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Old 08-06-06, 12:42 PM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 10th, ’06


































"My name is Rickard, and I am a pirate!" – Rickard Falkvinge


"I'm doing it just as a private person. Internet is the world's best music library." – Ivar Wenster


"We want an apology from the police and from the Justice Ministry, and we want our servers back." – Tobias Andersson


"Really what you're talking about is someone saying, 'Look we've put something on your computer and it might go screwy, so we're going to kind of check in every day'." – Lauren Weinstein
























Rampant Fileflation

Do newer formats "cost" more than mp3s?

In general the answer is, yes.

There has been a trend in "file costs" since Napster, and that trend has invariably been up.

Unless and until someone invents a new lossless codec that is much more efficient than the present codecs I don't see that upward trend reversing anytime soon. As a matter of fact with newer disc formats like multichannel high definition digital, file sizes may continue to increase.

The more one downloads the more one needs to upload to maintain good standing at file-sharing sites that require positive ratios. This has been well established for years, and it’s nothing new but since costs are measured in bits and not files, attaching an economic metaphor to a non-monetary trading transaction can be warranted.

Files are getting bigger, and while not everyone can appreciate the quality differences, everyone ultimately pays for it.

To those who observe that file-sharing is all "for free," here’s some news: it may be true that some people are not paying media companies directly in cash for songs, but they do pay media companies directly in cash for bandwidth, and there are storage and other related costs that they might not otherwise incur, so a more accurate description would be that the record company divisions of the media multinationals might not be receiving cash payments directly from file-sharers. Now that may not equal an actual loss, and I doubt it does and several studies indicate I’m right, but it’s a choice the labels have made in any event. The media companies have had ten years to come up with some system of automated payments and have declined every opportunity, but whether or not record company lobbyists do or don’t support mechanical payout systems is an irrelevancy for the trader facing increased file sizes. The fact is swappers do incur costs for sharing, and may actually pay for files with files, but if the files they want are more "expensive" than the files they have, if that price rise is recent and I think that it is, then I have no problem with applying the term inflation to the situation.

My Steve Miller CD "Your Saving Grace" for instance was once ripped at 128 kbs and came in at 32 megs for the lossy MP3 album. How did it sound? At the time, around 1999, it sounded pretty good actually. Seven years have passed and technology hasn’t exactly stood still so in 2006 a new lossless APE rip of that same CD has now swollen the size of the album to 203 megabytes. How does it sound? Pretty damn good actually. It's perfect perhaps, if one can believe the underlying claim that "lossless" is actually lossless, although I must confess I feel the act itself of ripping/encoding may introduce alien artifacts, but nevertheless it's take it or leave it today if that's the only rip around. Your choices certainly, but those are the only two if the owner of an ultra high-bit lossless file doesn't feel like transcoding it to a lower lossy one. Going then from 32 MB albums to albums where just one or two songs is that size is major fileflation no matter how you slice it.

That’s Progress

With my German-made Sennheiser HD 414s can I hear the difference? Sure, at the proper volume the APE is more transparent and detailed and I’m glad I have it. Is it worth it to me in terms of storage and transfer costs? Maybe. To everyone? Maybe not. Still, that's not really the issue. The need and desire for a specific quality is ultimately a very personal matter that won't change until one's circumstances (and hearing) do. The only questions I’m pondering are whether or not "prices" have increased, and as a result will traders find themselves increasingly having to "pay" more for files. The only reasonable answers I can think of are yes they have, and yes they will.

Distant Rumblings

Many of the homes in my area have odd, fenced-in platforms on their roofs. To the uninitiated they look like something a flamboyant gothic architect slapped on for whimsy. In truth they are nothing but. They exist for a more somber purpose: to allow owners to stand on their roofs and look out to sea without falling off. In the dangerous days before radios, search planes and 24 hour a day rescue services once a sailor left port there was little those left home could do but await his return. The ocean regarded schedules with contempt and sailors returned – if at all – at the pleasure of Neptune. These Victorian structures soon acquired the sobering name of "Widow's Walks" after so many grieving wives and mothers were seen waiting on them day after day, sometimes years after loved ones had failed to return. Thankfully most of the time those missing did come back, and joyful screams would issue from the gables, but all too often wrecks or illness captured the seafarer, and occasionally mishaps of a more sinister nature would bring them harm, like a shark's jaw or a pirate's club.

I wonder now if I stand on my roof will I be able to see through the mist to the offshore armada slowly making it's way west. From Stockholm and Copenhagen, from Helsinki to Tallinn comes news of a most extraordinary event: the founding of a new global political party, one dedicated solely to the legal overthrow of antiquated, culture crushing copyright laws, chains forged to enslave minds and serve the rich.

A small boat has landed on our shore, and has inspired one man. Will he be the spearhead of a great American movement, or will the grim inertia of 300 million people grind him down to a compromised ghost of his present self? And what of those left behind, the political widows and widowers, the mothers and fathers who don't understand the urgency, or even the nature of this impending change? Will the Pirate Party capture and uplift them, will they persevere and even thrive, or will they succumb to the onslaught of this upcoming cultural storm?

Crystals can take forever to grow. It requires a larger caloric transfer to change water from a 32-degree liquid to a 32-degree solid than it does to bring it from 34 degrees to 33. But once started the process can be explosively fast. Many people living in New England have gone to sleep near a shimmering lake only to wake up to a silent, frozen one. The desire to see justice done has been building since an imperious Judge named Marilyn Hall Patel shut down Napster in what became the first of a long line of desperate establishment maneuvers. That was five years ago and the low rumblings since may have been mistaken for a people sleeping but were most assuredly not. Drums have been beating and they have been heard even if their sound was masked by the greater yawns of apathy. This may or not be the time for an American Pirate Party, but don't mistake quiescence for inactivity. There is something good and powerful occurring beneath the corrupted gloss of big-money American politics and when it finally breaks through it will do so decisively, and unapologetically, and things my friends will not be the same.

Like resting by a frozen lake, and waking to one alive with waves.


















Enjoy,

Jack.





















June 10th, ’06







Swedes Protest Police Shutdown Of Web Site
Adam Ewing

Hundreds of people waving signs and skull-and-crossbones pirate flags demonstrated in Stockholm on Saturday against a police crackdown on a popular file-sharing Web site with millions of users worldwide.

Dozens of police officers conducted raids in 10 locations Wednesday, seizing servers and other computer equipment in their crackdown on The Pirate Bay site.

But the site was back up Saturday, and spokesman Tobias Andersson said it would be "bigger and better than ever."

"We want an apology from the police and from the Justice Ministry, and we want our servers back," Andersson said.

He said the site is now mirrored on other sites around the world.

"It will be much stronger now. If police shut down a site, these other sites will be there to keep Pirate Bay working."

The Pirate Bay, started in early 2004, has 10 million to 15 million users each day, Andersson said.

He said the people running The Pirate Bay were not responsible for a hacker attack that shut down the Web site of Sweden's national police on Thursday, but added there many Swedish file sharers probably were angry about the crackdown.

Police spokesman Lars Lindahl said Friday it was not clear who attacked the police site, which was running again Saturday.

The music, movie and software industries say pirated works cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales each year.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060604/...MwBHNlYwM3Mzg-





Swedish Culture Chief Comes Out Of The Closet: "I Share Files!"
TankGirl

Ivar Wenster, the culture chief of the Swedish city Karlskrona, might well be one of the first to-be-heroes of the Swedish Pirate movement. Not that he looks outwardly anymore charismatic or heroic than any other city clerk might look. But from the hundreds of thousands of Swedes serving in various state and city offices and establishment jobs, he seems to be the first one to have - excuse my French - the balls to break the atmosphere of fear and hypocracy surrounding the issue of filesharing. He has publicly confessed being a filesharer and thereby automatically risks a two year jail sentence according to the new strict copyright laws of Sweden. A police report has already been filed.

The defiance of the Swedish people to play the copyright game by the rules set by the international media cartels and accepted by their own elected parliament has taken by surprise both the cartels and the Swedish government. The Swedish piracy drama, culminating around the high profile torrent site Pirate Bay and the group of tech-savvy political activists behind it, has quickly become an international headline item. The websites of both the Swedish police and the Swedish government have crashed under online demonstrations. And the international interest on the events is just growing. Because just like the Swedes, the citizens of all modern Internet-enabled nations love to share files with each other and keep doing it on daily basis - despite it being strictly forbidden in their copyright laws.

When cultural chief Ivar Wenster leaves his city office, he becomes a private person with a serious interest in music. Like millions of other music lovers, he has found out that Internet is the best music library there is. Not a particular online shop - with today's prices he could not afford to pay for all the music he consumes - but the Internet as a whole, with all of its diverse and mostly free sources of music. He is furious about the new copyright Swedish copyright law that is criminalizes his hobby. He knows he is not a criminal. He is not ready to give up the best music library in the world. He is not willing to settle for a strictly controlled, expensive shopping mall how the media cartels would like the Internet to be. Being a culture chief he knows the difference between a mall and a library.

From the legislator's point of view the situation has become nightmarish. How to enforce laws that criminalize tens of percents of a population, including more or less the entire younger generation? How to pick the exemplary punishable 'copyright criminals' from among the masses of schoolchildren, students, pensioners and normal, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens? How to keep the masses fearing to do something they already love to do and know how to do? It sounds as hopeless an effort as to deny sex from teenagers with a law.

The last round of European copyright laws, tighter than any of the previous ones, was hammered down the national parliaments in a hasty and undemocratic fashion to say the least. The practical impact of the laws was not explained to the citizens until it was too late to do something about it. In interviews the responsible ministers, many of them with poor knowledge of the Internet and modern technologies, were often confused about what would actually be allowed and not allowed under the new laws. Their confusion is understandable. They did not actually write or thing through these technically complex and obscure laws themselves. The media cartel lobbyists helped them to do that. It was a three-way deal between media cartels, copyright organizations and governments. The glaringly absent party from the negotiation table was the consumer, despite being the primary target of the laws.

No alternative models of royalty collection were presented to the citizens. No alternatives regarding fair use were given to the citizens to discuss and choose freely from. No possibility was given and no time was reserved to have an open, democratic discussion on the principles and the practical details. There was no democracy involved. From the media cartel point it all went down almost too well to be true. And so it did in almost the whole Europe - apart from one little northern country with 9 million citizens called Sweden.

Sweden is a country with a long democratic tradition and a long history of political and military independence. Being an ex-superpower themselves, they have not even feared to defy the superpowers in political issues. They don't like foreign interests dictating them how to live - even how to live on the Internet. While being a modern and international high-tech nation they are at the same time conscious and proud of their national identity and independent history. Justice Minister Thomas Bodström was quick to deny any U.S. influences behind the Pirate Bay raid - he knew how the Swedes would react to it - but the trail was too obvious and the PR damage was quickly done. In the public eye he is already one of the bad guys of the story - a puppet of U.S. media interests. The political pressure is mounting on him and may eventually cost him his job.

Even worse are things with Henrik Pontén, the lawyer head of the media cartel financed antipiracy 'bureau' Antipiratbyrån. Pontén and his bureau are so widely hated in Sweden that Antipiratbyrån had to shut down their website when things started to heat up after the Hollywood-style Pirate Bay raid. He has tried a few times publicly to justify the hardline police action on copyright issues but the efforts have ended up into PR disasters. The Swedish media shows little sympathy to him, and the reader forums of the newspapers filling up with angry posts protesting police action and defending people's right to private filesharing. Many are wondering why he as a media cartel representative is allowed to be visibly present in police operations.

By coming out of his filesharing closet Ivar Wenster brings into mind the famous lonely Chinese protester standing with a plastic bag on the Tiananmen Square and facing the deadly fury of the military tanks in front of him. The media is watching. The Swedish people are watching. Everybody knows that the establishment controls the tanks, and everybody has freshly learned that the media cartels control the establishment. Those with the power in their hands can still drive over Ivar Wenster if they wish, but the political price of such action might turn out to be high in a country where filesharers have already their own party, soaring in popularity, with only three months to go to the Parliamentary election.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22752





Here is my quickish translation of the remarkable speech given by Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of Pirate Party, in the Pirate Bay support demonstration in Stockholm 3.6.2006.
TankGirl


There Is Nothing New Under The Sun

Friends, citizens, pirates:

There is nothing new under the Sun.

My name is Rickard Falkvinge, and I am the leader of the Pirate Party.

During the past week we have seen a number of rights violations taking place. We have seen the police misusing their arresting rights. We have seen innocent parties being harmed. We have seen how the media industry operates. We have seen how the politicians up to the highest levels bend backwards to protect the media industry.

This is scandalous to highest degree. This is the reason why we are here today.

The media industry wants us to believe that this is a question about payment models, about a particular professional group getting paid. They want us to believe that this is about their dropping sales figures, about some dry statistics. But that is only an excuse. This is really about something totally else.

To understand today’s situation in the light of the history, we must go back 400 years - to the time when the Church had the monopoly over both culture and knowledge. Whatever the Church said, was the truth. That was pyramid communication. You had one person at the top talking to the many under him in the pyramid. Culture and knowledge had a source, and that source was the Church.

And God have mercy on those who dared to challenge the culture and knowledge monopoly of the Church! They were subjected to the most horrible trials that man could envision at the time. Under no circumstances did the Church allow its citizens to spread information on their own. Whenever it happened, the Church applied its full judicial powers to obstruct, to punish, to harass the guilty ones.

There is nothing new under the Sun.

Today we know that the only right thing to happen for the society to evolve was to let the knowledge go free. We know now that Galileo Galilei was right. Even if he had to puncture a monopoly of knowledge.

We are speaking here about the time when the Church went out in its full force and ruled that it was unnecessary for its citizens to learn to read or to write, because the priest could tell them anyway everything they needed to know. The Church understood what it would mean for them to lose their control.

Then came the printing press.

Suddenly there was not only a source of knowledge to learn from, but a number of them. The citizens – who at this time had started to learn to read – could take their own part of the knowledge without being sanctioned. The Church went mad. The royal houses went mad. The British Royal Court went as far as to make a law that allowed the printing of books only to those print owners who had a special license from the Royal Court. Only they were allowed to multiply knowledge and culture to the citizens.

This law was called "copyright".

Then a couple of centuries passed, and we got the freedom of press. But everywhere the same old model of communication was still being used: one person talking to the many. And this fact was utilized by the State who introduced the system of “responsible publishers”.

The citizens could admittedly pick pieces of knowledge to themselves, but there always had to be somebody who could be made responsible if – what a horrible thought – somebody happened to pick up a piece of wrong knowledge.

And this very thing is undergoing a fundamental change today - because the Internet does not follow the old model anymore. We not only download culture and knowledge. We upload it to others at the same time. We share files. The knowledge and the culture have amazingly lost their central point of control.

And as this is the central point of my speech, let me lay it out in some detail.

Downloading is the old mass media model where there is a central point of control, a point with a ‘responsible publisher’ – somebody who can be brought to court, forced to pay and so on. A central point of control from where everybody can download knowledge and culture, a central point that can grant rights and take them away as needed and as wanted.

Culture and knowledge monopoly. Control.

Filesharing involves simultaneous uploading and downloading by every connected person. There is no central point of control at all; instead we have a situation where the culture and the information flow organically between millions of different people.

Something totally different, something totally new in the history of human communications. There is no more a person that can be made responsible if wrong knowledge happens to spread.

This is the reason why the media corporations talk so much about ‘legal downloading’. Legal. Downloading. It is because they want to make it the only legal way of things for people to pick up items from a central point that is under their control. Downloading, not filesharing.

And this is precisely why we will change those laws.

During the passed week we have seen how far an acting party is prepared to go to prevent the loss of his control. We saw the Constitution itself being violated. We saw what sort of methods of force and attacks on personal integrity the police is prepared to apply, not to fight crime, but in an obvious intention to harass those involved and those who have been close to them.

There is nothing new under the Sun, and the history always repeats itself. This is not about a group of professionals getting paid. This is about control over culture and knowledge. Because whoever controls them, controls the world.

The media industry has tried to make us feel shame, to say that what we are doing is illegal, that we are pirates. They try to roll a stone over us. Take a look around today – see how they have failed. Yes, we are pirates. But whoever believes that it is shameful to be a pirate, has got it wrong. It is something we are proud of.

That is because we have already seen what it means to be without central control. We have already tasted, felt and smelled the freedom of being without a top-down controlled monopoly of culture and knowledge. We have already learned how to read and how to write.

And we do not intend to forget how to read and how to write, even if yesterday’s media interests do not find it acceptable.

MY NAME IS RICKARD, AND I AM A PIRATE!
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22745





News From The North
The TankGirl Diaries




Ahoy! The pirate ship is sailing again!

Pirate Bay is back online running on new servers located in Holland. Despite the forced move into a new hosting service in another country the site seems to have succesfully restored virtually all of its indexing data from the backups, and the functionality of the site is also being quickly restored. The first new video posted to the site was a control camera capture from the police raid that shut down the site three days ago.

Demonstrations in Stockholm and Gothenburg

Support demonstrations for Pirate Bay are taking place today in the two largest cities of Sweden, Stockholm and Gothenburg (Göteborg). The demonstrators, backed by four official political organizations, demand the returning of the seized servers, a stop to all raid-related police inquiries, destruction of the DNA samples taken and answers to a number of tough questions from the Justice Minister Thomas Bodström who was responsible for initiating the Pirate Bay raid.

A 17-year old hacker took down the Swedish police website

Newspaper Aftonbladet has found out that a 17 year old high school student was responsible for the DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that took down the website of the Swedish police for over a day. The hacker told Aftonbladet that it took an hour from him to organize the attack. Thousands of compromised 'zombie computers' were used in the attack, and the effect of the attack was further amplified by the curious surfers from around the world who went to browse the website from the links posted into popular sites like Digg.

Aftonbladet: "Generation War"

"The entertainment industry has no chances against the youth", writes journalist Lena Mellin in her Analys (Analysis) column in the large Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. "The shutdown of the pirate site Pirate Bay has led to a generation war. On the other side are the old people and the law. On the other side are the young people and the Internet." Her view is supported by the official participation of several political youth organizations in today's support demonstrations for the Pirate Pay. Many well-known younger politicians of the established Swedish parties have already openly challenged the official copyright policies of their respective parties.

Pirates recover faster than the Swedish police

Newspaper Aftonbladet organized a humorous online poll asking people to guess which of the two websites, Pirate Bay or the Swedish Police, will manage to come back online first. Indicating the huge public interest in the pirate drama, nearly 70,000 people participated in the poll, with 93 % of the people putting their bets on Pirate Bay. And indeed, at the time of this posting, the Pirate Bay website is online while the website of the Swedish police is still down.

Pirate Party keeps growing at record rate

With demonstrations underway in Stockholm and Göteborg, new people keep joining the Swedish Pirate Party literally by the minute. The member count is 4958 at the moment of this posting. The Party will need 225,000 votes in the parliamentary election to be held in September to pass the 4 percent thresold required for parliamentary representation. This is not an unrealistic goal considering there are an estimated 1,3 million active filesharers in Sweden, a country of 9 million inhabitants.

Led by a charismatic 34-year old IT specialist Rickard Falkvinge from Sollentuna, the party has set 10 candidates to its national candidate list, including the leader of the party, plus 12 local candidates. The party has only three issues on its agenda (in English, worth reading!): a radical reform of the copyright law, abolishment of the patent system and the securing of people's right to privacy. In the relatively split Swedish political field even a small number of parliament members might give them a good strategic position to advance these goals.

Peaceful pirate demonstration in Stockholm

Swedish Television reported about 500 people participating in the demonstration. In his speech one of the Pirate Bay founders, Fredrik Neij, asked the Swedish officials to calm down and stop fighting against the Internet. "It is a battle you are never going to win", he said.

According to blog reports the demonstration went peacefully and in the spirit of unity despite the diverse political groups being represented. Also the police was reported behaving friendly and peacefully.

Pirate Party keeps growing

Pirate Party's member count has just gone over 5000. It is now approaching in size the Greens (Miljöpartiet) who have 17 seats in the 349-seat Swedish Parliament. It took 4.6% of votes in the last parliamentary election for the Greens to get their 17 seats.

Pirate Bay to operate from four countries

According to Pirate Party, Pirate Bay will operate in future from four different countries - Holland, Russia, Ukraine plus one unnamed EU country. The sites will mirror each other so that a possible takedown of one site should not even cause any service breaks for the customers. The Pirate Bay staff called out for help on Internet after the police raid, and "when we told people that we are from Pirate Bay, Sweden, needing help with hardware and hosting, offers of help started to flow in immediately. Pirate Bay is now stronger than it has ever been!"

Latest developments from Sweden, June 4.:

Swedish government website collapses

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reports that the website of the Swedish Government has collapsed. The problem seems to be so serious that the Government representative does not expect them to get it up overnight even if they are constantly working on it. The website serves as a portal to all government departments, including the Foreign Ministery and Immigration Officials.

Antipiracy Bureau goes voluntarily offline

Dagens Nyheter also reports that Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish antipiracy organization financed by the media cartels will shut down its homepage for the moment "because it is rather lively right now out there in the Internet", in the words of Henrik Pontén, the nationally hated lawyer head of the organization, responsible for the raid against Pirate Bay.

700 people in demonstrations

An estimated 500 people in Stockholm and 200 people in Gothenburg took part in the Pirate Bay support demonstrations organized by the Pirate Party and three political youth organizations. The Swedish Television was present, interviewing participants. Image galleries from the demonstrations here and here.

Pirate Party soon larger than the Green Party

Pirate Party's member count keeps soaring. At the time of this posting there are 5215 members in the party - up from around 2000 before the police raid on Pirate Bay. At this rate it will take only days for the Pirate Party to become larger than the Green Party, already represented in the Swedish parliament.

Latest developments from Sweden, June 4.:

400,000 Swedes in Antipiracy Bureau's secret register

There's a new piracy-related scandal brewing in Sweden. Newspaper Aftonbladet reports that Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish antipiracy organization, is keeping a secret encrypted register in its Stockholm offices holding detailed records of the download activities of some 400,000 Swedes. Such registers are illegal in Sweden, where personal privacy is highly appreciated by the law and guarded by state officials. Göran Gräslund, the director of Swedish Data Inspection office has promised to take a closer look at the issue. "Antipiratbyrån having the IP addresses of people in encrypted form is unlikely to make any legal difference", he says. "The personal information is still there and can be decoded back to plaintext as wished."

Swedish press siding with people in the "Net War"

Despite the approaching FIFA World Cup football tournament (a big media event in Europe), it is the unfolding piracy drama that has captured the main headlines in the Swedish press. The press is showing little or no sympathy to Antipiratbyrån and to the media cartels financing its operations. The online reader forums of the newspapers are filling up with hundreds of furious posts from the readers protesting the illegal police action against Pirate Bay and demanding the resigning of the Justice Minister Thomas Bodström who seems to have been the key official to fold under the pressure from the U.S. government and the American movie cartel MPAA.

