, in part because she was proud to have been born on Norwegian Independence Day — which is May 17, today.

"Ann would have been 35," says Mr. Nelson, who turns 65 tomorrow.

25. Appreciate money, but don't worship it. 26. Learn how to use a computer. 27. Visit the New York Public Library. 28. Maine. 29. Learn to write. 30. Walk — exercise but also see the world firsthand. 31. Learn about other cultures. 32. Be a good listener. 33. Take time for friends. 34. Kayak. 35. Drink water. 36. Learn about wine.

Ann was supposed to attend a wine class the evening of Sept. 11, in keeping with Nos. 13, 19, 31, 36 — the whole list, really.

After 36, there is a 37, but it is blank.

Mr. Nelson reads the list as an inventory of his daughter's values. "You don't see any Corvettes in the garage or any of those material things you might expect from someone that age," he says. "She recognized that you appreciate a few things and kind of live your life wisely."

Mrs. Nelson interprets the list as another way in which Ann seems to communicate with her when she is most in need. So, just about every day in a small North Dakota town, halfway between Minot and Williston, the screen of a laptop computer goes from darkness to light.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/17...n/17about.html





Chief Says Sun Plans to Offer Open-Source Version of Java
Laurie J. Flynn

The new chief executive of Sun Microsystems said on Tuesday that the company was working toward making its Java programming language available free as open-source software, providing further evidence that Sun's new management sees it as more of a services company than a network computer maker.

In one of his first appearances since taking the helm of the struggling company three weeks ago, the executive, Jonathan Schwartz, told a gathering of software developers here that Sun viewed open-source software as a major part of its turnaround strategy. Turning Java into open-source software would allow outside programmers to examine and modify its underlying code.

Java has been one of the dominant programming language of the Internet since its release more than a decade ago and is used in millions of cellphones. But for years Sun's focus was on providing cheaper hardware to compete at the low end of the computer server market with Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other rivals.

Last month Sun reported that it lost $217 million in its third quarter, compared with a loss of $28 million a year earlier. On April 24, Sun's board announced that Mr. Schwartz would succeed Scott McNealy, a founder, who will remain chairman and continue to work with large corporate and government customers.

Mr. Schwartz has suggested over the years that Sun's future lies in its ability to offer services and fundamental technological tools, rather than just software and hardware.

By making more and more of its Java technology open source, Sun hopes to increase the number of Java developers and programs and raise Java's profile in the technology industry. The more prevalent Java becomes, the more customers there will be for Sun's support services as well as its hardware, which runs Java programs, Mr. Schwartz said.

"The question is not whether we will open-source Java; the question is how," Mr. Schwartz said in a speech to developers.

Mr. Schwartz declined to provide a timeline for delivering an open-source version of the Java programming language, saying the company still faced the considerable challenge of ensuring that it remained compatible with other software programs while inviting participation from the large base of independent Java developers.

While the notion that Sun would eventually offer open-source Java came as no surprise, the disclosure was welcome news to developers, whose fortunes are tied to Sun's. Still, developers seemed to agree that turning things around would not be an easy task for Sun.

"With the arrival of Schwartz, who's long been a champion of open source, you can see they are trying to build a defensible business model," said Brian Behlendorf, chief technology officer at CollabNet, one of the earliest Java developers.

Mr. Schwartz said Sun had had considerable success with an open-source version of Solaris, its once-proprietary operating system for server computers. In the year since it began offering Open- Solaris, there has been a surge in paying customers who still need additional support and service, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/te...gy/17suns.html





P2P Phone=Free=Good

Skype Offers Free Calls to Regular Phones

Skype, eBay Inc.'s Internet telephone subsidiary, has stopped charging users for dialing up people on traditional landline and mobile phones in the U.S. and Canada.

The Internet telephone service, which has always offered free PC-to-PC calls around the world, said Monday it will offer its SkypeOut service for free until the end of the year. Previously, Skype users paid about 2 cents a minute for calls to landline and mobile telephones.

"Millions of consumers around the world are flocking to Skype every month, and we believe free SkypeOut calling will rapidly accelerate Skype adoption in the U.S. and Canada," said Henry Gomez, general manager of Skype North America.

Users who make outgoing calls to and within countries outside the U.S. and Canada will continue to incur per-minute charges. The company also said it will continue to charge for traditional phone numbers that can be dialed from any phone to reach Skype users.

Skype, which was acquired last year by online auctioneer eBay for $2.6 billion, recently announced it has 100 million registered users worldwide.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060516/...ype_free_calls





Blu-Ray Makes Unexpected, Three-Way DRM Choice For High-Def DVD
Scott M. Fulton

Hollywood (CA) - In an announcement last night, the Blu-ray Disc Association, led by Sony, representing one of two competing high-definition DVD formats, stated it will simultaneously embrace digital watermarking, programmable cryptography, and a self-destruct code for Blu-ray disc players.

The BDA statement is unprecedented not only because its solution to the nagging problem of digital rights management is to embrace every option on the table, but also because Blu-ray appears to have developed its own approach - in some cases, proprietary - to each of these three technologies. Knowledge of this impending fact may have been what tipped movie studio 20th Century-Fox last week to throw its support behind Blu-ray, in a move that experts believe balanced the scales in Blu-ray's ongoing battle with competing format HD DVD - backed by a forum led by Toshiba - to become the next high-def industry standard.

The digital watermarking technique, which will be called ROM Mark, is described in the statement as "a unique and undetectable identifier in pre-recorded BD-ROM media such as movies, music and games." "BD-ROM" is the proposed writable version of the Blu-ray format. Little else is known about ROM Mark at this time, except that the statement describes it as being undetectable to consumers. This is noteworthy in itself, since a previously heralded watermark applied to first-generation DVDs was notoriously defeated by someone writing over it with a permanent marker.

One part of the announcement that had been anticipated by experts was Blu-ray's embrace of Advanced Access Content System (AACS), one version of which has also been adopted by the HD DVD Forum. This controversial technology would require that disc players maintain permanent connections to content providers via the Internet, making it possible for discs that fail a security check to trigger a notification process, enabling the provider to send the player a sort of "self-destruct code." This code would come in the form of a flash ROM "update" that would actually render the player useless, perhaps unless and until it is taken to a repair shop for reprogramming. The Blu-ray statement noted that certain elements of AACS have yet to be formally approved by the BDA.

The third part of the announcement that is perhaps most surprising, is Blu-ray's adoption of a third DRM technique that appears to embrace some of the ideals of one of the technologies that had been considered, without actually licensing its methodology or its existing tools. The BDA statement introduces what it calls "BD+," described as "a Blu-ray Disc specific programmable renewability enhancement that gives content providers an additional means to respond to organized attacks on the security system by allowing dynamic updates of compromised code."

BD+ appears to be Blu-ray's version of a concept previously under consideration called SPDC, which enabled the method for encrypting a disc's contents to be included on the disc, rather than on the EPROMs of the disc player. One of the perceived failures of first-generation DVD was that its encryption mechanism of choice, called Content Scramble System (CSS), was spectacularly defeated, with the result being that the industry was forced to permanently and irreversibly support a now-worthless encryption scheme. With SPDC, new encryption algorithms could be adopted as old ones are cracked, enabling successive generations of high-def DVD to be stronger than earlier ones.

Two months ago, the HD DVD Forum considered a coupling of AACS with SPDC. But a scientifically accurate though politically imbalanced white paper released by the creators of SPDC technology, Cryptography Research, Inc. (CRI), soundly rebuked alternative DRM technologies, and thus may have unintentionally played a role in SPDC's falling out of favor with the original supporters of CSS, some of whom were HD DVD Forum members. The Forum rejected "AACS+SPDC" for undisclosed reasons, leading many to speculate that Blu ray would respond by embracing SPDC.

However, as SPDC was originally discussed, there would only have been one encryption standard in use throughout the industry at any one time. According to yesterday evening's BDA statement, BD+ would follow SPDC's core principle, but instead allow each content provider to utilize whatever encryption standard it sees fit at the time. "With these enhancements," the statement reads, "content providers have a number of methods to choose from to combat hacks on Blu-ray players. Moreover, BD+ affects only players that have been attacked, as opposed to those that are vulnerable but haven't been attacked and therefore continue to operate properly."