Government website comes back online, police website still down

The web portal of the Swedish government came back online this morning, bringing some relief to the various Swedish officials who need it to access their respective data systems. The website of the Swedish Police is still down under a continuing DDoS attack. Earlier yesterday Antipiratbyrån voluntarily went offline, obviously to avoid an inevitable crashing or worse under the attacks coming from the Internet.

Latest developments from Sweden, June 5.

Cultural Chief confesses filesharing publicly, defying the new copyright law

Swedish TV reports that the Cultural Chief of Karlskrona, a city of 61,000 people in southern Sweden, reports himself voluntarily to the police, confessing publicly that he downloads music from the Internet. He says he started filesharing as a protest against the new stricter copyright law in Sweden, to come into effect 1. of July. He emphasizes that he is filesharing only from his home, not from workplace. "I'm doing it just as a private person. Internet is the world's best music library." According to the new law he risks a two year jail sentence.

Swedish Security police to investigate Government website crashdown

Dagens Nyheter reports that the Swedish Security Police will make a criminal inquiry regarding the recent crashdown of Swedish Government's website. The police is already busy investigating the crashdown of its own webpages, back online after a two day's downtime due to DDoS attacks.

Digged! Pirate Captain's speech gets international attention

P2P Consortium, a 'roof' website linking numerous p2p communities together, gets to taste the dreaded Digg Effect as the English version of Rickard Falkvinge's (Swedish Pirate Party leader) inspired speech from the Stockholm demonstration found its way to Digg's front page in less than a day from its posting. Digg comments available here. The speech has also started to spread as copies in Blogosphere. The voice of Pirate Captain will be heard by an international audience of tens of thousands!

Latest developments from Sweden, June 6.:

Swedish police prepares for National Day unrest

Today is the National Day of Sweden, and the Swedish police is preparing for violent clashes between various political youth groups - mainly the neo-nazis and the radical leftist antifascistic movement, both to have their own meetings in the centrum of Stockholm. An additional worry for the police are the Net activists who managed to shut down both the police and the government websites in the aftermath of the Pirate Bay raid a week ago. The situation in downtown Stockholm is bound to be tense tonight, and the police has told in advance that they will be present with a large riot control force.

Green Party echoes Pirate Party's criticism in filesharing issues

The approaching Parliamentary election starts to show in the Swedish political discussion, even if the large government parties have not yet really started their own campaigns. Peter Eriksson, the spokesman of the Green Party (Miljöpartiet), attacks in today's Expressen Justice Minister Thomas Bodström and his views on Pirate Bay. "It is totally absurd to try to stop new technology with police and repressive laws", he tells Expressen, echoing the criticical voices of the popular Pirate Party. He also addresses filesharing issues in his blog in sharp terms, demanding Swedes to accept the new technology and to start thinking about new ways to compensate copyright owners. The credibility of the Greens as a pro-p2p party is questionable though as they have earlier voted for the new stricter copyright laws and also negotiated possible minister arrangements in a post-election government with the anti-p2p Social Democrats. A more likely explanation is that the party is alarmed by the record fast growth of the new Pirate Party. Should the Pirates manage to attract enough younger voters, the Green Party might be left under the 4 % vote thresold required for parliamentary presence.

New study: every second Swedish schoolchild downloads from Internet

Aftonbladet has just released a new study revealing that every second child in the age group 10-16 is downloading copyrighted material from Internet. Children typically have their own computers in their own rooms, with parents having little idea of what their offspring is doing online. The study also shows that less than 10 % of children have bought music online - most prefer to get their online music for free. However, about 40 % had spent money on CDs during the month before the study.

Pirate Party member lists circulating on Internet?

Aftonbladet reports that copies of Pirate Party's member lists are circulating on Internet. The newspaper claims the lists to be genuine but hasn't given the Pirate Party a chance to verify it. With the election approaching, and with Pirate Party's membership tripled within a week (current member count is 5910) misinformation and scare campaigns are a real possibility.

Latest development, 6.6.2006:

Swedish Green Party now officially wants to legalize 'downloading'

...and it did not take long for the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet) to make legalizing of personal 'downloading' an official campaign issue. This goes straight against the political program of their most likely political partner in the next government, the influential Social Democrats, who have been instrumental in bringing the new tougher copyright laws into Sweden. It is worth noting though that the Greens talk about 'downloading' only which suggests that they are not ready to legalize modern p2p software where uploading is an essential part of the network functionality. And as noted earlier, the credibility of the Greens in this issue is not high, but the development itself is remarkable. The mere possibility of Pirates entering the Swedish parliament is changing the established political field in relation to the filesharing issue.

Latest developments, 6.6.2006

Media game getting dirty

At this stage it seems likely that the news of a Pirate Party memberlist 'circulating in Internet', first claimed by journalist Robert Triches in Aftonbladet, was a fabricated smear and scare effort by the journalist himself and his unknown background forces. The journalist never could deliver this 'list' to Pirate Party for verification; there were no signs of hacking on Party's computer, and despite some 100 or so of the finest pirates looking for this list from Internet they could not find a sign of it. Now if these guys cannot find something from the Internet, it probably is not there!

Pirate Party leader: "Greens are cheating filesharers"

Alarmed by Pirate Party's sensational membership growth and facing a very real risk of dropping below the 4 % vote thresold and thereby having to leave the parliament, the Swedish Greens quickly jumped to the p2p bandwagon and included the legalization of 'downloading' into their official campaign items. In reality they are not promising anything beyond the corporate distribution model, says Pirate Party's Rickard Falkvinge. There are no p2p networks with downloaders only. It's all about downloading and uploading, and only if you legalize both, you are really legalizing filesharing, he emphasizes.

95 % of pirates will have a vote in the election

Bernt Granbacke, one of the many volunteering Pirate Party field workers, gives some interesting statistics about party membership in an interview for Norlänska Socialdemokraten. He tells that the party grows nationwide at a rate of 20-100 new members per day, and that 95 % of party members are in a legal voting age. Perhaps surprisingly the members are not predominantly young people but mostly from the age group 30-50 years. When asked about the position of the party in the traditional left-right axis, Granbacke answers with a question: "Where would you like to have us?"

Election specialist: "Filesharing will be one of the main election themes"

A nationally respected statistics professor and election specialist Peter Esaiasson has already gone on record saying that filesharing will be one of the main themes of these parliamentary elections. Greens have already responded to the signals and made their own p2p-friendly facelift, and there may be pressures in other parties to do something similar.

7.6.2006

Court decision: 26-year Swede to pay fines for sharing a movie on DC

Aftonbladet reports that a lower court in Gothenburg has sentenced a 26-year old Swedish man to pay 16,000 Swedish crowns (1735 euros / 2221 USD) as fines for sharing a movie on a Direct Connect hub. He was the third filesharer sentenced under the new Swedish copyright law, and all sentences so far have been fines only. Media industry appealed earlier one of the sentences to a higher court which refused to consider the appeal.

From the practical point of view it is important that the filesharing punishments have been fines only. This means that the crime is considered so small that it does not give the police a permission to force the ISPs to identify the people behind IP numbers in filesharing networks. This is a remarkable security factor for the Swedes, one of the most active filesharing nations in the world. US-style John Doe cases which the media cartels have used actively to extort money from American filesharers are out of question in Sweden.

In a related reader poll in newspaper Expressen 85 % of people consideres it wrong to sentence filesharers while 15 % accepts it.

8.6.2006

Larger parties bend to support filesharing under political pressure

Following the example of the Swedish Greens, the leaders of two larger Swedish parties, Moderate Party (Moderaterna) and Swedish Left Party (Vänsterpartiet), have now also come out and declared a change in their filesharing politics, reports Expressen. Both parties are now willing to review the new strict Swedish copyright laws so that they would allow domestic filesharing, despite the same parties voting for these strict laws just a year ago. "We cannot go chasing after a whole generation of young people", says Fredrik Reinfeldt, the leader of Moderate Party. "The idea was to address commercial piracy, not to chase private persons", says Lars Ohly, the Swedish Left Party leader. Both party leaders told that they had changed their minds after seeing the recent police actions against filesharers.

By challenging the established parties with their 3-point agenda the Pirate Party has already managed to cause a major shift in the Swedish political climate regarding filesharing. The Moderates are the second largest party in the Swedish parliament with their 55 seats; Left Party has 28 seats; the Greens, who joined the p2p bandwagon earlier, have 17 seats. Together their 100 seats represent a third of the Swedish parliamentary power. And all this has happened in just a couple of days, with three months still to go to the election. Filesharing will be one of the central election themes in Sweden this time.

The main catalyst for the massive political shift has of course been the soaring popularity of Pirate Party. Now the established parties have realized that they risk losing votes to the Pirates not only from among younger voters but from all age groups in a country where filesharing is a national hobby. As for the young generation, results from a large national Youth Poll (mimicking Parliamentary election with the same candidates) were published yesterday. The established parties were going fast downhill while the great winners were Swedish Democrates (Sverigedemokraterna), a radically nationalistic right-wing party, and Pirate Party, which got 4.7 % of the votes - enough to take it to the Parliament in the real election. However, the poll was done before the Pirate Bay raid - an event that sent Pirate Party's popularity skyrocketing. The party has tripled its member count since the raid, now at 6324 members.

8.6.2006

Three out of four first time voters support filesharing

Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan has just released results of a poll charting the opinions of first time voters on the filesharing issue. The results show that three out of four first time voters support filesharing, legal or not, and the support comes similarly from political left and right. "Anybody who is doing business with copyrighted material has reason to be worried", says Nicklas Källebring, an opinion expert from the Temo institute behind the poll.

The participants were asked whether they feel it is ok to download files from Internet even if it is illegal, to which 38 % answered yes without reservations and 39 % answered yes with some reservations.

"It is quite bizarre that we have tried to criminalize something that is a part of everyday life of young people", comments the results Ida Gabrielsson, a spokeswoman for Young Left, a youth organization of the Swedish Left Party. Two out of three of her party supporters gave an unreserved 'yes' to filesharing in the poll. Usually the thresold for people to admit supporting something illegal is very high, even in opinion polls. The filesharing issue seems to be an exception to this rule. "Obviously many voters think that this particular law is extremely stupid", says Temo's representative.

The poll was done in May, before the MPAA-initiated Pirate Bay raid, a landmark event in the Swedish Net War.

Broadband tax? "No thanks", say both pirates and antipirates

Two high-level managers from Swedish Radio came out yesterday with a compromise proposition of a broadband tax to solve the Swedish filesharing controversy. The proposition was quickly rejected both by the pirates and by the antipiracy organization Antipiratbyrån. A reader poll in Aftonbladet confirms that the public does not like the idea either: 80 % of readers oppose proposed tax, with 15 % supporting it.

"The problem with this kind of solution is that filesharing is a very widespread phenomenon. Most people are not downloading well-known bands but smaller, unsigned bands. The tax money would end up to the pockets of the well-known bands though", says Tobias Andersson from Pirate Bureau. "Yet another tax sounds like a classical Swedish solution. I would instead like to see our politicians stand firmly behind the new stricter laws and keep communicating to people that it is illegal to download copyrighted material", says Henrik Pontén, the head of media cartel controlled Antipiracy Bureau.

In the present pre-election opinion climate the politicians do not seem to be ready to pay the price of standing firmly behind the media cartel friendly laws. Three established parties have already officially indicated to be willing to legalize personal filesharing - a major political achievement from Pirate Party, founded only six months ago.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22742





On a Russian Site, Cheap Songs With a Backbeat of Illegality
Thomas Crampton

Rising consumer popularity is turning AllofMP3.com, a music downloading service based in Moscow, into a global Internet success story, but with a catch. The site may well be illegal.

Operating through what music industry lobbyists say is a loophole in Russia's copyright law, AllofMP3.com offers a vast catalog of music that includes artists not normally authorized for sale online — like the Beatles and Metallica — at a fraction of the cost of services like the iTunes Music Store owned by Apple Computer.

The songs are sold by the megabyte instead of individually, and an album of 10 songs or so on AllofMP3 can cost the equivalent of less than $1, compared with 99 cents a song on iTunes. And unlike songs purchased on iTunes and other commercial services, songs downloaded with AllofMP3's software can be copied without restrictions.

It is an offer that may seem too good to be true, but in Russia — a country that is frequently cited by news media and content owners as rife with digital piracy and theft of intellectual property — courts have so far allowed the site to operate, despite efforts by the record labels Warner, Universal and EMI to aid prosecutors there.

So great is the official level of concern about AllofMP3 that United States trade negotiators warned that the Web site could jeopardize Russia's long-sought entry into the World Trade Organization.

Meanwhile, consumers are flocking to the site, particularly in Britain, where a survey in March ranked AllofMP3 second only to iTunes in popularity among self-described music enthusiasts surveyed by XTN Data.

Use in the United States reached 345,000 unique visitors in April, an increase of 57 percent over January but a tiny fraction of the 19 million that used the iTunes software, according to comScore Networks, a service that monitors the habits of Internet users.

Music industry officials say AllofMP3 is a large-scale commercial piracy site.

"It is totally unprecedented to have a pirate site operating so openly for so long," said Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which is based in Washington.

People associated with AllofMP3, which lists no telephone contacts on its Web site, declined to comment for this article when tracked down by domain-name ownership records kept by VeriSign. Those records show that Ivan Fedorov of Media Services in Moscow is the owner.

AllofMP3.com says on the site that it can legally sell to any user based in Russia and warns foreign users to verify the legality within their countries for themselves. The site also features a wide selection of Russian music, but it is in English, with prices listed in American dollars.

AllofMP3 asserts its legality by citing a license issued by a royalty collecting society, the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, known as R.O.M.S. for its Russian initials.

In most countries, the collecting societies that receive royalty payments for the sale or use of artistic works need reciprocal agreements with overseas copyright holders, according to agencies that represent rights holders.

According to Russia's 1993 copyright law, however, collecting societies are permitted to act on behalf of rights holders who have not authorized them to do so. The result is that numerous organizations in Russia receive royalties for the use of foreign artistic works, but never pass on that money to the artists or music companies, according to the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, the umbrella organization for collecting societies.

"These collecting agencies are thieves and frauds because they accept money while pretending to represent artists," said Eric Baptiste, director general of the confederation, commonly referred to by the acronym Cisac.

Mr. Baptiste said that in 2004, the confederation expelled R.O.M.S., the collecting society associated with AllofMP3, because it had issued licenses to sell foreign music without agreements from the right holders. R.O.M.S. defended its actions as legal.

"Not a single court says we are illegal, and anything Cisac says is only their opinion," said Oleg Nezus, director general of R.O.M.S. "Unless a court says otherwise, our actions are legal."

Struan Robertson, a Britain-based senior associate in the technology practice of the Pinsent Masons law firm, said that argument did not provide legal cover for consumers who bought music from the site.

"If the music industry says the site is unlicensed, then consumers are buying pirated music," Mr. Robertson said. "In practical terms, however, the chances of an individual consumer being sued for it are very slim."

AllofMP3.com is at the top of the office of the United States trade representative's latest list of the world's most notorious piracy markets.

"Improvement of intellectual property enforcement is critical to our support for Russia's World Trade Organization accession, and AllofMP3 is clearly something they need to address," said Victoria A. Espinel, assistant United States trade representative for intellectual property.

Vladimir Dragunov, a Moscow-based legal adviser to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a group that represents major and independent music labels, said the District Court of Moscow rejected a case against AllofMP3 on May 16 on technical grounds, but the decision was being appealed. Sergei Marchenko, a spokesman for the Moscow prosecutor, said his office was continuing to investigate AllofMP3.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/te...y/05music.html





U.K. Music Industry To Sue AllofMP3.com
Jo Best

The U.K. music-industry trade organization, the BPI, is to sue popular Russian download site AllofMP3.com, claiming it is not sharing any of its profits with the artists whose music it sells.

AllofMP3.com sells singles and albums for download in a fashion similar to rival iTunes, but AllofMP3's offerings typically are much less expensive--1 pound (about $1.87) per album versus iTunes' typical price of 7.99 pounds ($14.85).

The site says it complies with Russian laws and does make royalty payments to the country's rights-holders organization. Not so, says the BPI, which maintains that all of the site's claims to legal operation are false and that no artists have received royalties from the site to date.

As a result, the BPI is now intending to take AllofMP3.com through the U.K. courts.

A representative for the BPI said the organization's lawyers won't be going after any U.K. users of the site: "While it remains illegal to use the site, we aren't interested in taking users to task--what we are doing is targeting the site itself."

According to recent research by XTN, AllofMP3.com is the second-most-used download site in the U.K., behind Apple Computer's iTunes.
http://news.com.com/U.K.+music+indus...3-6080988.html





Can Oink be far behind?

MPAA Takes Aim At Another BitTorrent Search Site

isohunt.com feels the heat
Tobias van der Wal

THE MPAA continues to reach out and send armies of lawyers to the owners of any website making use of BitTorrent and or other file-sharing systems.

The latest victim is Canadian-owned search engine website isohunt.com, which has been sued and labelled a pirate by the association.

As we noted in March, here, IsoHunt attempted to create a coalition in preparation to fight the evil empire on the grounds that the website was a mere search engine, and not a willful pirate site, and thus is doing nothing illegal.

Within the IsoHunt forums Gary Fung, the 23 year-old operator of IsoHunt, said, "the MPAA's allegation that our service is for the sole purpose of helping copyright infringement of their movies is plainly wrong."

For its part, the MPAA claimed Fung had, "chosen not to enter into any negotiations with anybody, but rather to steal… for [his] own ends."

The statement was rather curious, as Fung demonstrated by publishing correspondece he had with the MPAA back in January of 2005, on forums here.

Recently Fung was interviewed on the Canada’s CBC, where he warned the world of, "the Internet taking over phone networks and TV and movies and music, (and) all forms of media."

Fung finds the MPAA's attempts to stop the use of BitTorrent and file-sharing protocols futile. There is, he says, "no way to stop the technology."

He suggests distribution systems like BitTorrent could allow Hollywood to "reach a much bigger audience at a much cheaper cost."

Fung declined to make a statement to the INQUIRER for what he said were legal reasons.

In the meantime, isohunt.com remains open for business, and is now enjoying a slew of new users and seeds to download from.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32255





Platterpush

Music Sharing Site Promises To Help Artists

Lala.com to allow CD trading for just $1 plus shipping, pledges to give a fifth of sales to all musicians.

A new Web site that aims to transform music industry economics is set to go live Thursday, giving musicians a major cut of the proceeds while largely freezing out record labels and other intermediaries.

Lala.com, which allows fans to trade music discs for just $1, plus shipping, pledges to give a fifth of its sales to all the musicians, including lesser known session studio players, involved in the making of CDs exchanged on its site.

In a move that is certain to stoke controversy with music promoters, the founder of the Silicon Valley start-up said Lala will circumvent traditional copyright and royalty payment systems to compensate identifiable working musicians.

The site works something like an eBay auction exchange as it encourages consumers who sign up for the service to list all the CDs they may want to exchange as well as ones they would be interested in receiving.

Once an exchange is arranged, the recipient pays $1.49, of which 49 cents pays for shipping the disc, leaving $1 for the company for musicians, administrative costs and its own cut.

Lala said 20 cents of each $1 will go into a charitable fund for the musicians. It is looking to pay the musicians via a charitable organization it has set up called the Z Foundation. It plans on keeping 20-30 cents for itself, with the remainder going on administration.

"We all have this music that sits in our homes - wouldn't it be great if people can exchange those CDs," said founder Bill Nguyen, a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

He's a veteran of start-up companies including Seven, a mobile e-mail rival to Blackberry maker Research in Motion and OneBox, which was sold to Phone.com, which is now known as Openwave.

Lala has been testing the service for several months with nearly 100,000 people and claims to already have another 200,000 people waiting to join the service when it goes live.

The service is bound to raise eyebrows at record companies which have stepped up their anti-piracy drives in the last few years to combat both CD and digital music piracy.

But a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America said that, "To date we have declined comment on Lala.com - and will hold to that here as well."

Nguyen admits his company has had a mixed reaction from the record companies, with some viewing his plan as a threat along the lines of the pioneering peer-to-peer music file sharing service Napster.

"One label thought it would help them to know their customers for the first time," Nguyen said. "But others' view of us is as the devil, more like peer-to-peer services."

Lala argues that it offering a vibrant new way for consumers to discover new music and that if successful, it will encourage robust sales of new music, unlike the culture of pirated CDs and downloading that followed in Napster's wake.

Nguyen claims that Lala's research shows that for every five CDs exchanged on the server a new CD was bought.

Though Lala is a for-profit business, Nguyen envisages a community of fans and musicians running many key elements of the site with a relatively skeletal paid staff that he plans to keep under 30 employees.

For instance, fans and artists will jointly decide whether a musician who applies for compensation will get paid under the system. Nguyen described the site as having a business model inspired by Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia built from editorial contributions by its users.

Lala has received up to $9 million in venture capital funding, Nguyen said.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/07/tech...n=money_latest





Sneaky

Microsoft Plans Better Disclosures For Piracy Monitoring Tool
Allison Linn

Microsoft Corp. acknowledged Wednesday that it needs to better inform users that its tool for determining whether a computer is running a pirated copy of Windows also quietly checks in daily with the software maker.

The company said the undisclosed daily check is a safety measure designed to allow the tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, to quickly shut down.

"It's kind of a safety switch," said David Lazar, who directs the Windows Genuine Advantage program.

Lazar said the company decided to add the safety measure because the piracy check, despite widespread distribution, is still a pilot program. He said the company was worried that it might have an unforeseen emergency that would require the program to terminate quickly.

But he acknowledged that Microsoft should have given users more information about the daily interactions.

"We're looking at ways to communicate that in a more forward manner," he said.

Lazar also said the company plans to tweak the program soon so that it will only check in with Microsoft every two weeks, rather than daily.

The tool, part of the Redmond company's bid to thwart widespread piracy, is being distributed gradually to people who have signed up to receive Windows security updates. The company expects to have offered it to all users worldwide by the end of the year.

Lazar said that so far, about 60 percent of users who were offered the piracy check decided to install it. Once installed, the program checks to make sure the version of Windows a user is running is legitimate, and gathers information such as the computer's manufacturer and the language and locale it is set for.

That information-gathering is disclosed in a licensing agreement. But the agreement does not make clear that the program also is designed to "call home" to Microsoft's servers, to make sure that it should keep running.

At least every 90 days, the tool also checks again to see if the copy of Windows is legitimate. Lazar said that's because the company sometimes discovers that a copy of Windows that it thought was legitimate is actually pirated.

When Microsoft believes a copy of Windows is pirated, the user begins to get a series of reminders that the copy isn't genuine. Such users also are barred from downloading non-critical updates, such as the new version of its Internet Explorer browser. But anyone who has signed up to automatically received security updates, which repair flaws to prevent Internet attacks, will still get those fixes.

Lauren Weinstein, who is co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility and was one of the first people to notice the daily communications to Microsoft, said he understands and sympathizes with Microsoft's desire to control widespread piracy of its flagship product. But he said it's problematic that Microsoft did not disclose all the tools' communications with the company.

Weinstein said he also was surprised that Microsoft decided to release so widely a tool that it says is in a "pilot" mode and might need to suddenly be shut down.