This last sentence is important, because one key objection that experts raised to the pairing of AACS with SPDC was the possibility that, once the single SPDC encryption scheme was broken, AACS could trigger a signal to all players using that encryption scheme, rendering all discs that use this scheme unplayable, perhaps prior to a system upgrade. The BDA statement appears to distance itself from the CRI approach to SPDC, perhaps to calm consumer fears that entire libraries of perfectly legitimate content could be rendered useless due to someone else's illicit activities.

The CRI white paper, incidentally, distinguished SPDC by contrasting it with other DRM techniques such as watermarking. "Although some progress is being made at improving robustness and efficiency," the white paper states, "we are not optimistic that a practical and secure public watermarking scheme is possible." Such comparisons may have worked against SPDC's eventual adoption by Blu-ray in method as well as in principle.

On behalf of the HD DVD Forum this morning, Toshiba's advisor to the Forum, Mark Knox, released a brief statement: "Today's announcement by the BD Group should not confuse anyone," states Knox. "HD DVD's content protection system provides the highest level of advanced copy protection to meet content owner's needs and the rigors of consumer demand." Knox goes on to say that AACS - which now singularly forms the crux of HD DVD's DRM - is the most advanced such scheme yet devised, and that HD DVD's own membership continues to back that approach.

"We will continue to promote further penetration of the format," Knox added, "while simultaneously seeking ways to eventually realize a single format that delivers optimized benefits to all concerned industries and, most important, to consumers."

Tom's Hardware Guide will present an in-depth analysis of the Blu-ray/HD DVD format combat Thursday morning in its Business Reports section. There, we'll speak with industry experts, including one prominent media pioneer, in examining how the participants in this struggle may actually have always been planning for its eventual resolution, and what form the fruits of that resolution may take.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/08/10/blu/index.html





Total Computer Security Could Result From Unbreakable Optical Code
Richard Wilson

Researchers at Mitsubishi Electric, NEC and the University of Tokyo claim to have made a breakthrough in a new technique for very secure data communications.

The firms have implemented a technique known as quantum cryptography which codes the data optically and have for the first time transmitted information between systems uses this technique.

According to the companies, it is hoped that using this technology it will be possible to realise networks with unbreakable codes within five years.

Security of most modern data cryptography is based on codes of evermore computational complexity. But with processing performance of computers increasing dramatically, cracking these data codes becomes more achievable.

Optical cryptography makes computational power of would-be hackers irrelevant by using quantum-state photons to carry the secure data. It also detects any eavesdropping.

“This results in a physically unbreakable, ultimate code,” said the companies.

However, since there has been no standardisation in the details of the encryption algorithms or the construction of optical devices necessary in communication, it has not been possible to interconnect different systems or build a communication network between different users. “We have now developed a technology that can interconnect Mitsubishi Electric and NEC’s cryptography systems,” said the companies.

The work was carried out on a NICT-developed JGN2 test bed network at the Akihabara access point. “The results verify the potential for our system to be the foundation for the next generation of secure networks,” said the firms.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Art...icalcode.h tm





IBM Breakthrough Multiplies The Amount Of Data That Can Be Stored On Tapes

IBM scientists have found a way to cram unprecedented amounts of information onto magnetic tapes in a breakthrough it heralded Tuesday as a data-storing boon to businesses for years to come.

Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California packed 6.67 billion bits of data per square inch (645 square millimeters) on magnetic tape developed with the help of Fuji Photo Film Company of Japan, IBM reported.

That was 15 times as much data as can fit on similar space on magnetic tapes considered the current industry standard, IBM spokesman Mike Ross told AFP.

A cartridge half the size of a typical VHS tape cartridge used in home recorders will be able to hold the text from eight million books that would fill 57 miles (92 kilometers) of bookshelves, according to researchers.

Scientists from IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory created a new data coding method to enhance the accuracy of reading the tiny magnetic bits, the company reported.

IBM estimated that the new technology and tapes should be on the market in five years.