"Really what you're talking about is someone saying, 'Look we've put something on your computer and it might go screwy, so we're going to kind of check in every day,'" he said.

Such a concession raises concerns about the quality of the tool itself, he added.

"They sure should've notified better, and it makes me wonder if it should have been deployed better."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/...ng_Piracy.html





Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules
Motoko Rich

When Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel, "Only Revolutions," is published in September, it will include hundreds of margin notes listing moments in history suggested online by fans of his work. Nearly 60 of his contributors have already received galleys of the experimental book, which they're commenting about in a private forum at Mr. Danielewski's Web site, www.onlyrevolutions.com.

Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor and author of the new book "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom" (Yale University Press), has gone even farther: his entire book is available — free — as a download from his Web site. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people have accessed the book electronically, with some of them adding comments and links to the online version.

Mr. Benkler said he saw the project as "simply an experiment of how books might be in the future." That is one of the hottest debates in the book world right now, as publishers, editors and writers grapple with the Web's ability to connect readers and writers more quickly and intimately, new technologies that make it easier to search books electronically and the advent of digital devices that promise to do for books what the iPod has done for music: making them easily downloadable and completely portable.

Not surprisingly, writers have greeted these measures with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread. The dread was perhaps most eloquently crystallized last month in Washington at BookExpo, the publishing industry's annual convention, when the novelist John Updike forcefully decried a digital future composed of free downloads of books and the mixing and matching of "snippets" of text, calling it a "grisly scenario."

Hovering above the discussion of all these technologies is the fear that the publishing industry could be subject to the same upheaval that has plagued the music industry, where digitalization has started to displace the traditional artistic and economic model of the record album with 99-cent song downloads and personalized playlists. Total album sales are down 19 percent since 2001, while CD sales have dropped 16 percent during the same period, according to Nielsen BookScan. Sales of single digital music tracks have jumped more than 1,700 percent in just two years. What writers think about technological developments in the literary world has a lot to do with where they are re sitting at the moment. As a researcher and scholar, Anne Fadiman, author of "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" and "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," thinks a digital library of all books would be a "godsend" during research, allowing her to "sniff out all the paragraphs" on a given topic. But, she said: "That's not reading. For reading, you have to read a book in its entirety and I think there's no substitute for the look and feel and smell of a real book — the magic of the paper and thread and glue."

Others have a much less fixed notion of books. Lisa Scottoline, the author of 13 thrillers, the most recent of which, "Dirty Blonde," spent four weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this spring, offers the first chapter or two of each book on her Web site; and her publisher, HarperCollins, hands out "samplers" of a few chapters of her titles in bookstores. Any of these formats are fine with her, she says. Whether its "paper, pulp, gold rimmed or digitized, I don't think you can take away from the best stories," she said.

Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. "Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together," wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his BookExpo polemic. "The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book."

"Does that mean 'Anna Karenina' goes hand in hand with my niece's blog of her trip to Las Vegas?" asked Jane Hamilton, author of "The Book of Ruth" and a forthcoming novel, "When Madeline Was Young." "It sounds absolutely deadly." Reading books as isolated works is precisely what she wants to do, she said. "When I read someone like Willa Cather, I feel like I'm in the presence of the divine," Ms. Hamilton said. "I don't want her mixed up with anybody else. And I certainly don't want to go to her Web site."

For unknown authors struggling to capture the attention of busy readers, however, the Web offers an unprecedented way to catapult out of obscurity. Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer who started a political blog, "Unclaimed Territory," just eight months ago, was recruited by a foundation financed by Working Assets, a credit card issuer and telecommunications company, to write a book this spring. Mr. Greenwald promoted the result, called "How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok," on his own blog and his publisher e-mailed digital galleys to seven other influential bloggers, who helped to send it to the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com before it was even published. This Sunday it will hit No. 11 on the New York Times nonfiction paperback best-seller list. "I think people who are sort of on the outside of the institutions and new voices entering will be a lot more excited about this technology," Mr. Greenwald said. "That's one of the effects that technology always has. It democratizes things and brings in new readers and new authors."

For many authors, the question of how technology will shape book publishing inevitably leads to the question of how writers will be paid. Currently, publishers pay authors an advance against royalties, which are conventionally earned at the rate of 15 percent of the cover price of each copy sold.

But the Internet makes it a lot easier to spread work free. "I've had pieces put up on Web sites legally and otherwise that get hundreds of thousands of hits, and believe me I sit around thinking 'Boy, if I got a dollar every time that somebody posted an op-ed that I wrote, I'd be a very happy writer,' " said Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the forthcoming book "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," a memoir about his hunt to discover what happened to relatives who were killed in the Holocaust.

Mr. Mendelsohn said he understood that technological shakeups take time to play out, and that he can't bemoan every lost penny. "But as an author who creates texts that people consume, I want my authorship to be recognized and I want to get compensated," he said.

Mr. Benkler, the Yale professor and author, argues that people will continue to pay for books if the price is low enough. "Even in music, price can compete with free," Mr. Benkler said. "The service has to be sufficiently better and the moral culture needs to be one where, as an act of respect, when the price is reasonable, you pay. Its not clear to me why, if people are willing to pay 99 cents for a song they won't be willing to pay $3 for a book."

He argues that without the costs of paper and physical book production, publishers could afford to give authors a higher cut of the sale price as royalties.

In the context of history, the changes that today's technology will impose on literary society may not be as earth-shattering as some may think. In fact, books themselves are a relatively new construct, inheritors of a longstanding oral storytelling culture. Mass-produced books are an even newer phenomenon, enabled by the invention of the printing press that likely put legions of calligraphers and bookbinders out of business.

That history gives great comfort to writers like Vikram Chandra, whose 1,000-page novel, "Sacred Games," will be published in January. Mr. Chandra, a former computer programmer who already reads e-books downloaded to his pocket personal computer, said he saw no point in resisting technology. "I think circling the wagons and defending the fortress metaphors are a little misplaced," he said. "The barbarians at the gate are usually willing to negotiate a little, and the guys in the fort usually end up yelling that 'we are the only good things in the world and you guys don't understand it,' at which point the barbarians shrug, knock down your walls with their amazingly powerful weapons, and put a parking lot over your sacred grounds.

"If they are in a really good mood," he added, "they put up a pyramid of skulls."

Mr. Danielewski said that the physical book would persist as long as authors figure out ways to stretch the format in new ways. "Only Revolutions," he pointed out, tracks the experiences of two intersecting characters, whose narratives begin at different ends of the book, requiring readers to turn it upside down every eight pages to get both of their stories. "As excited as I am by technology, I'm ultimately creating a book that can't exist online," he said. "The experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the space close between the characters until you're exactly at the halfway point is not something you could experience online. I think that's the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further emphasize what is different and exceptional about books."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/books/05digi.html





UK Music Fans Can Copy Own Tracks
BBC

UK music fans no longer face the threat of prosecution for copying their own CDs on to PCs or MP3 players, as long as the songs are only for personal use.

Peter Jamieson, chairman of the British Phonographic Industry, said consumers would only be penalised if they made duplicates of songs for other people.

Currently anyone transferring music to portable devices breaks copyright laws.

The music industry has traditionally turned a blind eye, however, in favour of targeting "professional" pirates.

"We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties," said Mr Jamieson, whose organisation represents the UK's record labels.

He told the Commons select committee for culture, media and sport that he wanted to "make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format, we will not pursue them".

Domination 'not healthy'

Mr Jamieson also called for Apple - which makes the popular iPod portable music player - to open up its iTunes software so it is compatible with the technology of other manufacturers.

Apple applies a digital protection system to its downloads, which means they are not usually compatible with other companies' devices.

He said iTunes' dominant market share in downloads was "not particularly healthy" and said he "would advocate that Apple opts for interoperability".

Consumers in the UK pay 79p per track on iTunes and - generally - £7.90 for a full album, although this can vary according to the number of songs and the status of the artiste in question.

In February, music industry investigators claimed someone in almost every street in every town in the UK was illegally copying music and film.

The Federation Against Copyright Theft and British Phonographic Industry said home counterfeiters now accounted for the majority of their investigations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/5053658.stm





Brin Says Google Compromised Principles
Ted Bridis

Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.

Meeting with reporters near Capitol Hill, Brin said Google had agreed to the censorship demands only after Chinese authorities blocked its service in that country. Google's rivals accommodated the same demands - which Brin described as "a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with" - without international criticism, he said.

"We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference," Brin said.

Brin also addressed Internet users' expectations of privacy in an era of increased government surveillance, saying Americans misunderstand the limited safeguards of their personal electronic information.

"I think it's interesting that the expectations of people with respect to what happens to their data seems to be different than what is actually happening," he said.

Google has battled the U.S. Justice Department in court seeking to limit the amount of information the government can get about users' Internet searches. It also says it has not participated in any programs with the National Security Agency to collect Internet communications without warrants.

Google's free e-mail service is among the Internet's most popular.

Brin visited Washington to ask U.S. senators to approve a plan that would prevent telephone and cable companies from collecting premium fees from companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! for faster delivery of their services. Brin, dressed casually in jeans, sneakers and a black sport jacket, said he wasn't sure whether he changed any lawmakers' minds.

Google's China-approved Web service omits politically sensitive information that might be retrieved during Internet searches, such as details about the 1989 suppression of political unrest in Tiananmen Square. Its agreement with China has provoked considerable criticism from human rights groups.

"Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense," Brin said.

The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday that Google's main Web site, http://www.google.com , was no longer accessible in most Chinese provinces due to censorship efforts, and that it was completely inaccessible throughout China on May 31.

Brin said Google is trying to improve its censored search service, Google.cn, before deciding whether to reverse course. He said virtually all the company's customers in China use the non-censored service.

"It's perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, 'Look, we're going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won't actually operate there.' That's an alternate path," Brin said. "It's not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





SanDisk Goes After The iPod iPuppets
CS

If you've been on public transport this past week, you'll have noticed what looks like a counter-culture uprising against the iPod. Posters and stickers have appeared showing chimps, donkeys and sheep listening to music on iPods. Underneath the images there are taglines like 'are you an iChimp?' and, 'Don't follow the iPack'. One advert shows a man strung up by iPod headphones, like Pinocchio, beneath him the tagline reads, 'have you become an iPuppet?'

The adverts have a pseudo-street graffiti style. The stencilled graphics and ancient typewriter font give the impression of an underground movement against cultural homogenisation. But visit the idont.com Web site espoused by the ads and you'll uncover a different story. Far from a triumph of AdBusters or a campaign financed by Naomi Klein converts, these posters are actually SanDisk's new marketing campaign.

SanDisk is Apple's archrival. Since May 2006 SanDisk has been the world's second most popular MP3 player manufacturer, behind Apple. Its e200 player looks very much like the nano, but unlike many other iPod clones it sells well.

This anti-iPod advertising campaign represents a spark of genuine retaliation against Apple. It's a relief to see a rival bring out its guns, in what had become a landscape devoid of any major competition for the iPod.

SanDisk is the first company to market its player as an ideological rather than technological alternative to the iPod. To do so is to fight Apple on their own terms. The SanDisk e200 is not being touted as more advanced than the iPod, it doesn't claim to have longer battery life or a larger capacity. Instead the e200 is being marketed simply as what it is not. It's not an iPod.

The SanDisk assault doesn't end there. SanDisk is reported to have quietly approached the open source developers behind Rockbox, a free operating system for MP3 players. The company is said to be interested in porting the Rockbox software to its e200 player. Rockbox was first conceived as an alternative to the flawed software provided with an Archos MP3 player, but it has evolved into a multi-platform alternative interface supported by many different players. The latest version supports everything from an iPod to an iRiver MP3 player.

Not only would a Rockbox port earn SanDisk credibility with grassroot geeks, but the software offers a number of appealing features, including support for nearly every codec going.

It looks like Apple may finally have a fight on its hands. iPod critics are quick to bemoan Apple's reliance on marketing over the player's technical advantages, now SanDisk will be putting this to the test. If Apple really won the west by manipulating the iPod to the point where it became a lifestyle necessity for any self-respecting music lover, can SanDisk unseat it by turning the iPod's ubiquity against it?

In many ways, SanDisk's advertising campaign has the phony ring of Sony's heavily criticised faux-graffiti campaign for the PSP. Sony hired graffiti artists to paint what looked like street art on city walls, but the characters depicted suspiciously clasped PSPs. Critics on some forums said Sony was "shamelessly appropriating a culture". Effectively that is what SanDisk is doing here. The adverts may use the graphic vocabulary of anti-capitalist campaigns, but the object of the exercise is to sell SanDisk MP3 players. Still, competition is exactly what Apple needs right now, and this is an ingenious attack. Now get back to your iPods, chimps!
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic...9273890,00.htm




Survey: iPods More Popular Than Beer
Paul Sakuma

Move over Bud. College life isn't just about drinking beer. In a rare instance, Apple Computer Inc.'s iconic iPod music player surpassed beer drinking as the most "in" thing among undergraduate college students, according to the latest biannual market research study by Ridgewood, N.J.-based Student Monitor.

Nearly three quarters, or 73 percent, of 1,200 students surveyed said iPods were "in" - more than any other item in a list that also included text messaging, bar hopping and downloading music.

In the year-ago study, only 59 percent of students named the iPod as "in," putting the gadget well below alcohol-related activities.

This year, drinking beer and Facebook.com, a social networking Web site, were tied for second most popular, with 71 percent of the students identifying them as "in."

The only other time beer was temporarily dethroned in the 18 years of the survey was in 1997 - by the Internet, said Eric Weil, a managing partner at Student Monitor.

Though beer might soon regain its No. 1 spot, as it quickly did a decade ago, the iPod's popularity is still "a remarkable sign," Weil said. "For those who believe there's an excessive amount of drinking on campus, now there's something else that's common on campuses."

Student Monitor conducted the survey the week of March 6, interviewing full-time undergraduate students at 100 U.S. colleges. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Secrets Claims In NSA Case May Stop Suits
Dionne Searcey

As lawsuits mount against phone companies from plaintiffs who allege their call records were handed over to the National Security Agency illegally, the companies' defense may benefit from a powerful force: the U.S. government.

The plaintiffs, who accuse Bell phone companies of privacy violations and are seeking billions of dollars in damages, would need to delve into the depths of the NSA's surveillance program to make their cases. But the government considers such information top secret, and legal experts expect the Bush administration to assert the "state secrets" privilege in the 20 or more lawsuits filed by privacy advocates in recent weeks. If judges accept the claim, as has been the case in nearly every instance in which it has been asserted since the early 1950s, the suits will dissolve.

The state-secrets privilege stems from the Cold War era, created to allow the U.S. government a means of moving to dismiss lawsuits that would hurt foreign policy or national security. The motion has been successfully invoked in cases involving government contractors and, more recently, in the case of a German citizen claiming he was wrongfully detained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

In a California suit filed earlier this year against AT&T Inc., the Bush administration has already weighed in to try to dismiss the case, asserting state secrets in a motion aimed at preventing the airing of any classified information. A federal judge in San Francisco is expected to rule on the motion as soon as June 23.

In that case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco privacy-rights group, accuses AT&T of illegally helping the NSA analyze phone records and Internet communications without court authorization. Most of the suits have been brought on behalf of phone-company customers by activists ranging from the state branches of the American Civil Liberties Union to public-interest lawyers to Chicago author Studs Terkel. Nearly all seek class-action status.

The suits against AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. stem from recent media reports alleging that the companies violated privacy laws by handing over domestic calling records of Americans without court authorization. To litigate the cases, plaintiffs as well as defendants must produce evidence of exactly what happened between the companies and the NSA, lawyers say. AT&T declines to comment on the cases but insists it has violated no laws. Spokesmen for BellSouth and Verizon, which have denied turning over records to the NSA, say the suits are without merit.

Senate Judiciary Committee leaders met yesterday to consider issuing subpoenas to the chief executives of AT&T, BellSouth, Verizon and Qwest Communications International Inc. for a hearing that would examine the NSA issue. No decision was made, a committee aide said, but the senators plan to meet again June 6. Earlier this week Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, citing the government's invocation of the state's secret privilege in the AT&T suit, said the agency wouldn't investigate allegations of privacy violations by the phone companies.

In highly redacted document unsealed yesterday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation suit, a former AT&T technician says an NSA agent visited an AT&T office in 2002 and 2003.

The bulk of the other lawsuits offer virtually no evidence from plaintiffs beyond the allegations raised in newspaper articles. The phone companies have either denied participating in the NSA program or said they did nothing illegal, and they have noted that they can't discuss classified information. So far, no one in the U.S. government has offered any information publicly.

"As it stands right now we have no way to defend against these lawsuits," said one telecom lawyer. "It's equally important to point out that short of a newspaper article the plaintiffs don't have anything to prosecute these cases," he added.

Lawyers familiar with the suits say they anticipate that the government will invoke state secrets in all the cases against the phone companies. In a filing Wednesday in which Verizon asked the courts to consolidate the myriad cases, the company's lawyers said: "The United States is likely to intervene in and seek the dismissal of these cases...in order to assert its state secret privilege." The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in Washington, D.C., will determine whether to consolidate the cases.

In recent years, government officials have ratcheted up the use of state-secrets motions. According to Thomas Blanton, a director the National Security Archive at George Washington University, the use of the privilege climbed from about once every five years from the 1950s through the late 1970s to twice a year from 1977 to 2001. Since 2001, the government has used the privilege in at least 13 cases, or a rate of about three times a year.

Mr. Blanton says that in nearly every case judges have sided with the government. "With state secrets the way it's developed is that's the magic word, the neutron bomb that leaves no plaintiff standing," he says.

If judges dismiss state-secret motions in the cases, both sides would likely rely on classified information to argue their cases, which could result in significant logistical hurdles. Secret documents would need to be flown from Washington, with federal escorts, to judges' chambers in Rhode Island, Louisiana, Montana and numerous other states where suits have been filed.

Lee Tien, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says he is optimistic that the judge in that suit will quash the state-secrets motion. He argues that the government isn't merely a bystander in the case. "They're an intrinsic part of what's going on," Mr. Tien says. "It's a bigger problem from a fairness or due process point of view."

The judge's ruling in June could set the stage for how the other cases play out, and other lawyers and plaintiffs in the suits said they will be closely watching.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





Web Users To 'Patrol' US Border

A US state is to enlist web users in its fight against illegal immigration by offering live surveillance footage of the Mexican border on the internet.

The plan will allow web users worldwide to watch Texas' border with Mexico and phone the authorities if they spot any apparently illegal crossings.

Texas Governor Rick Perry said the cameras would focus on "hot-spots and common routes" used to enter the US.

US lawmakers have been debating a divisive new illegal immigration bill.

The Senate has approved a law that grants millions of illegal immigrants US citizenship and calls for the creation of a guest-worker programme, while beefing up border security.

But in order to come into effect, the plan must be reconciled with tougher anti-immigration measures backed by the House of Representatives, that insist all illegal immigration should be criminalised.

The issue has polarised politics and US society. Right-wing groups have protested against illegal immigrants, while millions of people marched in support of them last month.

Free number

The Texas governor announced his plans for streaming the border surveillance camera footage over the internet at a meeting of police officials on Thursday.

"A stronger border is what Americans want and it's what our security demands and that is what Texas is going to deliver," Mr Perry said.

The cameras will cost $5m (£2.7m) to install and will be trained on sections of the 1,000-mile (1,600km) border known to be favoured by illegal immigrants.

Web users who spot an apparently illegal crossing will be able to alert the authorities by telephoning a number free of charge.

Mr Perry, a Republican, is running for re-election in November.

Deployment dispute

Meanwhile, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has sent National Guard soldiers to his state's border with Mexico, ending a weeks-old dispute with US President George W Bush.

President Bush announced plans on 14 May for thousands of soldiers from the Guard to be sent to bolster security along the Mexican border.

Mr Schwarzenegger had opposed the plan, describing it as a "Band-Aid solution" - or a temporary fix.

He said he did not want to place his state's National Guard soldiers - many of whom would have already served in Iraq - under additional strain.

On Thursday, the governor said he would send the soldiers to the border and the cost of the deployment would be shouldered by the federal government.

Meanwhile, a group of US civilian volunteers that has been patrolling the Mexican border began last week building a fence along a section of the frontier.

The Minutemen group started erecting the fence on privately-owned land in Arizona on Saturday, saying it is "doing the job the federal government will not do".

The Minutemen are allowed to report illegal crossings to border police but have no right to arrest suspects.

Human rights groups have accused the group of xenophobia towards illegal immigrants - but the group denies this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...as/5040372.stm





Gattaca, USA

Vast DNA Bank Pits Policing Vs. Privacy

Data Stored on 3 Million Americans
Rick Weiss

Brimming with the genetic patterns of more than 3 million Americans, the nation's databank of DNA "fingerprints" is growing by more than 80,000 people every month, giving police an unprecedented crime-fighting tool but prompting warnings that the expansion threatens constitutional privacy protections.

With little public debate, state and federal rules for cataloging DNA have broadened in recent years to include not only violent felons, as was originally the case, but also perpetrators of minor crimes and even people who have been arrested but not convicted.

Now some in law enforcement are calling for a national registry of every American's DNA profile, against which police could instantly compare crime-scene specimens. Advocates say the system would dissuade many would-be criminals and help capture the rest.

"This is the single best way to catch bad guys and keep them off the street," said Chris Asplen, a lawyer with the Washington firm Smith Alling Lane and former executive director of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence. "When it's applied to everybody, it is fair, and frankly you wouldn't even know it was going on."

But opponents say that the growing use of DNA scans is making suspects out of many law-abiding Americans and turning the "innocent until proven guilty" maxim on its head.

"These databases are starting to look more like a surveillance tool than a tool for criminal investigation," said Tania Simoncelli of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York.

The debate is part of a larger, post-Sept. 11 tug of war between public safety and personal privacy that has intensified amid recent revelations that the government has been collecting information on personal phone calls. In particular, it is about the limits of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from being swept into criminal investigations unless there is good reason to suspect they have broken the law.

Once someone's DNA code is in the federal database, critics say, that person is effectively treated as a suspect every time a match with a crime-scene specimen is sought -- even though there is no reason to believe that the person committed the crime.

At issue is not only how many people's DNA is on file but also how the material is being used. In recent years, for example, crime fighters have initiated "DNA dragnets" in which hundreds or even thousands of people were asked to submit blood or tissue samples to help prove their innocence.

Also stirring unease is the growing use of "familial searches," in which police find crime-scene DNA that is similar to the DNA of a known criminal and then pursue that criminal's family members, reasoning that only a relative could have such a similar pattern. Critics say that makes suspects out of people just for being related to a convict.

Such concerns are amplified by fears that, in time, authorities will try to obtain information from stored DNA beyond the unique personal identifiers.

"Genetic material is a very powerful identifier, but it also happens to carry a heck of a lot of information about you," said Jim Harper, director of information policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington concerned about DNA database trends.

Law enforcement officials say they have no interest in reading people's genetic secrets. The U.S. profiling system focuses on just 13 small regions of the DNA molecule -- regions that do not code for any known biological or behavioral traits but vary enough to give everyone who is not an identical twin a unique 52-digit number.

"It's like a Social Security number, but not assigned by the government," said Michael Smith, a University of Wisconsin law professor who favors a national database of every American's genetic ID with certain restrictions.

Still, the blood, semen or cheek-swab specimen that yields that DNA, and which authorities almost always save, contains additional genetic information that is sensitive, including disease susceptibilities that could affect employment and health insurance prospects and, in some cases, surprises about who a child's father is.

"We don't know all the potential uses of DNA, but once the state has your sample and there are not limits on how it can be used, then the potential civil liberty violations are as vast as the uses themselves," said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts.

She and others want samples destroyed once the identifying profile has been extracted, but the FBI favors preserving them.

Sometimes authorities need access to those samples to make sure an old analysis was done correctly, said Thomas Callaghan, who oversees the FBI database. The agency also wants to be able to use new DNA identification methods on older samples as the science improves.

Without that option, Callaghan said, "you'd be freezing the database to today's technology."

Crime-Fighting Uses

Over the past dozen years, the FBI-managed national database has made more than 30,000 "cold hits," or exact matches to a known person's DNA, showing its crime-fighting potential.

In a recent case, a Canadian woman flew home the day after she was sexually assaulted in Mexico. Canadian authorities performed a semen DNA profile and, after finding no domestic matches, consulted the FBI database. The pattern matched that of a California man on probation, who was promptly found in the Mexican town where the woman had been staying and was charged by local authorities.

Congress authorized the FBI database precisely for cases like that, on the rationale that sexual predators and other violent felons tend to be repeat offenders and are likely to leave DNA behind. In recent years, however, Congress and state legislators have vastly extended the system's reach.

At least 38 states now have laws to collect DNA from people found guilty of misdemeanors, in some cases for such crimes as shoplifting and fortunetelling. At least 28 now collect from juvenile offenders, too, according to information presented last month at a Boston symposium on DNA and civil liberties, organized by the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics.

The federal government and five states, including Virginia, go further, allowing DNA scans of people arrested. At least four other states plan to do so this year, and California will start in 2009.

Opponents of the growing inclusion of people arrested note that a large proportion of charges (fully half for felony assaults) are eventually dismissed. Blood specimens are not destroyed automatically when charges are dropped, they note, and the procedures for getting them expunged are not simple.

Even more controversial are DNA dragnets, which snare many people for whom there is no evidence of guilt. Given questions about whether such sweeps can be truly voluntary -- "You know that whoever doesn't participate is going to become a 'person of interest,' " said Rose of the ACLU -- some think they violate the Fourth Amendment.

Civil liberties issues aside, the sweeps rarely pay off, according to a September 2004 study by Samuel Walker, a criminology professor at the University of Nebraska. Of the 18 U.S. DNA dragnets he documented since 1990, including one in which police tested 2,300 people, only one identified the offender. And that one was limited to 25 men known to have had access to the victim, who was attacked while incapacitated in a nursing home.

Dragnets, Walker concluded, "are highly unproductive" and "possibly unconstitutional."

Familial searches of the blood relatives of known offenders raise similar issues. The method can work: In a recent British case, police retrieved DNA from a brick that was thrown from an overpass and smashed through a windshield, killing the driver. A near-match of that DNA with someone in Britain's criminal database led police to investigate that offender's relatives, one of whom confessed when confronted with the evidence.

Not investigating such leads "would be like getting a partial license plate number on a getaway car and saying, 'Well, you didn't get the whole plate so we're not going to investigate the crime,' " said Frederick Bieber, a Harvard geneticist who studies familial profiling.

But such profiling stands to exacerbate already serious racial inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system, said Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University.

"Incarceration rates are eight times higher for blacks than they are for whites," he said, so any technique that focuses on relatives of people in the FBI database will just expand that trend.

A Universal Database?

That's a concern that many in law enforcement raise, too -- as an argument in favor of creating a universal DNA database of all Americans. The system would make everyone a suspect of sorts in every crime, they acknowledge. But every criminal, regardless of race, would be equally likely to get caught.

Opponents cite a litany of potential problems, including the billions it would cost to profile so many people and the lack of lab capacity to handle the specimens.

Backlogs are already severe, they note. The National Institute of Justice estimated in 2003 that more than 350,000 DNA samples from rape and homicide cases were waiting to be processed nationwide. As of the end of last year, more than 250,000 samples were backlogged in California alone.

And delays can matter. In 2004, police in Indiana arrested a man after his DNA matched samples from dozens of rapes -- the last 13 of which were committed during the two years it took for the sample to get through the backlog.

A big increase in tests would also generate more mistakes, said William C. Thompson, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine, whose studies have found DNA lab accuracy to be "very uneven."

In one of many errors documented by Thompson, a years-old crime-scene specimen was found to match the DNA from a juvenile offender, leading police to suspect the teenager until they realized he was a baby at the time of the crime. The teenager's blood, it turned out, had been processed in the lab the same day as an older specimen was being analyzed, and one contaminated the other.

"A universal database will bring us more wrongful arrests and possibly more wrongful convictions," said Simoncelli of the ACLU.

But Asplen of Smith Alling Lane said Congress has been helping states streamline and improve their DNA processing. And he does not think a national database would violate the Constitution.

"We already take blood from every newborn to perform government-mandated tests . . . so the right to take a sample has already been decided," Asplen said. "And we have a precedent for the government to maintain an identifying number of a person."

While the debate goes on, some in Congress are working to expand the database a bit more. In March, the House passed the Children's Safety and Violent Crime Reduction Act.

Under the broad-ranging bill, DNA profiles provided voluntarily, for example, in a dragnet, would for the first time become a permanent part of the national database. People arrested would lose the right to expunge their samples if they were exonerated or charges were dropped. And the government could take DNA from citizens not arrested but simply detained.

The bill must be reconciled with a Senate, which contains none of those provisions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...48.html?sub=AR





Implant this, Scott

Proposal to Implant Tracking Chips in Immigrants
Bill Christensen

Scott Silverman, Chairman of the Board of VeriChip Corporation, has proposed implanting the company's RFID tracking tags in immigrant and guest workers. He made the statement on national television on May 16.

Silverman was being interviewed on "Fox & Friends." Responding to the Bush administration's call to know "who is in our country and why they are here," he proposed using VeriChip RFID implants to register workers at the border, and then verify their identities in the workplace. He added, "We have talked to many people in Washington about using it...."

The VeriChip is a very small Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag about the size of a large grain of rice. It can be injected directly into the body; a special coating on the casing helps the VeriChip bond with living tissue and stay in place. A special RFID reader broadcasts a signal, and the antenna in the VeriChip draws power from the signal and sends its data. The VeriChip is a passive RFID tag; since it does not require a battery, it has a virtually unlimited life span.

RFID tags have long been used to identify animals in a variety of settings; livestock, laboratory animals and pets have been "chipped" for decades. Privacy advocates have long expressed concerns about this technology being used in human beings.

In a related story, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe allegedly remarked that microchips could be used to track seasonal workers to visiting U.S. senators Jeff Sessions (Alabama) and Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania). "President Uribe said he would consider having Colombian workers have microchips implanted in their bodies before they are permitted to enter the US for seasonal work," Specter told Congress on April 25.

Implanting microchips in human beings for the purpose of monitoring is not exactly news for science fiction fans; Alfred Bester wrote about "skull bugs" in his 1974 novel The Computer Connection:
"...you don't know what's going on in the crazy culture outside. It's a bugged and drugged world. Ninety percent of the bods have bugs implanted in their skulls in hospital when they're born. They're monitored constantly."
(Read more about Alfred Bester's skull bugs)

VeriChips are legal for implantation in people in the U.S.; see VeriChip RFID Tag Patient Implant Badges Now FDA Approved. See also a related story on a Proposed National Worker DNA Fingerprint Database. Read more at RFID implants for guest workers, Latin leader keen on ID chips and Chip implants for migrant workers?.

Note: The source for this story was inadvertently omitted; read the press release at spychips.com; also, see the Silverman interview transcript.

(This Science Fiction in the News story used with permission from Technovelgy.com - where science meets fiction.)

· George Orwell's Illnesses Influenced '1984'
· State Would Outlaw Mandatory Microchip Implants
· Chip Implants Proposed To Halt Blackmarket Cadaver Trade
· Two Workers Have Tracking Chips Implanted Into Them
· More Parents Going High-Tech to Track Kids

http://www.livescience.com/scienceof...fid_chips.html





Renting Movies With a Box and a Beam
David Pogue

YOU know the trouble with movies in America these days? There just aren't enough ways to see them. If you miss a movie in the theater, it's gone forever — unless you can find a video-rental store, DVD-by-mail service, cable movie station, pay-per-view service, video-on-demand channel, Internet movie download site, hotel room or airplane.

Thank goodness, then, that a company backed by Disney, Intel and Cisco has stepped in to fill the breach with yet another movie-delivery mechanism. It's a slim, silver, good-looking $200 set-top box called MovieBeam.

You connect the MovieBeam player directly to your TV set. Then, whenever you're in the mood for a movie, you choose from the list of 100 movies on the player's hard drive. Preposterous as this may sound, there's no monthly fee and no minimum; you're billed only for the movies you watch ($4 for a new release, $2 for an old one). You can rewind, pause, fast-forward and replay a movie you've bought — for 24 hours from your first glimpse of the opening credits.

Each week, seven or eight new movies magically show up in the player's list, pushing an equal number of old ones off to movie heaven.

This wireless movie-delivery feature gives MovieBeam its name. The company doesn't require an Internet connection or even a computer. Nor does the service depend on what cable or satellite setup you have, if any. How, then, can it send enormous, multigigabyte movies to MovieBeam owners nationwide?

Answer: Very cleverly. MovieBeam's movies are encoded in the broadcast signal of PBS stations across the country. You're actually receiving MovieBeam's movies at this very moment — but they're invisible unless you have the MovieBeam box. (MovieBeam pays PBS for these piggybacking rights.)

That's why part of the MovieBeam setup is placing a small, square, flat antenna high on a shelf or near a window, and trailing its 20-foot gray cord to the box itself. That's also why MovieBeam is available so far only in 29 major cities (and their suburbs), including Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Washington; you can check availability in your area at moviebeam.com. The company plans a large geographical expansion in 2007.

AND speaking of unattractive décor enhancements: the MovieBeam player also requires a connection to a phone jack. Every other week, the box dials a toll-free number in the middle of the night to tell the mother ship how much you've spent on movies so far, for the benefit of your monthly statement.

The software design owes an obvious debt to the TiVo's famous attention to detail. In fact, the MovieBeam service is so easy to use, it easily passes what home-theater aficionados call the Baby Sitter Test. The compact remote control isn't illuminated, but it doesn't have to be; you control playback functions with one thumb by touch alone.

The movies represent every genre: comedy, action, drama, kids, horror, and so on. They come from every major movie studio except Sony (MovieBeam says a deal is imminent). You can view them alphabetically or by category, including Coming Soon and Leaving Soon. When you highlight a movie title, details appear and its Hollywood trailer plays automatically.

The picture and sound quality are excellent on standard TV sets, although you should be warned that most of them play in wide-screen format. On standard sets, that means that you'll get black letterbox bars above and below the picture.

MovieBeam could also play an important role in the new era of high-definition movies — once it gets its act together. Each month, about four of its movies are offered in high definition (for an additional $1 each), which you can enjoy on any HDTV set that has — stand back for oncoming jargon — either an HDMI jack or a DVI connector with HDCP.

At the moment, though, MovieBeam is muffing its opportunity here. The graphics and menus look spectacular, but the clarity and detail of the movies themselves fall far short of what you think of as high-def. (When Nicole Kidman's skin looks grainy, you know something's off.) The company blames, not altogether convincingly, the HD transfers from the original film, and promises better-looking HD movies in the coming months.

Otherwise, though, you'll have a tough time finding much to criticize about the MovieBeam experience. The real question is whether MovieBeam can find a niche that's not already served by the 435 other movie-delivery channels.

The company points out that it has advantages over virtually every other contender:

BLOCKBUSTER MovieBeam offers the same sorts of movies at the same prices — but you don't have to make two trips to the video store. You never have to pay late fees. And you never find that all the good movies have already been checked out for the weekend by 7 p.m. on Friday night.

NETFLIX DVD-by-mail services carry just about every movie ever released on DVD. You get to watch a lot of movies each month for a fixed monthly fee, and you can keep the movies for as long as you like with no late fees. But you may have to wait for weeks for your turn to check out the most popular movies. And your movie selection on a given night is limited to the three you've ordered ahead of time. With MovieBeam, you never declare yourself in the mood for a mindless Adam Sandler comedy, only to find that all you've got on hand are three World War II documentaries.

HBO After a movie finishes its run in theaters, it generally moves through the system in this sequence: hotels and airlines; home video (like Blockbuster); pay-per-view television; and finally, maybe nine months after the theatrical run, movie channels like HBO and Starz.

Movies from Disney, Touchstone and Miramax appear on MovieBeam in the home-video window; the rest show up in the pay-per-view window, about a month later. The point is that movies appear much sooner on MovieBeam than on cable movie channels.

PAY-PER-VIEW Standard pay-per-view offers a very small selection, doesn't let you choose when to start the movie and doesn't offer any pause/rewind/replay features.

VIDEO-ON-DEMAND PAY-PER-VIEW This newfangled movie-delivery system is probably MovieBeam's biggest competitor. You can start a movie whenever you like, and even pause/rewind/replay it. Here again, though, the selection is very small, and upgrading to the necessary digital cable box can inflate your monthly cable bill by $10 or more.

INTERNET MOVIE-DOWNLOAD SITES Oh, forget it. It takes forever to download a movie, the quality isn't great, and you need a computer that's connected to your TV.

So who, exactly, is a good candidate for MovieBeam?

According to the company's research, movie fans in 30 million American households make at least four round trips to the video store each month. If you're among them, you're an excellent MovieBeam prospect.

You should also consider MovieBeam if you're paying for several cable movie channels but watching only a few movies a month on them. You could cancel the channels, saving about $10 a channel per month. The beauty of MovieBeam is that you pay only when you actually watch a movie. If your life hits a busy patch, you don't keep forking over money for a service you're not using.

Note that these situations make you a candidate for MovieBeam, not necessarily a happy camper. Potential drawbacks include the price for the box itself ($200, though with free shipping and a 30-day guarantee); the wide-screen format of most of its movies; and the lack of DVD extras ("making of" documentaries and other featurettes). MovieBeam offers only one featurette per movie, and for only a handful of movies each month. (On the bright side, it doesn't sentence you to watching an annoying, non-fast-forwardable F.B.I. warning as the movie starts.)

Clearly, MovieBeam's designers have analyzed nearly every aspect of movie delivery in an attempt to find a drawback-free solution: price, delivery speed, picture quality, movie variety, movie availability, movie timeliness and simplicity.

The result may fill only the nichiest niche. But the movie-rental business generates $10 billion a year; MovieBeam will no doubt be happy with even a very small slice of that pie.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/te...y/01pogue.html





11th Circuit to Webmasters: Telling Someone To Go Away Doesn't Make Them
ACS

The Eleventh Circuit in the case of Snow v. DirecTV held that a webmaster may not exclude certain persons from his site merely by telling them their access is unauthorized.

In this case, Michael Snow was the webmaster of Stop Corporate Extortion, a "private support group website for "individuals who have been, are being, or will be sued by any Corporate entity." In order to access Snow's site, a user was required to register a username and password, and to agree to a statement affirming that the user was not associated with DirecTV, inc. He claimed that several agents of DirecTV ignored this warning and accessed his site. According to Snow, such unauthorized access violated the Stored Communications Act (SCA), which forbids accessing an electronic communication "without authorization."

The Eleventh Circuit rejected this claim. According to the court, the SCA does not apply to communications which are "readily accessible to the general public." On Snow's site, any member of the general public could access the site by merely registering with a username and password and clicking on the words "I Agree to these terms." Such an easily surmountable barrier to access is, according to the court, insufficient to make a site not "readily acessible to the general public."

While the court did not explain just what sort of security measures would invoke the SCA, it did hint that a webmaster who "screens the registrants before granting access" would have a stronger claim than one who merely asks his registrants to "self screen[ ]."
http://www.acsblog.org/ip-and-tech-l...make-them.html





Coming Soon: The Wi-Fi MP3 Player
Rafe Needleman

I love my iPod, but I do not love that it's basically a PC accessory. No PC (or Mac) nearby means no content on the iPod, and no updates. There's got to be a better way.

I've previously covered a company, Music Gremlin, that's building a Wi-Fi-enabled music player. And at the D4 conference this morning, a new company, Zing, is rolling out a service that enables other companies (like its partners Sirius and Yahoo) to build their own complete music infrastructures--content to player--that work just fine without a PC connection.

The Zing prototype shown at D4 had both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios built in. The radios are used to download music and to upload data about what you are listening to. If you have one of these players, you can do cool things, like see what your friends are listening to, then play samples of those tracks, or buy songs and albums directly from the player. If you try buy items when you're not in range of a Wi-Fi access point, the product will queue up your requests and batch-process them when you do eventually connect.

Most people will probably start using a Zing-powered player by first loading it with music that they have on their computer. But say you have just one track by Johnny Cash, and when you're playing it you realize you want more. On your player, you can flag the album it came from, and next time you're in Wi-Fi range, the player will download it for you. The player will stream Sirius radio content (via Wi-Fi, not a satellite connection) and will enable you to do the same thing when you're listening to radio tracks.

The Zing reference player has both a built-in speaker and a microphone, which, combined with the Wi-Fi radio, means it has all the hardware a voice-communication platform needs. So as a bonus, the software enables you to talk with your friends, walkie-talkie style, over the Wi-Fi network.

Building networking capabilities into music players is the obvious next step in their evolution. But wireless devices (cell phones) are also getting music players built into them. It's a bit early to say definitively which model will win out, but it's worth noting that for most people, a cell phone is a necessity while a music player is a luxury; I think that indicates which way the market is going to tilt.

The first Zing-powered players should ship this year, carrying the Sirius brand.
http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6535687.html





Who Divides Antiterror Money? That's a Secret
Diane Cardwell and Al Baker

The panel that guided the distribution of $711 million in antiterrorism money in a process that led to New York City's share being reduced by 40 percent is a shadow player in the war on terror, its work kept secret and its members shielded from view.

A collection of about 100 law enforcement officials and government bureaucrats from all over the country, the so-called peer reviewers who evaluated proposals for the Department of Homeland Security, took vows of silence, signing agreements that they would not reveal the substance of their deliberations.

Speaking of the reduction in New York's share, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg assailed the process yesterday, telling listeners of his weekly call-in radio program that he had complained to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and planned to fight the cut.

"I said, 'Look, you know I'm going to go out there and fight as hard as I can to get this changed,' " Mr. Bloomberg said. "I just think the ways they went about it was wrong."

Even some of the panelists were frustrated by the evaluation process, which involved a complex and rigid system for grading the highly detailed proposals, according to an official who had been briefed on the deliberations by a member of the panel.

Homeland Security officials say that in creating the panel this year, they were seeking to institute a new system of evaluating aid applications that would for the first time engage people from around the country, making the judging impartial.

Panelists got to work in March at the National Fire Academy in Emmetsburg, Md. The panel evaluates applications for domestic security aid, but the actual decisions on how much aid to award, based in part on the panel's findings, are made by Homeland Security officials.

Officials promised to guard the identities of the panel members to keep them from being pressured, although they were free to come forward themselves, said George W. Foresman, the under secretary for preparedness at the Department of Homeland Security. Thus far, he said, only four have agreed to do so.

Mr. Foresman added that the secrecy surrounding the work stemmed from security concerns about not divulging the vulnerabilities of certain localities.

He said the department sought to ensure that there was "no disincentive for a local jurisdiction to be honest and up-front about what their needs are, where their shortcomings are, and what they are trying to fix and improve."

He added, "You do not want your doctor talking about your medical conditions, do you?"

Working in groups of five to seven from geographically diverse, urban and rural regions, the panelists were given almost three weeks to grade the applications. They were to review the proposals and supporting documents and then rate the individual programs and overall applications on a scale of 1 to 5, using criteria like "shows clear purpose" and "describes expected outcomes."

After the panelists completed that work, they met in groups with a consultant from Booz Allen Hamilton who helped the groups reach a consensus score. Once the evaluations were complete, analysts at the Department of Homeland Security signed off on them and determined the amounts of the allotments.

Mr. Bloomberg said he would investigate whether, as Homeland Security officials maintain, there had been problems with the city's application. At the same time, city officials continued to vigorously defend their work and criticize the federal process. They said they suspected the new system of judging applications was intended to ensure a broad geographic dispersal of the money away from New York.

One of the reviewers who agreed to be identified, Lt. Timothy N. Fisk, said that they judged the effectiveness of the proposals and whether the budgets seemed in line with the declared needs. He emphasized that the panelists made no judgments other than whether it was an appropriate amount of money to support the program in question.

"We did evaluate the investments based on the needs and how they presented the projects," said Lieutenant Fisk, who is commander of the Homeland Security section and Tactical Operations for the Orlando, Fla., Police Department. "We did not determine how much money anybody got."

According to Mr. Fisk, the peer review process was only one-third of the formula that ultimately determined how much money each state and urban area was to receive. The balance was the risk portion determined by the Department of Homeland Security.

As they faced mounting political pressure and public relations problems, Homeland Security officials said that an overwhelming majority of panelists had found the results objective and geographically balanced. But some panelists have questioned that balance, arguing that security officials from smaller locales would have a tough time judging the needs of a larger city like New York.

Officials pointed to another reviewer who agreed to be identified, Chris Geldart, the assistant director of the Maryland governor's office of homeland security, as someone with a rich range of life experience. As a United States marine for 12 years, he served several tours in the Middle East and worked on ways to protect government installations from possible attacks by weapons of mass destruction, a spokesman for the Maryland office said. Now Mr. Geldart is involved in the state's leading intelligence initiative, and "lives and breathes grant funding here," said the spokesman, James M. Pettit.

New York's police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said that in forming the peer review panel, the Department of Homeland Security had abdicated its responsibility to make threat-based financing decisions. Abandoning a system of decision-making based on real intelligence inevitably hurt New York because it shifted the focus to potential risks rather than to actual threats, he said.

City officials also complained that they had received mixed signals from the department in their battle over how to use antiterrorism funds.

The Bloomberg administration has used the money to pay for continuing costs, like overtime for police officers, while the federal government wants the grants to support semipermanent safeguards like improvements in communications systems, better gas masks or increased training. But city officials have argued that spending on overtime and the like clearly reduces the risk of terror attacks. They say that tactics like stationing patrol cars at the feet of the Brooklyn Bridge should be considered a legitimate use of federal counterterrorism dollars.

This year, according to city officials who spoke anonymously for fear of retribution from the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Chertoff indicated to Mr. Bloomberg that he was open to a philosophical shift toward the city's viewpoint. But when the city tried to follow up with departmental staff members, the officials said, no progress was made.