"This is really going to improve magnetic tape storage for years to come," Ross said. "The field of magnetic tape, which a lot of people thought was stodgy and old, isn't withering at all."

IBM first introduced it first magnetic tape, in reel-to-reel form, in May of 1952, according to Ross

Businesses use magnetic tape to store large volumes of data that doesn't need to be accessed instantly, such as archives, backup files, replicas for disaster recovery, and information required for regulatory compliance.

Calculated on a per-gigabyte basis, tape systems are about one-fifth to one-tenth the cost of hard-disk-drive storage systems, depending on their size.

"This is a major milestone in our program and gives magnetic tape the density boost that we gave hard-disk drives in the 1990s," said Spike Narayan, senior manager of advanced technology concepts at IBM Almaden.

IBM was reported to have been the top earner in the 4.82 billion dollar (US) global tape drive and tape library automation market.
http://www.spacemart.com/reports/IBM..._on_tapes.html





Revolutionary Japanese UV LED Makes Light Work

A trio of Japanese scientists say they have invented an ultraviolet light-emitting diode (LED) that could open the way to a new generation of optical discs with very high data-storage capacity.

The LED operates deep in the ultra-violet range of the energy spectrum, with a wavelength of only 210 nanometres (210 billionths of a metre), the shortest of any device of this kind, they report in Thursday's issue of the British journal Nature.

LEDs are semiconductors that emit light when they are electrically stimulated. They are widely used in consumer gadgets, providing the light source in many of today's up-market flat-screen televisions.

LEDs that emit ultraviolet light, which is not visible to the human eye, could have biological and public-health applications, such as killing germs in contaminated water.

They could also eventually replace lasers, which gobble up more energy and use toxic gases, as the tool for reading disc-stored data.

Engineers are cramming more and more information on disks, which thus throws down the challenge of finding a source of coherent light that is fine enough to read between ever-tighter tracks of data.

To do this, they have been working progressively farther down the light spectrum, from the wider wavelengths of red towards the narrower wavelengths of blue and violet.

For instance, the latest industry standard in commercial lasers is Blu-Ray, whose 405-nanometre wavelength enables 27 gigabytes of storage on a single-layer DVD. This compares with ruby lasers, whose wavelength of 4.5 gigabytes enables storage of 4.5 gigabytes.

The new LED devised by Yoshitaka Taniyasu of NTT Basic Research Laboratories and colleagues is based on "doping" aluminium nitride, a substance not previously used in LEDs, with silicon or magnesium.
http://www.physorg.com/news67096129.html





Back Up Your Phone, Not Just Your Computer
Seán Captain

By now you have probably received at least one mass e-mail message from a friend that said, "Lost my cellphone — Please send me your contact info." To save irritation for both absent-minded phone owners and their friends, Sprint has introduced Sprint Wireless Backup, which synchronizes the contact list on a phone with a copy on Sprint's servers. Software on the phone automatically uploads changes made on the handset, and if the original phone is lost or broken, a new phone can automatically download the data.

For now the service is available on two new Sprint phones — the Samsung A580, shown here, and the LG LX350 — for $2 a month. Subscribers can also log onto a Web site to view their contact list or make changes that are then sent to the phone. Using a full computer keyboard is easier than entering letters using the multiple taps required on a standard phone's numeric keypad.

The service cannot, however, exchange data with other online address books like those offered by Yahoo and Google, or with desktop information managers like Microsoft Outlook.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/te...y/18phone.html





Cell Phone Data Eraser
Website copy

Now you can sell, donate or recycle your old cell phone worry free! The Cell Phone Data Eraser gives you all the tools you need to remove personal information like contact names and phone numbers from your cell phone. To begin, simply:

· Select your phone manufacturer
· Select your phone model
· Click the Download Instructions box
· Follow the easy, step-by-step instructions

New phone models are added every month – keep checking in if you don’t find your model! For more information, go to our Frequently Asked Questions page.
http://www.wirelessrecycling.com/hom...er/default.asp





Review

A 'Da Vinci Code' That Takes Longer to Watch Than Read
A. O. Scott

It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media. Recent history — "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of Narnia" — suggests that such controversy, especially if religion is involved, can be very good business. "The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation.