Others in the administration complained that the decision-making process has been opaque, and they criticized the anonymity of the panelists.

"They made it sound like The New England Journal of Medicine," said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, "but we have no idea of who these people are."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/ny...rtner=homepage





News Media Pay in Scientist Suit
Adam Liptak

Wen Ho Lee, an atomic scientist once suspected of espionage, yesterday settled an invasion of privacy lawsuit against the government for $1,645,000.

Five news organizations are paying almost half that sum to avoid contempt sanctions against their reporters.

In the suit, Dr. Lee said the government had violated privacy laws by telling reporters about his employment history, finances, travels and polygraph tests. The settlement followed seven months of unusual negotiations among Dr. Lee, the government and lawyers for the news organizations.

The five reporters were not defendants, but had been held in contempt of court for refusing to testify and ordered to pay fines of $500 a day for refusing to disclose the identities of their confidential sources.

The news organizations — ABC News, part of the Walt Disney Company; The Associated Press; The Los Angeles Times, part of the Tribune Company; The New York Times; and The Washington Post — agreed to contribute $750,000 to the settlement.

Specialists in media law said such a payment by news organizations to avoid a contempt sanction was almost certainly unprecedented. Some called it troubling.

In a joint statement, the five organizations said they made the payment reluctantly.

"We did so," they explained, "to protect our confidential sources, to protect our journalists from further sanction and possible imprisonment and to protect our news organizations from potential exposure."

A senior vice president of ABC, Henry S. Hoberman, said the decision to settle was made after a long, hard legal fight.

"The journalists found themselves between a rock and a hard place after years of seeking relief from the courts and finding none," Mr. Hoberman said. "Given the absence of a federal shield law and the consistently adverse rulings from the federal courts in this case, the only way the journalists could keep their bond with their sources and avoid further sanctions, which might include jail time, was to contribute to a settlement between the government and Wen Ho Lee that would end the case."

Federal courts have been increasingly hostile in recent years to assertions by journalists that they are legally entitled to protect their confidential sources. Last year, Judith Miller, who was a reporter for The New York Times, spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. operative.

Dr. Lee, who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, brought his case against the government in 1999, the year federal investigators accused him of giving nuclear secrets to China.

Dr. Lee spent nine months in solitary confinement awaiting trial. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to one felony count of illegally gathering and retaining national security data, and he received an apology from the judge in the case.

A lawyer for Dr. Lee, Brian A. Sun, said the settlement furthered two goals.

"We wanted to send a message to the government that leaking information protected by law is not justified, even if they think it's politically expedient to do so," Mr. Sun said. "And the fact that the journalists contributed to the settlement recognizes the role they played in the series of unfortunate events that surrounded Dr. Lee's case."

The settlement included an unusual condition, Mr. Sun said.

"The government didn't want any of the money going into his pocket," Mr. Sun said of Dr. Lee.

In the end, Dr. Lee agreed to apply the government's payment to lawyers' fees, litigation costs and taxes. The money from the news organizations was unrestricted.

The fines against the reporters — Robert Drogin of The Los Angeles Times, H. Josef Hebert of The A.P., Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, James Risen of The New York Times and Pierre Thomas, formerly of CNN and now of ABC News — were suspended while they appealed.

The judge in the case, Rosemary M. Collyer of Federal District Court in Washington, vacated the contempt sanctions as part of the settlement. The settlement also moots a pending appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

Though Mr. Thomas covered Dr. Lee for CNN, part of Time Warner, it did not participate in the settlement.

"CNN paid over $1 million toward Pierre's defense in this matter," a spokeswoman, Laurie Goldberg, said. "We parted ways because we had a philosophical disagreement over whether it was appropriate to pay money to Wen Ho Lee or anyone else to get out from under a subpoena."

The five other organizations made roughly similar contributions to the settlement, lawyers in the case said.

The government has settled similar privacy suits in the past. In 2003, it paid Linda R. Tripp, a central figure in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, $595,000 to settle a suit that accused it of leaking employment information about her.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she viewed the settlement in Dr. Lee's case with mixed emotions.

"It's a huge disappointment, and it's certainly not an ideal resolution," Ms. Dalglish said. "But it's probably as good as we could have expected under the circumstances."

The New York Times has long maintained that it will not settle libel suits in the United States for money. Its lawyers said the payment to Dr. Lee did not violate the principles behind that policy.

"It's apples and oranges," George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, said. "That principle remains. In libel suits, people aren't sent to jail."

The Times covered the charges against Dr. Lee aggressively. But in September 2000, it published a lengthy note "from the editors" saying that despite "careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking," there were "some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt."

The note said The Times should have pushed harder and sooner "to uncover weaknesses in the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee" and to assess the scientific, technical and investigative assumptions behind the case.

In their statement yesterday, the news organizations said the settlement was not connected to their coverage of the case against Dr. Lee.

"The journalism in this case — which was not challenged in Lee's lawsuit — reported on a matter of great public interest," the statement said. "And the public could not have been informed about the issues without the information we were able to obtain only from confidential sources."

Jane E. Kirtley, a professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, said she found the news organizations' decision to participate in the settlement "profoundly disturbing."

"These are very strange times in which we are living," Professor Kirtley said, "and it does appear that sometimes decisions have to be made that would have been unthinkable five years ago. But to make a payment in settlement in this context strikes me as an admission that the media are acting in concert with the government."

Ms. Dalglish of the Reporters Committee disagreed.

"I view it," she said, "purely as, 'What can we do to get the least damaging result?' "

Mr. Freeman, the lawyer for The Times, also rejected Professor Kirtley's characterization.

"We acted in the best interests of our reporters and our news organizations to protect our sources and protect our journalists," he said. "We were not acting in concert with anyone. The three parties managed to resolve the matter."

News media lawyers said they hoped that the settlement would help prompt a change in federal law. The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment offers reporters no protection, at least in the context of grand jury subpoenas.

Though most states have so-called shield laws that protect journalists' confidential sources, those laws are usually irrelevant in cases brought in federal court.

The settlement in Dr. Lee's case, Professor Kirtley said, "certainly underscores the need for meaningful journalists' shield laws, now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/wa...rtner=homepage





Is Vonage Sinking or Coming Up for Air?
Matt Richtel

When the Internet telephone provider Vonage went public last week, it was meant to be a coming-out party for a technology that many see as the future of voice communications. It was also a chance at redemption for Jeffrey A. Citron, a brash and canny entrepreneur trying to overcome a checkered past.

The company had many things to recommend it: about 1.5 million paying customers, a solid brand name and a big share of a growing market. But Vonage's public offering quickly imploded. Its shares were priced at $17 and have fallen as low as $11.64, a 32 percent decline that is one of the sharpest for a new stock in recent years. The stock rose yesterday to close at $11.98.

The company is also contending with disgruntled customers who were encouraged to buy shares at the offering price. Roughly 9,000 of them were allotted around 13 percent of the 31 million shares offered, and some have complained publicly about having to pay $17 for shares that are now worth much less than that.

How did things go so wrong? There is no simple answer, but a handful of missteps by the company and its underwriters — UBS, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank — and investor nervousness about its prospects appear to have set the stock up for a fall, analysts say. Meanwhile, Vonage is left with the job of repairing an image that was meant to be burnished by the offering.

"Instead of rewarding people and driving loyalty, this could actually have backfired," said Richard S. Greenfield, a telecommunications industry analyst with Pali Research. "How much more is Vonage going to have to spend in marketing to rebuild its image and visibility?"

The company, citing a quiet period, has declined to comment on most issues related to the offering, but Brooke Schulz, a company spokeswoman, defended the initial share price yesterday and said there had been plenty of demand for the stock. Representatives of the underwriters would not answer questions about the offering.

The Vonage sale was the most anticipated initial offering of a technology company since Google's, nearly two years ago. Investors are not seeing its rocky reception as broader evidence of a weak market for initial offerings, or as an indictment of its underlying technology, which turns phone calls into chunks of data and sends them over Internet connections.

Vonage, based in Holmdel, N.J., helped to expand the popularity of the technology — known as VoIP, for voice over Internet protocol — which is less expensive to provide than traditional phone service and is virtually unregulated.

While Vonage has the largest share of the market at 31 percent, according to estimates from Sanford C. Bernstein, there is now severe competition, particularly from cable companies that offer television, Internet and phone service in a single bundle. The main question Vonage faced in the weeks before its offering was whether it still held any advantage over competitors with deeper pockets, longstanding customer relationships and bundles of services to offer.

Analysts say questions about the company's prospects sowed the seeds of a rough debut. They suggest that investors — from big pension funds to individuals — thought enough of Vonage to take a chance on the offering, but not enough to consider it a long-term bet. When the stock started trading and looked to be headed south, investors quickly soured and sold their shares, accelerating the decline.

One investor who found himself in that position is David Anderson, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Mr. Anderson is a Vonage customer who was given the opportunity to buy shares in the offering. He wound up being allotted 200 shares and spending around $3,400 for them. From the start he was not planning to keep them, he said, largely because of the company's competitive and financial situation.

"Before I bought it, I decided I'd sell it immediately," Mr. Anderson said. "If it opened up, I'd take a quick profit. If not, I'd cut my losses."

With the stock at $16.15 some 40 minutes after trading began, he put in an order to sell. By the time the trade was executed his sale price was $15.81, so his loss was roughly $240.

Mr. Anderson said he was not upset with Vonage. "I took a very deliberate gamble and understood the risks and lost a little bit of money," he said.

Other customers who invested have not been so understanding. Some have refused to pay for shares they were allotted. Vonage has said it will reimburse the underwriters if the payments do not come through, but it has also said it will pursue customers who fail to pay.

Analysts have laid much of the blame for the stock's decline on the underwriters.

"Investment banks are supposed to do a better job at pricing a stock," said Robert V. Green, a telecommunications industry strategist with Briefing.com, a financial analysis firm. The disconnect between the price and investors' willingness to pay, he said, led to a frantic sell-off.

"There was a mass exodus," he added. "I.P.O. prices go down, but not this far, this fast."

Indeed, Vonage had the second-steepest one-week percentage drop of any new public company since 2003.

Asked whether the offering price was set too high, Ms. Schulz of Vonage said there was demand for six times the shares allotted. She also noted that the price was at the midpoint of the proposed range of $16 to $18.

Vonage's struggles do not appear to indicate any broader problems in the market for initial offerings, said Richard Peterson, senior researcher with Thomson Financial. "The state of the I.P.O. market is rather healthy," Mr. Peterson said, noting that investor response was varying deal by deal.

To date this year, there have been 76 public offerings that have raised around $17 billion, up from 66 offerings raising around $15 billion in the period last year.

Mr. Green of Briefing.com said his theory was that the underwriters received assurances from big institutional investors that they would buy big allotments, but that those institutions never intended to make a long-term commitment to the stock.

Mr. Green said the underlying problem with Vonage was that while it does have a growing base of paying customers, it shares a crucial similarity with the companies of the boom era: it is focusing on growth while racking up losses. In a public filing on May 23, Vonage said that in the near term it was "pursuing growth, rather than profitability" to enhance future value.

"That's Internet bubble-era thinking," Mr. Green said.

But a handful of industry analysts are now saying the market is not giving Vonage a chance. Albert Lin, a telecommunications analyst with American Technology Research, started coverage of Vonage this week with a buy rating, and, citing Vonage's head start on the competition and its strong brand name, gave it a six- to 12-month target price of $20.

Another bull is Daniel Berninger, a telecommunications analyst with Tier 1 Research who has deep ties to Vonage. Mr. Berninger was an executive at the telecommunications start-up Pulver.com, where in 2000, he said, he brought on Mr. Citron to run the subsidiary that would eventually become Vonage.

Mr. Berninger said he did not own shares of Vonage and is not employed by the company. He predicts that the stock will hit $24 in the next two years. A chief reason for his confidence, he said, is Mr. Citron, a tireless entrepreneur who remains as Vonage's chairman.

Mr. Citron still has something to prove, Mr. Berninger said. Mr. Citron left Wall Street in disgrace in 2003, paying a $22.5 million fine and admitting no wrongdoing, after the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated illegal trading activity at Datek Online Holdings, a pioneering day-trading firm where he had been chief executive.

"That process gave the impression his riches were ill-gotten gains," Mr. Berninger said. "This time he wanted to prove, 'I got those monies because I'm a great entrepreneur.' He wanted to prove the second time that these were not ill-gotten gains."

Mr. Berninger said the disappointing offering would give new impetus to Mr. Citron, who he said was usually the smartest person in the room and "the most intense person I've ever met."

Vonage announced yesterday that it had appointed a new executive to oversee customer service. Bryan DiGiorgio, who has been a manager with OnStar since 1992, takes the title of senior vice president for customer care, a position that could help Vonage tackle issues that have led to customer complaints about its service.

In the wake of the offering, Mr. Citron is being forced to deal with a party gone bad that has left Vonage with a hangover.

"An I.P.O. is supposed to be advertising," said Linda Killian, a portfolio manager for the I.P.O. Plus After-Market Fund, a $25 million mutual fund that focuses on newly public companies. "An unsuccessful deal for a consumer company like Vonage is a problem."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/te.../03vonage.html





The Return of Fania, the Record Company That Made Salsa Hot
Jody Rosen

FANIA RECORDS, the legendary New York label that pioneered salsa, has often been called the Latin Motown. In its heyday, from the late 1960's through the 70's, Fania, like Motown, had a superstar-packed roster, a virtual monopoly on salsa's A-list: Celia Cruz, Willie Colón, Hector Lavoe, Johnny Pacheco, Rubén Blades, Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, Bobby Valentin, Larry Harlow and other greats. Like Motown, Fania began as a humble cottage industry — its releases were once sold out of the trunk of a car on the streets of Harlem and the Bronx — and became a multimillion-dollar business that carried a bracing musical hybrid to the nation and the world.

But the comparison soon breaks down. Today Motown looms gigantic in American cultural memory, a cornerstone of the 60's nostalgia industry, the subject of innumerable books and documentaries, its hits still ubiquitous on the airwaves decades after they made the charts. Fania, on the other hand, is recalled mostly by collectors and Latinos of a certain age. And where Motown's records have been endlessly reissued and anthologized, Fania's catalog languished for years, its master tapes moldering in a warehouse in Hudson, N.Y. Dozens of its most important recordings are out of print, and others were so shoddily transferred to CD — often directly from the original vinyl — as to be virtually unlistenable.

Now, though, a Fania revival is stirring. Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez just finished shooting "El Cantante," a biopic about the short, tragic life of the singing star Hector Lavoe. More important, the music itself is at last being reissued properly, with informative liner notes (in Spanish and English) and shimmering remastered sound that conjures a bygone era: the funky tumult of Latin New York in the years of Vietnam, Watergate and Jimmy Carter. Emusica, the Miami company that purchased the Fania catalog last year in a deal worth several million dollars, recently released the first 30 of a planned 300 reissues. This bounty holds surprises even for longtime Fania aficionados and offers non-initiates a chance to catch up with some of the greatest music from one of pop's most fertile periods.

"Fania is the catalog of salsa music, an unmatched body of recordings," said David Garcia, an assistant professor of music at the University of North Carolina and an expert on Latin music. Larry Harlow, the keyboardist and bandleader who produced and arranged many of Fania's classic records (his 1979 album "Yo Soy Latino" is among the first reissued Fania CD's), called the label's output "a chronological biography of the whole Latin music scene from the mid-60's through the early 80's." Fania, Mr. Harlow said, "is Latin music." The label was the brainchild of unlikely business partners: the Dominican flutist and bandleader Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, an Italian-American former New York City police officer turned lawyer who fell in love with Latin music during a brief stay in Cuba in the early 60's. In 1964, Mr. Masucci (who died in 1997) and Mr. Pacheco teamed up and began signing hot New York musicians, including Ray Barretto (who died in February at 76), a conga virtuoso and leader of one of the city's best dance bands, as well as younger bandleaders like Bobby Valentin and Mr. Harlow.

By the late 60's the label's roster had swelled with young talent, and Fania would soon annex several smaller Latin labels. The roster included Willie Colón, a gifted trombonist and composer with eclectic musical tastes, and Hector Lavoe, a Puerto Rican singer with a luminous tenor voice. Together these musicians honed a new sound — a blend of bustling Afro-Cuban rhythms, big-band jazz, street-smart R&B and other styles — in a combustive atmosphere of collaboration and friendly rivalry.

"It was a very competitive time," recalled Mr. Colón, who in recent years has become involved in New York City politics, running for public advocate in 2001 and serving as co-chairman of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's re-election campaign last year. "Within the label, there was a lot of competition. We were all trying to innovate and outdo each other."

Those innovations are all over the first batch of Fania reissues. The music is built on a rock-solid Afro-Cuban base, on the clave beat and on the sensuous big-band stylings of Cuban son, with numerous other styles stirred into the mix, from mambo and rumba to Puerto Rican plena and bomba. But on early albums like "El Malo" (1967) by Mr. Colón, and classic 70's releases like "Rey del Bajo" by Mr. Valentin and "El Maestro" by Mr. Pacheco (both 1974), a sophisticated new style emerges, with son's 1-4-5 chord structures giving way to jazz chords and harmonies, complex arrangements and far more aggressive rhythm than is typical of Cuban music.

Cold war geopolitics played a role in the development of that sound. The Cuban embargo cut off virtually all contact between the island and musicians based in the United States, and a distinctively New York style was incubated in the city's dozens of Latin nightclubs. The Fania reissues radiate big-city cosmopolitanism. The label was a melting pot, with a lineup that included black and white Latinos: Puerto Ricans (Mr. Valentin, Ismael Rivera, Pete Rodriguez), Dominicans (Mr. Pacheco), Panamanians (Mr. Blades), Cubans (Celia Cruz), native New Yorkers (Mr. Barretto, Mr. Colón), even gringos like Mr. Harlow, né Lawrence Kahn, whose keyboard skills earned him the nickname El Judio Maravilloso (the Marvelous Jew). Their music drew on bebop, soul, rock and other sounds of the polyglot metropolis, and the lyrics were steeped in grit and street reportage.

"We were making city music, talking about, you know, city things — what's happening on the corner, stories about drugs, violence, looking for a job," Mr. Colón said. "The stuff that was coming from Cuba was more rural, you know, 'my grass shack' and all that. We were kind of doing an urban folklore."

Mr. Colón in particular cultivated an image as a New York street tough, toying with gangster iconography and glowering on the covers of records like "El Malo" ("The Bad One"), whose artwork includes photos of his band performing in prisoners' uniforms.

What really shines through on these remastered records is extraordinary musicianship. Albums like "Celia & Johnny" (1974), Mr. Pacheco's collaboration with Ms. Cruz, and Roberto Roena's "Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound 5" (1973) are the essence of classic salsa: tough, gleaming, unstoppable dance music, with brass fanfares braying over crackling syncopation from claves, timbales and congas.

Jazz fans who have not caught up with salsa will be impressed by the virtuosity packed into tight pop song structures: Eddie Palmieri's cluster-chord-thick electric piano solo on the title track of his 1971 "progressive salsa" landmark "Vamonos Pa'l Monte," or Mr. Colón's blazing trombone improvisations on "El Malo." Most of these records are headlined, à la big-band jazz, by bandleader-instrumentalists. By the mid-1980's, with the arrival of a new style, salsa romántico, singers routinely got top billing. (In that period Fania dissolved amid a string of lawsuits involving royalties.)

Fania's heroic sound was a singer's: the high, pure voice of Hector Lavoe, whose mastery of both velvety crooning and fierce, percussive vocal improvisation set the standard for all salseros who followed. On the remastered version of his 1975 solo album "La Voz," one hears the disarmingly boyish warmth of his voice, a yearning quality that fires both love ballads and up-tempo numbers like "Mi Gente" ("My People"), the Johnny Pacheco song that became Mr. Lavoe's anthem. The sweetness of Mr. Lavoe's singing belied his hard living and hard luck — battles with drug abuse, the murder of his son, suicide attempts and an AIDS-related death at 46 — and today, 13 years after his death, he remains salsa's tragic saint. (His cult, one suspects, will only grow when "El Cantante" hits theaters.)

Fania will forever be defined by those hard-driving salsa records from the mid-70's, not least by the albums of its flagship band, the Fania All-Stars, which featured most of the label's biggest names. (Emusica is planning several Fania All-Star releases.) But the new reissues reveal the surprising breadth of Fania's catalog: it wasn't just a salsa label. The recordings include a remarkable album by the eccentric vocalist La Lupe, singing torchy boleros with string orchestra accompaniment; groove-oriented Latin jazz by the Cuban conga legend Mongo Santamaria; "Cuba y Puerto Rico Son," a superb 1966 collaboration between Tito Puente and a young Celia Cruz; and several very funky boogaloo and Latin soul releases from the middle and late 60's. The best of these is Joe Bataan's "Riot" (1968), whose cover photo of weapon-wielding Latin youth captures the growing militancy of the barrio in those turbulent years.

One of the hallmarks of Fania's golden age is politics, the social-consciousness messages musicians brought to songs that had previously stuck to themes of romance and dancing. "It was revolution time," Mr. Harlow remembered. "It was Woodstock time. It was the Black Panthers. It was Vietnam. When Latin music got cut off from Cuba in the 1960's, New York musicians added that new kind of lyrical content. We would sing about love, we would sing about war, we would sing about protest."

The pivotal figure was Rubén Blades, the singer-songwriter whose poetic lyrics carried forceful, often satirical messages about racism, social justice and cultural pride. "Siembra," Mr. Blades's 1978 collaboration with Mr. Colón, was a sweeping concept album with propulsive salsa tunes (and disco parodies) lampooning American materialism and calling for Latino unity, which for years stood as the top-selling Latin album of all time.

Like nearly all Fania albums, "Siembra" was recorded in a Manhattan studio. Your local record store will probably shelve these CD's in the world music section with all the other non-Anglophone stuff, but salsa is homegrown American music, as much a part of the indigenous musical landscape as jazz or rock or hip-hop.

At a moment when the country is convulsed by debate over the latest waves of Latin immigration, the Fania rereleases are reminders of the deep roots of Latinos here — the first Puerto Rican tradesmen arrived in New York in the 17th century — and of the profound role they have played in both shaping United States culture and exporting it back to points south.

"Fania really led the way in spreading salsa throughout South America and the Caribbean," Professor Garcia said. Leading second- and third-generation salsa musicians have hailed from such places as Colombia and Venezuela, and it wasn't just Fania's music but also its messages that took root. The huge popularity throughout Latin America of politically trenchant albums like "Siembra," with its feisty calls for pan-Latin pride, is just one dramatic example of the ways that the Latin diaspora has spoken back to the homeland.

Latin music has found a growing audience among gringos in the United States. But is the audience that embraced the Buena Vista Social Club's prerevolutionary Cuban son ready to discover some more Latin music, not nearly as genteel, from a lot closer to home?

The sound should certainly be familiar to most American listeners. Fania's songwriters were inspired by American pop like Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," but the influence ran both ways: the sonic texture of Gaye's album, with its gently percolating congas, is audibly indebted to salsa. Fania's sound seeped into soul and classic rock, into Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield, into Santana and even Led Zeppelin, whose album radio staple "Fool in the Rain" is a salsa pastiche. And no one who has lived in a city with a significant Latino population in the last four decades can have missed the festive music blasting from cars and open apartment windows on sultry summer evenings.

To younger Latinos enamored of today's Fania equivalent, reggaetón, these old albums will doubtless sound old-fashioned. But music this rhythmically tough could never be dowdy. It's late-20th-century music ready to ignite 21st-century dance floors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/ar...ic/04rose.html





Internet Phones: Please Wait for the Next Available Opportunity
Randall Stross

THE telephone and the PC are ubiquitous desk mates, separated by a few inches and about a century.

How soon we can use our home phones to exploit the efficiencies of the Internet, where calling costs are too small to be worth metering, is a question of no small import for every telecommunications provider — and for every household with a phone.

The prospect of modernizing the telephone seems close because broadband services have solved the so-called last-mile problem, bringing relatively fast Internet connections from local switching centers and cable offices into customers' homes. But connecting home phones to the Internet — spanning the last foot and a half — remains a problem, unless one subscribes to one of the new Internet phone services offered by cable companies here and there.

Ideally, we will not end up so dependent upon the cable guy. When eBay decided nine months ago to acquire Skype Technologies, the Luxembourg-based wunderkind that offers free Internet calls around the world, it seemed that free or nearly free Internet telephony would soon reach every American den, and no one would have to sign up for a separate phone service with the cable company. The happy day of free calls will not arrive, however, until existing phones are replaced or adapted to plug into the Internet.

Skype is a service that enables long-distance conversations without phones: one Skype user, sitting at a PC with a headset, can talk to any other Skype user sitting at another PC. Soon after announcing the Skype acquisition, eBay's chief executive, Meg Whitman, said she thought that Skype could "turbocharge" eBay and PayPal — and that eBay and PayPal could likewise "turbocharge" Skype. "One plus one plus one should equal four or five," she said.

She and her eBay colleagues were so eager to complete the Skype deal that they offered rich terms for a company with a mere $60 million in revenue last year: eBay paid $2.6 billion in cash and stock with an additional $1.5 billion to follow if performance targets are met. Figured most conservatively, the $2.6 billion price was 43 times revenue, a valuation so far above industry norms that it might as well have been determined by a Magic 8 Ball.

Any PC, equipped with Skype's free software and a headset, or with a microphone and speakers, can place a free phone call to a similarly equipped PC anywhere in the world — and without bankrupting Skype. The arrangement places no burden upon Skype's servers: messages go directly from calling PC to receiving PC, peer to peer.

These PC-to-PC calls avoid charges because they do not tie up the lines of proprietary telephone company networks. Voice sounds are digitized, compressed, popped into data packets and sent on their way into the shared space of the Internet. The quality of these digitized Internet calls can be as good as or better than conventional calls.

Skype's revenue comes principally from its SkypeOut service, for calls that originate on a PC and connect to a conventional phone number. The sound quality is not as good as it is with its PC-to-PC calls, but Skype's international calls are cheap — as cheap as those offered by no-name, prepaid calling cards — undercutting the rates of traditional telephone companies.

Verizon, for example, has a plan with monthly fees that entitle customers to call China for as little as 15 cents a minute — or $5.23 a minute for the basic rate if you aren't on a plan. At Skype, the call-anytime, no-monthly-fee flat rate is about 2 cents a minute.

News of Skype traveled swiftly, without need of advertising, after the company was founded in 2002. When eBay offered to buy it in September 2005, Skype said that it had 54 million members in 225 countries, and that it was adding 150,000 registrants a day. These numbers must have caused heart palpitations in eBay's executive suite. Skype's hypergrowth would help bolster eBay's slowing growth in its core auction business.

Skype users must use a PC to initiate a call, and eBay users are no less reliant on their PC's, so blending the two services by having eBay sellers offer a "Skype Me" button on their listings seemed a natural fit. With a click, someone interested in bidding would be connected directly to the seller, without having to wait for an exchange of e-mail messages. "Buyers will gain an easy way to talk to sellers quickly and get the information they need to buy," the company said when it announced the acquisition.

EBay has not been in a hurry, however, to roll out the Skype Me option to advertisers. EBay sellers in Belgium, the Netherlands and China can use the option, but not those in the United States. Chris Donlay, a spokesman for eBay, said that the delay in introducing it in the United States was a matter of careful testing and prudence. "We try not to throw something out there," he said.

Undoubtedly, eBay has noticed that stubborn last-foot-and-a-half problem. Paying little or nothing to place a long, unhurried call via Skype to a loved one halfway around the world is worth the minor inconvenience of putting on a headset. But using a headset for every call is a habit yet to be acquired by most people.

The handiest way to make a Skype call is by picking up a telephone. Skype, however, can use only Skype-certified phones, designed to be physically connected to a PC.

When will Skype phones become ubiquitous? Those amazing Skype registration numbers — in the first quarter, the number of users worldwide increased by 220,000 a day — are not having much of an impact on the telephone equipment market in the United States, even in Silicon Valley.

EBay made a great fuss last year when it struck a distribution deal with RadioShack to place Skype-certified phones in 3,500 RadioShack retail outlets. The only one that my local store had in stock, however, cost $120, a price that is not set to move a lot of product. I thought that a local electronics superstore chain might have far greater selection, but discovered that I was only half right: the store, Fry's Electronics, had a lot of phones — 237 models — but only one Skype phone in stock, on sale for $80.

Even after overcoming the equipment problems on the buyer's side, eBay faces another hurdle: most of its merchandise sellers, whether big or small, have good reason to resist offering a Skype Me option. Fielding telephone calls from prospective buyers one by one is labor intensive, which is to say expensive. Restricting communication to e-mail messages is far more efficient. EBay makes it easy for a seller to publicly post replies to queries so that the same questions need not be answered over and over.

While eBay dithers with its proprietary Skype Me plans, Google, Amazon, online newspapers and the rest of the Web are quickly embracing the Old New Thing in advertising: click-to-call, shorthand for "click to be called back," a technology that uses Internet telephony for calling customers back and is available to Web site designers from any number of vendors.

With a click on the button in a Web advertisement, like a Google text ad, a box pops up where you type in your phone number. If it works properly, your phone rings in a blink — with the local plumber or florist or bookseller at the other end of the line. Local merchants who have traditionally advertised in the Yellow Pages are showing particular interest in click-to-call. They, unlike most of eBay's merchandise sellers, are set up to field customers' questions anyhow. On the customer's side, there is no need for a headset or any special equipment. Everyone with a phone can use a click-to-call feature immediately.

For advertisers, click-to-call offers twin attractions: the efficient placing of ads linked to particular search terms, and a means of measuring results without worry about automated click fraud perpetrated by competitors. Peter M. Zollman, an analyst at Classified Intelligence, a consulting firm based in Altamonte Springs, Fla., said that in the future, "advertising — and I mean all advertising — will be performance-based."

"Click-to-call," he added, "is one more manifestation."

Mr. Zollman said he was pleasantly surprised recently when he was searching on the Web for last-minute deals on cruises and was offered a click-to-call button. He clicked, was called back instantly and got a price that he deemed a bargain.

STRICTLY speaking, click-to-call did not save appreciable time when dialing — punching an unfamiliar number into a telephone keypad cannot take much longer than tapping one's own phone number into the click-to-call box. But the process connected him instantly to a human being. Presumably, this level of service will be necessary: surely, no merchant would have the audacity to call you back only to put you on hold.

In an unexpected way, Skype, for all its peer-to-peer ingenuity, has yet to catch up with the plain old telephone system. "People want instant gratification," Mr. Zollman said. "Many do not have Skype, but everyone has a phone."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/bu...ey/04digi.html





Invoking Secrets Privilege Becomes a More Popular Legal Tactic by U.S.
Scott Shane

Facing a wave of litigation challenging its eavesdropping at home and its handling of terror suspects abroad, the Bush administration is increasingly turning to a legal tactic that swiftly torpedoes most lawsuits: the state secrets privilege.

In recent weeks alone, officials have used the privilege to win the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a German man who was abducted and held in Afghanistan for five months and to ask the courts to throw out three legal challenges to the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program.

But civil liberties groups and some scholars say the privilege claim, in which the government says any discussion of a lawsuit's accusations would endanger national security, has short-circuited judicial scrutiny and public debate of some central controversies of the post-9/11 era.

The privilege has been asserted by the Justice Department more frequently under President Bush than under any of his predecessors — in 19 cases, the same number as during the entire eight-year presidency of Ronald Reagan, the previous record holder, according to a count by William G. Weaver, a political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso.

While the privilege, defined by a 1953 Supreme Court ruling, was once used to shield sensitive documents or witnesses from disclosure, it is now often used to try to snuff out lawsuits at their inception, Mr. Weaver and other legal specialists say.

"This is a very powerful weapon for the executive branch," said Mr. Weaver, who has a law degree and is a co-author of one of the few scholarly articles examining the privilege. "Once it's asserted, in almost every instance it stops the case cold."

Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University who is studying the recent use of the privilege, said the administration's legal strategy "raises profound legal and policy questions that will be the subject of intense debate for the foreseeable future."

Some members of Congress also have doubts about the way the privilege has been used. A bill approved by the House Government Reform Committee would limit its use in blocking whistle-blowers' lawsuits.

"If the very people you're suing are the ones who get to use the state secrets privilege, it's a stacked deck," said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, who proposed the measure and has campaigned against excessive government secrecy.

Yet courts have almost always deferred to the secrecy claims; Mr. Weaver said he believed that the last unsuccessful assertion of the privilege was in 1993. Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said, "It's a sign of how potent the national security mantra has become."

Under Mr. Bush, the secrets privilege has been used to block a lawsuit by a translator at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sibel Edmonds, who was fired after accusing colleagues of security breaches; to stop a discrimination lawsuit filed by Jeffrey Sterling, a Farsi-speaking, African-American officer at the Central Intelligence Agency; and to derail a patent claim involving a coupler for fiber-optic cable, evidently to guard technical details of government eavesdropping.

Such cases can make for oddities. Mark S. Zaid, who has represented Ms. Edmonds, Mr. Sterling and other clients in privilege cases, said he had seen his legal briefs classified by the government and had been barred from contacting a client because his phone line was not secure.

"In most state secrets cases, the plaintiffs' lawyers don't know what the alleged secrets are," Mr. Zaid said.

More recently the privilege has been wielded against lawsuits challenging broader policies, including the three lawsuits attacking the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program — one against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and two against the federal government by the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

In a filing in the New York case, John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, wrote that allowing the case to proceed would "cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States" because it "would enable adversaries of the United States to avoid detection." Mr. Negroponte said he was providing more detail in classified filings.

Those cases are still pending. Two lawsuits challenging the government's practice of rendition, in which terror suspects are seized and delivered to detention centers overseas, were dismissed after the government raised the secrets privilege.

One plaintiff, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained while changing planes in New York and was taken to Syria, where he has said he was held in a tiny cell and beaten with electrical cables. The other, Khaled el-Masri, a German of Kuwaiti origin, was seized in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan, where he has said he was beaten and injected with drugs before being released in Albania.

The United States never made public any evidence linking either man to terrorism, and both cases are widely viewed as mistakes. Mr. Arar's lawsuit was dismissed in February on separate but similar grounds from the secrets privilege, a decision he is appealing. A federal judge in Virginia dismissed Mr. Masri's lawsuit on May 18, accepting the government's secrets claim.

One frustration of the plaintiffs in such cases is that so much information about the ostensible state secrets is already public. Mr. Arar's case has been examined in months of public hearings by a Canadian government commission, and Mr. Masri's story has been confirmed by American and German officials and blamed on a mix-up of similar names. The N.S.A. program has been described and defended in numerous public statements by Mr. Bush and other top officials and in a 42-page Justice Department legal analysis.

In the A.C.L.U. lawsuit charging that the security agency's eavesdropping is illegal, Ann Beeson, the group's associate legal director, acknowledged that some facts might need to remain secret. "But you don't need those facts to hear this case," she said. "All the facts needed to try this case are already public."

Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said he could not discuss any specific case. But he said the state secrets privilege "is well-established in federal law and has been asserted many times in our nation's history to protect our nation's secrets."

Other defenders of the administration's increasing use of the privilege say it merely reflects proliferating lawsuits.

In all of the N.S.A. cases, for instance, "it's the same secret they're trying to protect," said H. Bryan Cunningham, a Denver lawyer who served as a legal adviser to the National Security Council under Mr. Bush. Mr. Cunningham said that under well-established precedent, judges must defer to the executive branch in deciding what secrets must be protected.

But critics of the use of the privilege point out that officials sometimes exaggerate the sensitivities at risk. In fact, documents from the 1953 case that defined the modern privilege, United States v. Reynolds, have been declassified in recent years and suggest that Air Force officials misled the court.

An accident report on a B-29 bomber crash in 1948 was withheld because the Air Force said it included technical details about sensitive intelligence equipment and missions, but it turned out to contain no such information, said Wilson M. Brown III, a lawyer in Philadelphia who represented survivors of those who died in the crash in recent litigation.

"The facts the Supreme Court was relying on in Reynolds were false," Mr. Brown said in an interview. "It shows that if the government is not truthful, plaintiffs will lose and there's very little chance to straighten it out."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/wa...04secrets.html





India Becoming a Crucial Cog in the Machine at I.B.M.
Saritha Rai

The world's biggest computer services company could not have chosen a more appropriate setting to lay out its strategy for staying on top.

On Tuesday, on the expansive grounds of the Bangalore Palace, a colonial-era mansion once inhabited by a maharajah, the chairman and chief executive of I.B.M., Samuel J. Palmisano, will address 10,000 Indian employees. He will share the stage with A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, India's president, and Sunil Mittal, chairman of the country's largest cellular services provider, Bharti Tele-Ventures. An additional 6,500 employees will look in on the town hall-style meeting by satellite from other Indian cities.

On the same day, Mr. Palmisano and other top executives will meet here with investment analysts and local customers to showcase I.B.M.'s global integration capabilities in a briefing customarily held in New York. During the week, the company will lead the 50 analysts on a tour of its Indian operations.

The meetings are more than an exercise in public and investor relations. They are an acknowledgment of India's critical role in I.B.M.'s strategy, providing it with its fastest-growing market and a crucial base for delivering services to much of the world.

"A significant part of any large project that we do worldwide is today being delivered out of here," said Shanker Annaswamy, I.B.M.'s managing director for India, who presides over what is now the company's second-largest worldwide operation. In the last few years, even as the company has laid off thousands of workers in the United States and Europe, the growth in I.B.M.'s work force in India has been remarkable. From 9,000 employees in early 2004, the number has grown to 43,000 (out of 329,000 worldwide), making I.B.M. the country's largest multinational employer.

Some of the growth has been through acquisition. In a deal valued at about $160 million in 2004, I.B.M. bought Daksh eServices of New Delhi, India's third-largest back-office outsourcing firm with 6,000 workers. Since then, that operation alone has grown to 20,000 employees.

"Now that companies such as Infosys Technologies and Cognizant have clearly demonstrated that the services marketplace is not impregnable, the new battle is for talent," said N. Lakshmi Narayanan, president and chief executive of Cognizant Technology Solutions of Teaneck, N.J. Cognizant is one of I.B.M.'s competitors; it is incorporated in the United States but has the bulk of its 28,000 employees in India.

I.B.M. is growing not only in size by adding new hires, but also in revenue. The company's business in India grew 61 percent in the first quarter of this year, 55 percent in 2005 and 45 percent the year before.

That growth has not come just from taking advantage of the country's pool of low-cost talent. In recent months, the technology hub of Bangalore has become the center of I.B.M.'s efforts to combine high-value, cutting-edge services with its low-cost model.

For instance, the I.B.M. India Research Lab, with units in Bangalore and New Delhi and a hundred employees with Ph.D.'s, has created crucial products like a container tracking system for global shipping companies and a warranty management system for automakers in the United States. Out of the second project, I.B.M. researchers have fashioned a predictable modeling system that helps track the failure of components inside a vehicle, a potentially important tool.

In March, the company started a Global Business Solutions Center here, announcing that it would represent the "future of consulting services." I.B.M. said that it expected to invest more than $200 million a year in the new center. The company hopes to provide clients with access to the expertise of its 60,000 consultants worldwide in complex areas like supply chain management and compliance with banking rules.

But competitors are trying to gain on I.B.M. The rival consulting firm, Accenture, based in Hamilton, Bermuda, is ramping up equally rapidly in India, while another outsourcing competitor, Electronic Data Systems, based in Plano, Tex., recently made an offer for a controlling stake in Mphasis, a midsize outsourcing firm in Bangalore.

The race for India's skilled, inexpensive talent may not stop at I.B.M. "Many companies in the technology development and support niche covet and value these workers highly," said Kevin M. Moss, a New York-based special counsel in Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel's outsourcing and technology transactions group.

On the pricing front, rivals like Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai and Infosys Technologies of Bangalore have pioneered and perfected the low-cost model. Infosys Technologies, with 52,700 employees, has $2.15 billion in annual revenues, a figure that is growing 30 percent annually.

But the depth, breadth and geographic spread of I.B.M.'s global operations — which generated $91 billion in sales last year, $47 billion from services — keep it ahead of its competitors for now. For example, I.B.M. manages a system it developed for a large American oil company, which it would not identify, that keeps track of consumption and oversees financial and administrative processes as well as the technical help desk, data network and servers. I.B.M. is also researching tools to track company assets and reduce costs.

"All this is done for one customer seamlessly from three of our centers in Bangalore, Chicago and outside of London," said Amitabh Ray, director of global delivery, I.B.M. Global Services. "These kinds of capabilities and global scale are unmatched."

But smaller rivals are playing catch-up here, too, by talking to customers about their needs and then developing custom-built software. Infosys Technologies, for instance, has a consulting unit with headquarters in Fremont, Calif., near Silicon Valley, where it now has 200 consultants, and an additional 1,800 consultants in India.

Meanwhile, Mr. Annaswamy, I.B.M.'s chief executive in India, acknowledged that growth was difficult because thousands of recruits had to be quickly integrated into the company. Salaries are rising, and employee costs are also moving up, he said.

Even so, the Indian operation is becoming more and more strategic for the company. "Both in terms of size and scale, India has become the focal point," Mr. Ray, of I.B.M. Global Services, said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/technology/05ibm.html





Apple Software Logs Out Of India
R Raghavendra

BANGALORE: The company that redefined the way we listen to music has decided to call it quits in India. Apple, known for its popular iPods, is pulling out its software development and support operations in India.

The company had commenced operations in April and hired about 30 people for its subsidiary, Apple Services India Pvt Ltd.

At a meeting on May 29, Apple announced its decision to lay off all its employees. Apple officials told them that "the company is revaluating its operations and has thought of pulling back its Indian operations".

Apple is giving these employees a severance package of two months salary. It will settle all claims on June 9. When contacted, Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesperson, said, "We have re-evaluated our plans and have decided to put our planned support centre growth in other countries."

Apple continues to operate its sales and marketing arm in Bangalore which employs 25 people. For most employees — a few have returned to their former employers — it was a bolt from the blue.

"It started off with building dreams. We were not given any warning. They just told us the operations would now head back to the US," said a sacked employee.

Considering the low-cost, high-quality talent pool that Bangalore offers, it is unclear why Apple decided to shut shop just over a month after it commenced operations.

Apple had set itself a hiring target of 600 by the year-end. After a gala induction ceremony on April 17, the operations team went to Transworks for training. Some of the managers were about to leave for the US for further training when they were asked to stay put.

"On May 15, Apple officials addressed us and were highly appreciative of the workforce and the task it would execute in India. I wonder why they never said anything even then," said another fired employee.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/a...ow/1611960.cms





The History of Console Piracy and How It Affects You, The Gamer
Vahid Mirjamali

Software Piracy has been around since the floppies were invented; people were copying games and sharing with their friends and family if they too owned a computer. The first mass console piracy came when the Super Nintendo Entertainment Center got a device that let people put ROMs into a cartridge (at that time only 1 game at a time worked). Then the first modchip was invented for the PS1, this was the first major move in piracy because it caused major concern from Sony and Nintendo over console game security. Sony personally sued many companies over selling and having mod chips in possession. Lik-Sang.com was personally one of those victims as it was one of the biggest modchip retailers at the time. They were shut down for around 2 years before being reopened fully legal. Now companies are wasting time and money inventing hundreds of ways to irritate their customers, they now are adding copy prevention software’s into their games.

Due to this the cost of games has not only risen a large amount, but the release date of the new next-gen consoles such as the Wii and the PS3 have been shifted back almost a whole year. These companies want to make sure that their games don’t get pirated so they are on a mission to build the invisible barrier around their games being copied, unfortunately the demands of piracy is so high, that “invisible protection” is broken down within the first year of that consoles release. That leaves us the customers not only sad and broken hearted, but also angry at the fact that the games cost us now 60 dollars versus the original 40 dollars.

I am sure most of you are noticing that piracy is growing daily by leaps and bounds. A few years back, I was the only one who even knew how to pirate ps1 and ps2 games in my school, now half the people I talk to know how to pirate game consoles, and how to play their pirated version of games. People feel that when you pirate it makes you seem cooler, and somewhat of a “hacker” (I am guessing this came from all those hacker movies from the early 90’s). Man, they are wrong, piracy is what thief’s do in order to save their hard earned money for physical items that they can’t steal so easily.

The largest piracy breakout I have ever seen in my life to date is the PSP iso loader issue. It is not only one of the easiest systems to pirate, but it also requires no modchip. That means it cost the user nothing to fully pirate a game, and it doesn’t prevent even the youngest kid from pirating a PSP game. Although I am totally fine with having a backup of a game you own, or putting ISO’s on your PSP if you own the game in order to speed up the games loading time (As some of the PSP games do have long loading times). I have been noticing the extreme decrease in good games coming out for the PSP. At first I believed that this issue stemmed from the fact that the console has high-graphical demands that are hard to meet, but now I have figured out the true reason that good games are hard to find on the PSP.

Game developers evaluate many different things on a game console before deciding to develop a highly time consuming game for it. They evaluate its system potential, its market share, its popularity, and most of all whether there game will truly sell on its console. If any one of the developers even is slightly up to beat with PSP news they will know right off the bat, that their games will be pirated the second it is released, and the second it is released the game will not sell to its potential. Then they see that the Nintendo DS (Nintendo’s portable system) has a low-rate of piracy compared to the PSP, and many more people own it, they will most likely go to the DS to develop games leaving the PSP in the dust. Now that leaves us, PSP owners with a copy of Dynasty warriors to brood over, or homebrew that bores us after a year.