The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia — it only feels that way — but part of Columbia Pictures' ingenious marketing strategy has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute. Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised: Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?

Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci Code," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. (Curiously enough Mr. Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)

To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.

To be fair, though, Mr. Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," Audrey Tautou hisses to Paul Bettany (who play a less than enormous, short-haired albino). "He burns them!"

Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da Vinci Code" is above all a murder mystery. And as such, once it gets going, Mr. Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Mr. Goldsman have deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists and introducing others that keep the action moving along.

Hans Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop-romantic with some liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise be talky and inert. The movie does, however, take a while to accelerate, popping the clutch and leaving rubber on the road as it tries to establish who is who, what they're doing and why.

Briefly stated: An old man (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is killed after hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a hooded assailant. Meanwhile Robert Langdon (Mr. Hanks), a professor of religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French policemen who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his department has cut back on its shaving cream budget.

Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer and also — Bezu Fache! — the murder victim's granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets, which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of Western Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) is at this very moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.

A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It skids through the nighttime streets of Paris and eventually to London the next morning, with side trips to a Roman castle and a chateau in the French countryside. Along the way the film pauses to admire various knickknacks and art works, and to flash back, in desaturated color, to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters (Langdon falls down a well; Sophie's parents are killed in a car accident; Silas stabs his abusive father).

There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.

Through it all Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Mr. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue.

In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

But thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code" a jolt of mischievous life. He plays a wealthy and eccentric British scholar named Leigh Teabing. (I will give Mr. Brown this much: he's good at names. If I ever have twins or French poodles, I'm calling them Bezu and Teabing for sure.)

Hobbling around on two canes, growling at his manservant, Remy (Jean-Yves Berteloot), Teabing is twinkly and avuncular one moment, barking mad the next. Sir Ian, rattling on about Italian paintings and medieval statues, seems to be having the time of his life, and his high spirits serve as something of a rebuke to the filmmakers, who should be having and providing a lot more fun.

Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a Tintin comic, is a marvelously absurd creature, and Sir Ian, in the best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this — a more acute sense of its own ridiculousness — would have given "The Da Vinci Code" some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting Euro-thriller.

But of course movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Jesus or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema such matters are best left to Monty Python. In any case Mr. Howard and Mr. Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Mr. Brown's book with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull sententiousness.

So I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/05/1...7cnd-code.html





And if It's a Boy, Will It Be Lleh?
Jennifer 8. Lee

Chances are you don't have any friends named Nevaeh. Chances are today's toddlers will.

In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda.

The spectacular rise of Nevaeh (commonly pronounced nah-VAY-uh) has little precedent, name experts say. They watched it break into the top 1,000 of girls' names in 2001 at No. 266, the third-highest debut ever. Four years later it cracked the top 100 with 4,457 newborn Nevaehs, having made the fastest climb among all names in more than a century, the entire period for which the Social Security Administration has such records.

Nevaeh is not in the Bible or any religious text. It is not from a foreign language. It is not the name of a celebrity, real or fictional.

Nevaeh is Heaven spelled backward.

The name has hit a cultural nerve with its religious overtones, creative twist and fashionable final "ah" sound. It has risen most quickly among blacks but is also popular with evangelical Christians, who have helped propel other religious names like Grace (ranked 14th) up the charts, experts say. By contrast, the name Heaven is ranked 245th.

"Of the last couple of generations, Nevaeh is certainly the most remarkable phenomenon in baby names," said Cleveland Kent Evans, president of the American Name Society and a professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska.

The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. "Heaven spelled backwards," he said.

Among the many inspired by Mr. Sandoval's appearance was Jade San Luis, who named his first daughter Nevaeh two years later. "It felt original," said Mr. San Luis, 26, of Cerritos, Calif. "Now, not anymore."

Today Mr. Sandoval is introduced to and photographed with baby Nevaehs all the time. His own Nevaeh, now 6, skateboards and, when introduced, pipes up that her name is Heaven spelled backward. Does she understand the meaning of heaven? Mr. Sandoval replied, "She knows that is where her grandmother is."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/us...rtner=homepage


















Until next week,

- js.


















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