In recent news headlines there is news of yet a new way to pirate games on the PSP unhindered by firmware issues or game compatibility issues. It is by the method of modchip, the soldered in version of the piracy loader. It will allow you from what we have heard to play ISO’s on any firmware, and all games will work on it. I must point out if you are stupid enough to pay $90 to buy a modchip for a system that costs 200 dollars, then go through the near impossible installation process, then for all I care feel free to brick your PSP, and try again. Modchip’s are like about as safe as the early downgrader when it was released, they are usually so buggy they brick ½ PSP’s it takes a good 6-8 months to perfect the modchip’s firmware. Even though I hate modchip’s, I feel for PSPCrazy’s members, so I will tell you this if you are going to truly get a modchip, for you own sake, WAIT! until a bug-free perfected version is released, it will save you the process of getting a new PSP

It is your choice to pirate or not, for the good of the PSP Scene, and the future of video games please put pirating to rest.
http://www.pspcrazy.com/?page=Articl...article&id=201





Hotels.com Customer Info May Be At Risk
Donna Gordon Blankinship

Thousands of Hotels.com customers may be at risk for credit card fraud after a laptop computer containing their personal information was stolen from an auditor, a company spokesman said Saturday.

The password-protected laptop belonging to an Ernst & Young auditor was taken in late February from a locked car, said Paul Kranhold, spokesman for Hotels.com, a subsidiary of Expedia.com based in Bellevue, Wash.

"As a result of our ongoing communication with law enforcement, we don't have any indication that any credit card numbers have been used for fraudulent activity," Kranhold said. "It appears the laptop was not the target of the break-in."

Both Hotels.com and Ernst & Young mailed letters to Hotels.com customers this past week encouraging them to take appropriate action to protect their personal information.

The transactions recorded on the laptop were mostly from 2004, although some were from 2003 or 2002, the companies said. The computer contained personal information including names, addresses and credit card information of about 243,000 Hotels.com customers. It did not include their Social Security numbers.

Ernst & Young, which has been the outside auditor for Hotels.com for several years, notified the company of the security breach on May 3.

"We deeply regret this incident has occurred and want to apologize to you and Hotels.com for any inconvenience or concern this may cause," said the unsigned memo from Ernst & Young dated May 2006.

Ernst & Young invites those affected by the incident to enroll in a free credit monitoring service arranged by the auditor.

"We sincerely regret that this incident occurred and we are taking it very seriously," said the letter signed by Hotels.com general manager Sean Kell.

The letter from Hotels.com said "Ernst & Young was taking additional steps to protect the confidentiality of its data, including encrypting the sensitive information we provide to them as part of the audit process."
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Death by DMCA
Fred von Lohmann and Wendy Seltzer

In 1998, U.S. entertainment companies persuaded Congress to make dramatic changes in its copyright code by passing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA gave copyright holders new rights to control the way people use copyrighted material and new protection for technologies designed to restrict access or copying. The movie and record companies argued they needed these new restrictions to fight increased piracy threats in the digital era.

In the eight years since the DMCA's passage, however, piracy has not decreased, and hurdles to lawful uses of media have risen. The Motion Picture Association (MPA), the international arm of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), estimated worldwide losses because of piracy to be US $2.2 billion in 1997 and $3.5 billion annually in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

Meanwhile, entire consumer electronics categories have been wiped from retail shelves. If three or four years ago you didn't buy a digital video recorder that automatically skips commercials, you're out of luck; that feature is not in such products today. Television executives brought litigation that bankrupted the company offering DVRs with these user-friendly features, because skipping commercials potentially undermines their ability to sell commercial time.

You're likewise out of luck if you're looking to buy software that lets you copy a DVD onto your laptop's hard drive; it's no longer for sale, at least not in the United States. Even if you want to put the movie you bought onto a pocket-size video and game console, such as Sony's PlayStation Portable, which allows users to watch video stored on flash memory or a miniature hard drive, you can't legally do so, because you'd have to “rip,” or decode, it to make the transfer—and the studios claim that this action violates the DMCA. When you rip a CD, be it to an audiotape or an MP3 file, you're not breaking any laws. But to rip a DVD you need to somehow get around the encryption technology built into a standard disc, and since such circumvention is forbidden by the DMCA, if you rip a DVD, you are breaking a law. Under the DMCA, legality doesn't depend on how the copy will be used but rather on the means by which the digital content is copied.

Now, in an even more vexing situation, U.S. entertainment companies are successfully spreading the copyright code changes established by the DMCA around the world. Laws similar to the DMCA now exist in Japan, Australia, and much of Europe. At least nine additional countries, including Chile, Guatemala, and Singapore have also been pressured to enact DMCA-like laws as part of a devil's bargain with U.S. trade negotiators, who say the copyright change is necessary to secure free trade pacts with the United States that would govern all sorts of commerce. And in Europe, the body charged with defining the European digital television standards is mixing in content-protection obligations, responding yet again to pressure from major U.S. movie studios.

Emboldened by their successes, U.S. entertainment companies are pushing for another wave of even more restrictive legislation. “Broadcast flag” legislation could require that all consumer electronics devices recognize protected television broadcasts and potentially refuse to copy them; a so-called “radio flag” bill would prevent or restrict the manufacture of hard disk recorders for digital radio; and an “analog hole” closure would restrict the connections new digital devices can make with analog devices.

As the entertainment industry expands copyright law, the rising tide threatens to completely wash away many types of innovative gadgets.

Before the passage of the DMCA, entertainment and technology had, for the most part, peacefully coexisted. Laws addressing the use and misuse of copyrighted content targeted “bad actors” rather than complete classes of technology. For example, when songwriters in the 1920s sued radio stations for broadcasting live music performances without paying the songwriters, the lawyers did nothing to the companies that designed and built the broadcast transmitter towers. And in the early 1980s, when videocassette recorders (VCRs) made it possible for consumers to record television broadcasts, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its landmark Betamax case, ruled that the manufacturers of home video-recording devices were not liable for copyright infringement.

By the 1990s, U.S. entertainment companies wanted not just compensation but control. They went abroad to fight for international treaties that went beyond punishing copyright infringement. These new treaties endorsed copyright-protection technologies and prohibited the circumvention of these technological barriers. Then the companies brought the treaties back home to demand an update of the U.S. Copyright Act. And that brought about the DMCA.

The most controversial of the DMCA's additions to copyright made it a crime to circumvent “technological protection measures” deployed on copyrighted works. Under the DMCA, these measures mean any technology used to restrict or prevent copying of or access to a copyrighted work. Thus, the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass a password-control system and also prevents working around an encryption scheme that might stop someone from copying a song to an MP3 player. Other DMCA provisions outlaw the distribution of devices that bypass these digital locks.

Copyright is being turned from a limited-term incentive designed to encourage creative artists to a broadly scoped transfer of wealth from the public to the private realm. As the industries that generate copyrighted materials seek control over not only their works but also the devices on which we watch, listen to, and remix them, copyright law is turning into technology regulation.

ReplayTV 4000, an advanced digital video recorder introduced in 2001 by ReplayTV Network Inc., of Cupertino, Calif., was an early victim of the rising legislative tide. Like its competitor TiVo, from TiVo Inc., Alviso, Calif., the ReplayTV 4000 recorded television programs to a hard drive and allowed the viewer to watch the show at a later time—the kind of time shifting the Supreme Court approved as a fair use of the Betamax. The ReplayTV had two additional unique features: it could automatically skip commercials, and it could also relay a recorded program to another ReplayTV unit in the home or elsewhere on the Internet.

These new capabilities did not please Hollywood. Jamie Kellner, then CEO of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., called skipping commercials “theft” and, along with 28 entertainment companies including major movie studios and television networks—such as Disney, Paramount, Time Warner, Fox, Columbia, ABC, NBC, and CBS—sued ReplayTV for contributing to copyright infringement. Though the company might have prevailed in the end based on the Betamax precedent, ReplayTV ultimately ended up in bankruptcy before it could have its day in court. The company that rescued ReplayTV from bankruptcy, D&M Holdings Inc., Tokyo, settled the case in 2005 by pledging not to include the commercial-skipping and the show-forwarding features in its future models.

None of the DVRs on the market today, from TiVo, ReplayTV's successors, or elsewhere, such as from cable companies, offer these features. Although nothing currently stops a technically savvy hobbyist from turning a personal computer with a TV tuner card into a ReplayTV 4000–like video recorder, the legislative tide may soon threaten these tinkerers as well, as we'll explain.

The DVD, introduced in 1996, quickly became one of the most successful consumer products of all time. It revolutionized the market for home movie viewing and enabled new, portable devices to be created; it also gave rise to new distribution schemes like the Netflix subscription service and its many imitators.

But for consumers, the DVD format left room for improvement. Copy-protection schemes implemented in the DVD format at Hollywood's insistence made it difficult to reproduce movies, in whole or in part. So DVD owners who wanted to copy a few movies onto a laptop computer for a long trip—and to leave the drive and discs themselves at home—couldn't. Furthermore, region codes locked discs to specific areas of the world, blocking travelers from picking up new discs or trying foreign selections.

In 1999, a team that included Jon Lech Johansen, a young Norwegian programmer, cracked the DVD copy-protection technology. Johansen explained how to do it on his Web site, and programs soon developed to enable direct copying of a DVD. A group of movie studios complained to legal authorities in Norway, and the Norwegian prosecutor charged Johansen with a crime. The court cleared him after years of legal battles. However, Johansen's Web site addressed technologically savvy users, not the average consumer looking to make a quick copy of one of the Barney movies.

In 2003, 321 Studios, of St. Charles, Mo., launched a software product called DVD X Copy for these more typical DVD owners. The company built in aggressive measures to prevent piracy, including an antipiracy splash screen that appeared when viewing any copy and watermarks that would enable copies to be traced back to those who made them. The management at 321 Studios hoped that these cooperative measures would stave off Hollywood's wrath.

The company was wrong. Before the DMCA, 321 Studios would have been on relatively safe legal ground. From the time of the Betamax case, U.S. courts had made it clear that copying devices were legal so long as they had any substantial lawful use. But the DMCA changed the rules. When the movie studios sued 321 Studios, the Hollywood contingent did not argue that any of their movies had been unlawfully copied. Instead, it said that the product circumvented a “technical protection measure,” which in this case was the Content Scramble System (CSS) on DVDs.

The CSS is the scheme Hollywood uses to encrypt movies on DVDs. Decryption requires a key, which manufacturers of DVD players obtain by signing a license with the DVD Copy Control Association, a consortium of movie studios, including Fox and Warner, and technology providers, such as Intel and Toshiba. This license, in turn, forbids licensed devices from making digital copies of DVD content or from offering playback modes that the studios disapprove of. (DVD recorders can copy only unencrypted digital material, such as home movies.) The licensing rules and DMCA put companies like 321 Studios in a quandary. If they signed the license in order to obtain the CSS decryption keys, the document prohibited them from using those keys in software capable of copying a DVD. If they didn't sign the license and forged ahead anyway, deriving the CSS keys on their own, they risked prosecution or a civil suit under the DMCA for circumventing the CSS. After consideration, 321 Studios opted to go forward without a license. The DMCA quickly washed away DVD X Copy. After the movie studios prevailed in court in 2004, manufacturers pulled DVD X Copy and similar ripping tools off the U.S. market.

Though DVD-copying software has been swept off U.S. retail shelves, plenty of it escaped to higher ground. Freeware DVD-copying applications like DVD Shrink, MacTheRipper, and HandBrake wander the Web. To escape the Hollywood hunters, most live on Web servers located outside the United States.

Unencumbered digital television tuners are a bit higher up on the beach, yet they represent another class of products that may be eliminated by legislation. These peripherals slip into a computer's PCI card slot or hook up to a USB port to enable it to receive digital television broadcasts, turning a PC into a TV or video recorder. The cards, which cost from $100 to $350, came to market in 2004 from a variety of manufacturers, including ATI, Dvico, Elgato, and pcHDTV. With a tuner card, a hobbyist can build his or her own DVR.

The entertainment companies do not like the flexibility of these home-built machines—or, more significant to them, the flexibility of the machines that consumer electronics manufacturers could offer under the current copyright law and its Betamax rule.

Envisioning a world in which copyrighted works are indiscriminately distributed on the Internet, the entertainment industry looked for ways to force limitations into the design of these devices. Hollywood went first to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to demand a “broadcast flag mandate,” that is, a requirement that every device capable of receiving digital television broadcasts incorporate restrictions against redistribution of those programs. Such a law would give Hollywood a say in the design of all the new hardware consumers would need to make DTV work. The mandate would require devices capable of receiving over-the-air DTV signals to detect and respond to a flag, known officially as the Redistribution Control Descriptor, in the broadcast stream. The flag indicates that the owner of the rights to the transmission has imposed restrictions on its copying or redistribution. The mandate required that the technology designed to detect the flag and implement the restrictions be embedded in every tuner that has digital outputs.

Hollywood lobbyists actually convinced the FCC to impose broadcast flag regulations in 2003, but a U.S. Court of Appeals found that the Commission lacked the authority to regulate the internal workings of televisions. Hollywood is now asking Congress to give the FCC that legal authority by passing the Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act of 2006, sponsored by Rep. Michael Ferguson (R-N.J.).

If Congress does enact these broadcast flag regulations, existing tuner cards will ignore the flag, but it will be unlawful to manufacture any new cards without the feature. Products that would have to be redesigned in response to the flag mandate would include the wide variety of inexpensive tuner cards available today, as well as TV hard disk digital recorders, DVD recorders, and any other hardware or software that would make it possible to receive or view digital broadcast television. The broadcast flag law would force designers of tomorrow's digital television devices to either implement one of a limited list of approved content-protection technologies to restrict flagged broadcasts or hire lawyers to seek FCC approval for any newly developed content-protection mechanism. Neither option would ensure backward-compatibility with existing high-definition televisions or interoperability with the other digital media equipment consumers might have already purchased. These requirements would inevitably mean higher costs for technology developers and would handicap the introduction of new features. And all this would happen without stopping those who are truly determined to redistribute HDTV programming.

Like the DMCA's provisions, broadcast flag legislation, if established in the United States, is likely to proliferate around the world.

Hollywood is no longer waiting for products to actually be invented, manufactured, and shipped to retailers before trying to bar them from the market. Instead, the entertainment industry has already begun attacking some consumer electronics devices before the manufacturing process begins. That's happening to products that would give consumers the ability to record digital radio in the same way we “TiVo” television shows.

In the United States, 3000 FM broadcasters have committed to augmenting their traditional analog AM and FM broadcasts with digital signals using a technology called In-Band On‑Channel Digital Audio Broadcasting, more commonly called HD Radio, which debuted around 2004. Some 700 of these stations already have HD Radio on the air. Europe has deployed a similar digital radio system. HD Radio promises increased fidelity for AM broadcasts and increased capacity for FM broadcasts: using digital radio, broadcasters could transmit as many as three compressed digital programs in the same width of spectrum that supports only one analog program today, albeit at lower fidelity than with analog FM.

For decades, music fans have been recording analog music from radio broadcasts. The recording industry never liked this home taping, and in the 1970s and early 1980s it repeatedly tried but failed to convince legislators to tax analog tape. In 1991, the music industry took the issue to the courts, suing to block the first digital audio tape recorders, asserting that digital music is different from analog because digital copies are as good as the originals, whereas analog copies are not. Congress brokered a compromise between the music industry and the consumer electronics manufacturers and enacted the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. Among other items, the law resolved the question of taping off the radio, making it clear that analog taping for noncommercial use was perfectly legal but digital taping would be legal only if the recording devices and blanks included a small royalty, for example, 3 cents on a $1.00 recordable audio CD, payable to the music industry. The law also required that covered digital audio recorders include a primitive copy-control system known as the Serial Copy Management System.

With the advent of HD Radio, the recording industry wanted to reopen the issue. The industry, represented by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is trying to renege on the bargain struck in the Audio Home Recording Act, in which it agreed to accept the royalty in exchange for permitting digital radio recording. The RIAA is urging the FCC and Congress to impose design restrictions on any future HD Radio recorders to stave off a successful new mutation: a digital hard disk recorder that allows easy and flexible archiving of radio broadcasts. As similar devices have appeared for satellite radio, the recording industry has also begun pushing for legislation to restrict them, such as S. 2644, the Platform Equity and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music (PERFORM) Act of 2006, introduced by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Cal.).

The restrictions sought by the RIAA would prevent users from storing individual song tracks, searching by title or artist, or creating playlists. What the RIAA wants, according to documents it filed with the FCC, are digital recorders that record only in segments at least 30 minutes long. This action would prevent users from splitting the 30-minute segment into individual songs or skipping to the beginnings of songs. Limitations such as these would make off-the-air recordings less desirable and therefore, the industry hopes, prevent them from cutting into record sales, and they would also deny users key benefits of the new technology.

The industry argues that the regulations should also require that recordings be cryptographically bound to the recording device, thereby making them nontransferable to iPods, MP3 players, or computers. Further, the regulations should also limit the use of metadata—that is, identifying information that may supplement the audio file—and so deny users the convenience of setting up devices to record only favored artists or genres. In essence, these rules would force future digital recorders to ape the analog cassette recorders of decades past. The regulations would ban all “noncompliant” recorders from the marketplace.

The good news for radio fans is that the recording industry's proposal met with a chilly reception both at the FCC and at a Senate hearing this past January. The bad news is that the recording industry continues to push hard for it.

While some gizmos in the eye of the storm are exotic or newly evolved, one is, today, as common as a house cat. This is the type of device that transforms analog signals into digital ones: the analog-to-digital converter.

The MPAA has made plugging the “analog hole” a top legislative priority. The concept is simple: most of today's digital entertainment devices, whether they are DVD or CD players, hard disk recorders like TiVo, or television tuners, have analog as well as digital outputs. The analog outputs include composite video (a single yellow RCA jack), component video (a trio of RCA jacks, usually green, blue, and red), and S-video (a multipin jack). These jacks let consumers easily connect modern digital products to home entertainment devices that predate the digital era. Hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide use these jacks to enjoy DVDs and other digital media without having to run out and replace all their existing consumer electronics.

New and emerging products are increasingly encrypting their digital outputs. The list includes DVD-Audio players and the new Blu‑Ray Disc and HD DVD players, the much-hyped high-definition successors to DVD players, the first examples of which are just reaching the market. In contrast, device designers can't encrypt or scramble analog outputs, at least not if they intend the products to continue to work with older devices. This means that users can freely record and manipulate analog signals, using an old VCR, for example.

Nevertheless, what really bothers Hollywood about standard, unencrypted analog interfaces is that it cannot use licensing to impose restrictions on the makers of analog devices; unlike digital devices, most analog interfaces do not need decryption keys. If such interfaces are eliminated, however, then when analog devices wear out and consumers replace them with digital devices, Hollywood will have tighter control over the evolution and interconnection of consumer entertainment technologies than it did in the analog era.

Hollywood, therefore, is going on the attack against devices that convert analog content to digital. This category covers an incredibly broad array of products, from basic components found on RadioShack shelves to fully formed gadgets ubiquitous in the marketplace. For example, for just a few hundred dollars consumers can buy video capture cards and use them in their personal computers to digitize old home movies. With a video capture card, you can make a copy of a movie for your video iPod, excerpt video for a school project, or take a clip to remix with your own footage.

In an attempt to put an end to all that, Hollywood has drafted the Digital Transition Content Security Act, introduced as H.R. 4569 in December 2005 by Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.). This legislation, better known as the Analog Hole Bill, would impose a design mandate on any “analog video input device that converts into digital form an analog video signal.”

The act would require digital recorders, video capture cards, and other devices that can convert analog signals into digital data to detect and respond to two different analog signaling technologies. One of them, the Copy Generation Management System for Analog (CGMS-A) would set a flag in a television transmission that would identify whether or not the show being broadcast has copy restrictions on it. If it does, the flag would identify the generation of the recording and the number of times it could be copied: not at all, once, or some preset number. The television broadcaster would transmit this identification during the video-blanking interval of the analog transmission, that moment in which the electron gun that paints the pixels on a television screen jumps from the bottom to the top. The second signal, called Video Encoded Invisible Light (VEIL), would be inserted into the video picture itself and, like CGMS-A, would not be visible to the eye. Originally developed to trigger responses by toys to daytime cartoons, VEIL would operate as a backup for CGMS-A and would be present in every content-controlled broadcast. If a device covered by the legislation detected a VEIL signal without accompanying copy-control information, the mismatch would tip off the device that the copy-control flag had been stripped or tampered with.
Hollywood is going on the attack against devices that convert analog content to digital

The Analog Hole Bill is Hollywood's attempt to control an even broader range of devices than the DMCA does. The chips used to convert video from analog to digital are in today's digital cameras, camera phones, and personal media players. A host of future new devices are likely to include this basic technology. The Analog Hole Bill would require that all these products incorporate content-protection technologies certified by federal regulators and include hardware and software to block any end-user modifications. The days of hardware “tweaking” would end. The legislation would also dictate the kinds of video outputs permitted, potentially orphaning generations of older products, including television sets, stereo speakers, and VCRs. Such legislation, combined with other laws already passed and pending, would lead to a world in which federal regulators, not creative engineers, would dictate many product features and design decisions. In place of the new era's digital developments, Hollywood's vision takes us back to the Stone Age.

Hollywood is good at telling stories. The one it has been screening in Washington—that music and movies will perish if the regulators don't kill the dangerous gizmos first—is powerful drama but has about as much basis in reality as Lord of the Rings. Killing off gizmos and subjecting technological development to the whims of federal regulators will ultimately hurt not just consumers but also tomorrow's creative industries—both technology and entertainment.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun06/3673





Hollywood, Retailers Eye Movie Download Kiosks
Sue Zeidler

In a bid to preserve shelf space and fight slowing DVD sales, major retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT - news) have held talks with Hollywood's studios to develop kiosks where consumers can copy movies and TV shows onto DVDs and devices, industry executives said.

Installing video-burning kiosks in retail stores would help counter the slowing growth in the $24 billion home DVD market, executives said.

Retailers have used discounted DVDs to lure customers to stores and sell them other goods. But increasingly, Hollywood's studios are starting to offer digital downloads of films, TV shows and videos to cell phones, PCs and laptop computers.

Retailers are concerned that digital downloads might spell an end to the sale of DVDs, and see the download-to-burn kiosks as a way to keep them in the DVD business.

"There have been discussions with all the major retailers who have an interest in kiosks because they would let them grow their product offerings without using a lot of shelf space," said Jim Wuthrich, senior vice president, digital distribution for Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group.

"Burning DVDs in stores could happen in 2007," he said, but noted various licensing and technology hurdles still remained. Warner Bros. is the studio owned by Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX - news).

Retailers like Wal-Mart, Target Corp. (NYSE:TGT - news) and Best Buy Co. Inc. (NYSE:BBY - news) represented 50 percent of all sell-through retail DVD sales in 2004, according to the Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA).

A spokeswoman for Wal-Mart confirmed that the world's largest retailer was looking into kiosks, but said no formal announcements or decisions were expected soon.

Billion Dollar Business

The video industry group's most recent stand-alone survey for Wal-Mart put its DVD sales at $3.2 billion in 2003, more than double those at Target, the No. 2 sell-through retailer.

Target and Best Buy officials were unavailable to comment.

Restaurant chain McDonald's Corp. (NYSE:MCD - news) and movie rental retailer Movie Gallery (Nasdaq:MOVI - news) have experimented with kiosks that are more like vending machines for renting physical DVDs.

McDonald's has put its $1-per-night kiosks, which hold about 500 disks, in hundreds of restaurants in a bid to lure consumers into a one-stop experience to eat first, then rent a movie to take home and watch.

By contrast, digital on-demand video kiosks could enable retailers to offer all 6,600 Warner Bros. movie titles because they would be downloaded immediately via a high-speed Internet connection at the kiosk. Retailers could use shelf space to stock only the most recent releases.

"It's been a big topic of discussion. The technology does exist currently to enable DVD on-demand through a kiosk," said Lawrence Dvorchik, general manager of KioskCom, a leading trade show on interactive self-service kiosks held in Las Vegas.

"I'd imagine that some of the holdup can be tied to the rights issues. That is the way that it was with the music burning kiosks," said Dvorchik.

Officials from other major studios like Walt Disney Co. (NYSEIS - news) and General Electric Co.'s (NYSE:GE - news) Universal Studios also had no immediate comment. But sources said all the studios were looking at the idea.

"From a studio's perspective, the kiosks would allow us to get more content to more people," said Wuthrich.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060602/...edia_kiosks_dc





Storage Demands Flash Memory Industry
May Wong

The senior vice president of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. whipped out a tiny hard drive about the size of a Wheat Thin. The drive's label claimed a capacity of 1,000 gigabytes — more than 100 times greater than today's models that can hold 8,000 photos or 2,000 songs.

It wasn't real. But at the rate storage technology is now moving, it's only a matter of time before Healy's mock 1-terabyte disk drive becomes a reality.

With pioneering products like TiVo Inc.'s digital video recorders and Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod music players, the unsung storage components of hard disk drives and flash memory are taking on more visible roles. These are the keepers of precious personal cargo — from photos and household finances to music collections and favorite TV shows.

"You're letting us into your heart now, not just your home," said Bill Watkins, chief executive of Seagate Technology LLC, the world's largest maker of hard drives.

The opportunity hasn't been lost on storage purveyors.

Top suppliers — like Seagate, Western Digital Inc. and Hitachi for hard drives, and Samsung Electronics Co. and Toshiba Corp. for both flash memory and hard drives — are consistently pushing the technological envelope to feed device makers with ever beefier and more reliable technology.

Consider Apple's original iPod, which started in 2001 with a 5-gigabyte hard drive. Today, Apple has models ranging from the pencil-thin iPod Nano that holds up to 4 gigabytes using flash memory, to a video-capable iPod holding up to 60 gigabytes on a hard drive.

Flash memory makers have been doubling capacities about every nine months, says Celeste Crystal, an analyst at market researcher IDC. They're squeezing more bits of data onto cells in their silicon chips as well as developing new ways to stack layers of cells in the same amount of space.

The capacities of hard drives, which use spinning magnetized disks, have been doubling nearly each year. After decades of cramming more and more bits of data closer together, physical limitations are kicking in, so now the industry is switching to so-called perpendicular recording. By flipping the bits of information to stand vertically rather than horizontally, hard drive capacities are again on track to keep expanding.

As a result, consumers are closer than they've ever been to seeing a terabyte of storage in the 3.5-inch hard disk drives found in mainstream home computers.

Later this year, consumers will see PCs and backup-storage devices with 750-gigabyte hard drives — a 50 percent increase from the previous industry maximum of 500 gigabytes and many more times greater than the megabyte drives of the 1980s.

Three-quarters of a terabyte will let consumers store roughly 375 hours of standard TV programming, about 75 hours of high-definition video, more than a half million photos, or more than 10,000 music CDs converted into the MP3 digital audio format.

And by the end of 2007, PCs will have 1-terabyte drives while notebook computers will sport 200-gigabyte drives, suppliers said.

The competing storage medium, flash memory, holds data in tinier packages than hard drives, though at smaller capacities. Flash chips, unlike hard drives, have no moving parts, making them particularly rugged and versatile. It's why people can now tote around reams of documents on USB keychains or work out to their favorite tunes on gizmos as light as a stick of Chapstick.

Continued advances will mean portable gadgets will be able to carry 32 gigabytes of data on fingernail-sized flash memory cards within five years, predicts Eli Harari, chief executive of SanDisk Corp., the world's largest supplier of flash memory storage cards.

Both industries are on a tear.

The hard drive industry hit a record $27.9 billion in worldwide sales in 2005, and IDC predicts record shipments will continue annually, ballooning to $41.5 billion in 2010.

Flash industry sales are expected to jump to $18.7 billion in 2010, up from a record $10.6 billion in 2005, IDC forecasts.

"Storage growth is phenomenal," said IDC analyst John Rydning.

Though flash memory and hard drives will compete for business in some overlapping product segments — cell phones, portable media players and ultracompact laptops — analysts say both are poised to dominate their respective markets.

Hard drives, with their monster capacities, are expected to become increasingly vital components in all kinds of consumer gear — not just computers. They're also expanding into game consoles, car navigation systems, digital video recorders and camcorders.

And Watkins eyes the kingpin of consumer electronics: "Every TV will have a hard drive on it, in it, near it," he said, adding that storage demands will only be driven higher as consumers download more video games, TV shows, movies and other media.

Meanwhile, flash memory is expected to expand beyond its current staples of digital cameras, portable music players and keychain drives. Flash memory suppliers are bullish on how the portability and battery-life advantages of their technology will give consumers access to media wherever they want.

Harari eyes the mother lode in the mobile arena: "There are a billion consumers coming on stream for cell phones that will be your TV, personal computer, personal communicator and entertainment device. That's our huge opportunity."

For both industries, thriving sales in consumer electronics have been key in boosting company profits even as they invested in research and development and cut per-gigabyte prices.

Seagate saw its fiscal 2005 earnings rise to $707 million on revenue of $7.5 billion, up from $529 million in income on sales of $6.22 billion the year before. SanDisk earned $386.4 million in 2005, on sales of $2.31 billion, up from $272 million on sales of $1.78 billion a year earlier.

Because the industry has continually reduced prices, Hitachi's Healy promises consumers won't have to break the bank to satisfy their storage needs.

"This is the vision of the future," Healy said, holding the mock 1-inch, 1-terabyte hard drive. It might take 20 years to get there, he said, "but it won't cost you anymore than it would today."

That would roughly mean a retail price of $150, but instead of getting 8 gigabytes of storage, you would get 1,000.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060604/...hkBHNlYwMxNjk1





Back To The Bunker
William M. Arkin

On Monday, June 19, about 4,000 government workers representing more than 50 federal agencies from the State Department to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will say goodbye to their families and set off for dozens of classified emergency facilities stretching from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to the foothills of the Alleghenies. They will take to the bunkers in an "evacuation" that my sources describe as the largest "continuity of government" exercise ever conducted, a drill intended to prepare the U.S. government for an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The exercise is the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration since 9/11, a focus of enormous and often absurd time, money and effort that has come to echo the worst follies of the Cold War. The vast secret operation has updated the duck-and-cover scenarios of the 1950s with state-of-the-art technology -- alerts and updates delivered by pager and PDA, wireless priority service, video teleconferencing, remote backups -- to ensure that "essential" government functions continue undisrupted should a terrorist's nuclear bomb go off in downtown Washington.

But for all the BlackBerry culture, the outcome is still old-fashioned black and white: We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on alternate facilities, data warehouses and communications, yet no one can really foretell what would happen to the leadership and functioning of the federal government in a catastrophe.

After 9/11, The Washington Post reported that President Bush had set up a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work outside Washington on a rotating basis to ensure the continuity of national security. Since then, a program once focused on presidential succession and civilian control of U.S. nuclear weapons has been expanded to encompass the entire government. From the Department of Education to the Small Business Administration to the National Archives, every department and agency is now required to plan for continuity outside Washington.

Yet according to scores of documents I've obtained and interviews with half a dozen sources, there's no greater confidence today that essential services would be maintained in a disaster. And no one really knows how an evacuation would even be physically possible.

Moreover, since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the definition of what constitutes an "essential" government function has been expanded so ridiculously beyond core national security functions -- do we really need patent and trademark processing in the middle of a nuclear holocaust? -- that the term has become meaningless. The intent of the government effort may be laudable, even necessary, but a hyper-centralized approach based on the Cold War model of evacuations and bunkering makes it practically worthless.

That the continuity program is so poorly conceived, and poorly run, should come as no surprise. That's because the same Federal Emergency Management Agency that failed New Orleans after Katrina, an agency that a Senate investigating committee has pronounced "in shambles and beyond repair," is in charge of this enormous effort to plan for the U.S. government's survival.

Continuity programs began in the early 1950s, when the threat of nuclear war moved the administration of President Harry S. Truman to begin planning for emergency government functions and civil defense. Evacuation bunkers were built, and an incredibly complex and secretive shadow government program was created.

At its height, the grand era of continuity boasted the fully operational Mount Weather, a civilian bunker built along the crest of Virginia's Blue Ridge, to which most agency heads would evacuate; the Greenbrier hotel complex and bunker in West Virginia, where Congress would shelter; and Raven Rock, or Site R, a national security bunker bored into granite along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border near Camp David, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff would command a protracted nuclear war. Special communications networks were built, and evacuation and succession procedures were practiced continually.

When the Soviet Union crumbled, the program became a Cold War curiosity: Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered Raven Rock into caretaker status in 1991. The Greenbrier bunker was shuttered and a 30-year-old special access program was declassified three years later.

Then came the terrorist attacks of the mid-1990s and the looming Y2K rollover, and suddenly continuity wasn't only for nuclear war anymore. On Oct. 21, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 67, "Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations." No longer would only the very few elite leaders responsible for national security be covered. Instead, every single government department and agency was directed to see to it that they could resume critical functions within 12 hours of a warning, and keep their operations running at emergency facilities for up to 30 days. FEMA was put in charge of this broad new program.

On 9/11, the program was put to the test -- and failed. Not on the national security side: Vice President Cheney and others in the national security leadership were smoothly whisked away from the capital following procedures overseen by the Pentagon and the White House Military Office. But like the mass of Washingtonians, officials from other agencies found themselves virtually on their own, unsure of where to go or what to do, or whom to contact for the answers.

In the aftermath, the federal government was told to reinvigorate its continuity efforts. Bush approved lines of succession for civil agencies. Cabinet departments and agencies were assigned specific emergency responsibilities. FEMA issued new preparedness guidelines and oversaw training. A National Capital Region continuity working group established in 1999, comprising six White House groups, 15 departments and 61 agencies, met to coordinate.

But all the frenetic activity did not produce a government prepared for the worst. A year after 9/11, and almost three years after the deadline set in Clinton's 1998 directive, the Government Accounting Office evaluated 38 agencies and found that not one had addressed all the issues it had been ordered to. A 2004 GAO audit of 34 government continuity-of-operations plans found total confusion on the question of essential functions. One unnamed organization listed 399 such functions. A department included providing "speeches and articles for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary" among its essential duties, while neglecting many of its central programs.

The confusion and absurdity have continued, according to documents I've collected over the past few years. In June 2004, FEMA told federal agencies that essential services in a catastrophe would include not only such obvious ones as electric power generation and disaster relief but also patent and trademark processing, student aid and passport processing. A month earlier, FEMA had told states and local communities that library services should be counted as essential along with fire protection and law enforcement.

None of this can be heartening to Americans who want to believe that in a crisis, their government can distinguish between what is truly essential and what isn't -- and provide it.

Just two years ago, an exercise called Forward Challenge '04 pointed up the danger of making everyone and everything essential: Barely an hour after agencies were due to arrive at their relocation sites, the Office of Management and Budget asked the reconstituted government to identify emergency funding requirements.

As one after-action report for the exercise later put it in a classic case of understatement: "It was not clear . . . whether this would be a realistic request at that stage of an emergency."

This year's exercise, Forward Challenge '06, will be the third major interagency continuity exercise since 9/11. Larger than Forward Challenge '04 and the Pinnacle exercise held last year, it requires 31 departments and agencies (including FEMA) to relocate. Fifty to 60 are expected to take part.

According to government sources, the exercise will test the newly created continuity of government alert conditions -- called COGCONs -- that emulate the DEFCONs of the national security community. Forward Challenge will begin with a series of alerts via BlackBerry and pager to key officials. It will test COGCON 1, the highest level of preparedness, in which each department and agency is required to have at least one person in its chain of command and sufficient staffing at alternate operating facilities to perform essential functions.

Though key White House officials and military leadership would be relocated via the Pentagon's Joint Emergency Evacuation Program (JEEP), the civilians are on their own to make it to their designated evacuation points.

But fear not: Each organization's COOP, or continuity of operations plan, details the best routes to the emergency locations. The plans even spell out what evacuees should take with them (recommended items: a combination lock, a flashlight, two towels and a small box of washing powder).

Can such an exercise, announced well in advance, hope to re-create any of the tensions and fears of a real crisis? How do you simulate the experience of driving through blazing, radiated, panic-stricken streets to emergency bunker sites miles away?

As the Energy Department stated in its review of Forward Challenge '04, "a method needs to be devised to realistically test the ability of . . . federal offices to relocate to their COOP sites using a scenario that simulates . . . the monumental challenges that would be involved in evacuating the city."

With its new plans and procedures, Washington may think it has thought of everything to save itself. Forward Challenge will no doubt be deemed a success, and officials will pronounce the continuity-of-government project sound. There will be lessons to be learned that will justify more millions of dollars and more work in the infinite effort to guarantee order out of chaos.

But the main defect -- a bunker mentality that considers too many people and too many jobs "essential" -- will remain unchallenged.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...060201410.html





Hearst's New Home: Xanadu in Manhattan
Richard Siklos

Frank A. Bennack Jr., the former chief executive of the Hearst Corporation, was recently touring the resplendent new headquarters the company has erected at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan.

What would William Randolph Hearst, the company's legendary founder, have thought of this glass and steel monolith? he was asked. "He only wanted to own his own land and all the land that joined it," Mr. Bennack replied. Gazing around the lobby, he added: "He would have loved it."

Chances are that the Chief, as Mr. Hearst was known to his minions, would be as pleased with the seemingly flush condition of the empire he left behind on his death 55 years ago. Indeed, the company paid for the gleaming headquarters with $500 million in cash.

Among the media giants, the privately held Hearst has been a famously buttoned-up organization. It is gaining a higher profile at a time when publicly traded companies like Time Warner and the Tribune Company are under mounting pressure from disappointed investors. Now, Hearst's ability to move in any direction it chooses without having to explain itself to Wall Street is looking more like a strategic advantage.

The company has been able to go stealthily about its business of running media assets that include newspapers like The San Francisco Chronicle and The Houston Chronicle; scores of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Esquire; television stations; investments in cable channels; digital start-ups; and much else. It even publishes Floor Covering Weekly and sells ketchup and grass-fed beef under the Hearst brand from ranches it owns in California.

"Since I became C.E.O. of Hearst, people have said: 'Do you like running a private company?' and I've said 'Yes,' " said Victor F. Ganzi, who succeeded Mr. Bennack in 2002. "Now I say, 'No. I love running a private company.' "

Mr. Hearst might also be surprised by the unexpected and ambitious directions Mr. Ganzi has lately taken the business. In March, for instance, Hearst signaled a move away from traditional media by buying a 20 percent interest in the Fitch Group, which operates the Fitch bond rating service, from its French owner, for $592 million.

A month after the Fitch deal — as if to show the company had not given up on its ink-stained roots — it announced a complex deal with the newspaper publisher William Dean Singleton, which would effectively result in Hearst owning a 20 percent to 30 percent stake in Mr. Singleton's company, the MediaNews Group, at a cost of $263 million.

Typical of the inscrutable Hearst style, both of these recent deals make the company appear to be a passive, patient investor in a larger entity. But Mr. Ganzi revealed in an interview that both arrangements carry rights of refusal and other provisions that would allow Hearst to increase its stake in Fitch and MediaNews (excluding a group of California newspapers it owns) and potentially acquire control of both businesses down the road.

"We are comfortable with our minority stake in all these cases and if it never changes we are comfortable with that," Mr. Ganzi said. In the case of MediaNews, Mr. Singleton, 54, and another investor, Richard Scudder, who is 93, each currently own 45 percent of the group of 55 daily newspapers. "Ultimately, I think there will be opportunities," Mr. Ganzi said. Mr. Singleton did not return calls seeking comment.

It is probably no accident that the new 46-story headquarters, with its geometric form, latest technology and green design elements, stands atop the medieval-style cast-stone husk of a six-story Hearst Magazines office built in the 1920's. The profile-raising new tower, like its occupant, is a melding of newfangled and nostalgic — a throwback to the future.

"As a business, it's a bit of an amalgam," said Richard D. Parsons, the chief executive of Time Warner and a friend of Mr. Ganzi. "They're able to think beyond quarter-to-quarter and my sense is they've been very deliberate and thoughtful about building a business that will be around for a long, long time."

Indeed, only one of the company's main business units, Hearst-Argyle Television, is publicly traded — and, as it happens, it has not been much of an investment in recent years. While acknowledging that his company is not immune to the challenges of the Internet or slowing growth at some businesses, such as newspapers, Mr. Ganzi said the company was loath to sell assets.

Private but Tough

And while the company is assiduously private in nearly every sense of the word, it is not shy. Mr. Ganzi, 59, is known as a tough negotiator who recently took a personal role in tackling disputes with strong-minded media figures like Charles W. Ergen chief executive of EchoStar, which briefly took the Hearst-affiliated Lifetime Television channel off its satellite service, and Frank A. Blethen, a Seattle publisher trying to disentangle a partnership with The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a Hearst newspaper.

Mr. Ganzi, a civic-minded accountant and Harvard-trained lawyer, joined the company as its general counsel in 1990. He was brought up in Queens, and his family has owned half of The Palm chain of steakhouses for close to 80 years. Colleagues say Mr. Ganzi is possessed of a photographic memory, and he speaks in precise rapid-fire bursts.

He agreed to a rare interview, given all the curiosity about the company's new tower, yet he declined to meet in person or to pose for a photo. When asked why, he quickly replied into the telephone: "It's quite simple. Don't take this the wrong way: I've enjoyed talking to you but it doesn't make the Hearst Corporation another dollar."

Mr. Ganzi said Hearst executives did not take their private status for granted, and regularly benchmarked their performance against other publicly traded companies. Despite the company's heritage — dating back to 1887, when young William took over The San Francisco Examiner — Mr. Ganzi said that 85 percent of the company's profits came from businesses that were built, started or acquired in the past 30 years.

Through acquisitions, new publications and the nearly obsessive pursuit of brand extensions, the company says it has increased profits in 13 of the last 14 years, and last year raised net income by 10 percent, to about $850 million on revenue of more than $7 billion. (Hearst declined to share more detailed financial information.) By comparison, in 1951, the year Mr. Hearst died, the company had earnings of around $2.6 million, or $20 million in 2005 dollars.

Hearst has been known mostly for its magazines but, while the company generates nearly 60 percent of its revenue from advertising, magazines are expected to represent only 16 percent of its after-tax cash flow this year. Its 12 newspapers and 28 television stations contribute similar cash-flow numbers. According to the company, Hearst generates nearly half of its cash flow from having invested wisely in cable TV channels alongside the Walt Disney Company.

In fact, much of its business is conducted in a maze of partnerships and investments more typical of European family media dynasties than American media conglomerates. For instance, Hearst publishes Smart Money with Dow Jones, runs a magazine distribution business with its publishing rival Condé Nast, and in cable channels holds 50 percent of Lifetime, one-third of A&E and 20 percent of ESPN.

All three of those cable holdings are close partnerships with Disney, which also uses Hearst to distribute its ESPN Magazine. Hearst-Argyle Television, meanwhile, is the largest operator of affiliates for Disney's ABC network.

In a similar vein, NBC Universal owns another third of the cable channel A&E, and Hearst-Argyle is the second-largest operator of NBC affiliates. NBC Universal also recently acquired the Web site iVillage.com, in which Hearst was a 25 percent shareholder.

The ESPN stake, acquired for around $170 million in 1990, has been especially lucrative. Hearst's investment is now worth as much as $3.5 billion, estimates Laura Martin at Soleil Securities. And Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, says: "In many respects we're joined at the hip. We don't really intersect with any other company in the world the way we do with Hearst."

Hearst's marquee magazine business has long bumped up against the fancier Condé Nast Publications and the Time Inc. juggernaut — both of which outstrip Hearst's stable of 20 magazines in terms of ad pages and revenue in the United States. But Hearst has fought for a place in the top rank of publishers under the direction of Cathleen Black, its magazine president for the last decade.

Print and Online

Most notably, Hearst Magazines has pursued an aggressive international expansion of its titles (Cosmopolitan alone has 56 separate editions) and enjoyed breakout success with O, The Oprah Magazine, a partnership with Oprah Winfrey, started in 2000. But a Lifetime magazine fizzled and other recent lifestyle ventures such as Shop Etc., Quick & Simple and Weekend appear, at first blush, more cautious than revolutionary.

But Ms. Black — a champion of print for whom, it seems, the glass is not half-full but overflowing — said the company was constantly looking at ways to introduce and extend brands. "It's got to be something that parts the waters," she said.

Her current focus is online. IVillage, before being sold, was the exclusive Web home for women's publications at Hearst. Now, the company is hustling to create its own digital sales division and pursuing new Web distribution deals like one Ms. Black announced last month with MSN.

Elsewhere, Hearst's approach to the Internet has been typically idiosyncratic. Rather than running Web businesses, it has made some 35 investments in interactive start-ups that have included Netscape and XM Satellite Radio. Some of the company's recent bets — including the companies Sling Media, Brightcove, USDTV and Current Communications — reflect Mr. Ganzi's interest in capitalizing on new forms of distribution for Hearst's video businesses.

Since a vast majority of Hearst's 20,000 employees are outside New York, magazine staff members will fill most of the new tower's floors. Corporate executives and some other divisions will take what is left. The original magazine building, completed in 1928, was part of a plan the Chief hatched in his heyday — when he owned three New York dailies — for a gigantic media plaza. Indeed, its structure was built to support additional floors. Realizing Mr. Hearst's dream of a Midtown skyscraper has been under study for decades.

In his will, Mr. Hearst left an estate in trust valued at roughly $51 million to his wife, five sons and two charities (around $400 million in today's dollars). One provision of the will was that nonfamily members occupy 8 of the 13 slots on the board of trustees. Another was that the trust would dissolve on the death of the last grandchild living on the day Mr. Hearst died. Mr. Ganzi said actuaries estimated that to be some time around 2045 — too far into the future to affect the company's strategic planning.

The Hearst Heirs

Despite their codified independence, several people close to Hearst said Mr. Ganzi and other executives take pains not to be seen as getting in front of the Hearst heirs who are its shareholders. Today, some 60 descendants of Mr. Hearst's sons are among the owners and "remaindermen" (those who will inherit an interest) of the trust. Many of them meet once a year for a picnic in Northern California where, among other activities, bocce is inexplicably a favorite, said George R. Hearst III, a great-grandson of the founder.

George Hearst III is associate publisher of The Albany Times Union, a Hearst paper, and one of several family members who work in the business. His father, George R. Hearst Jr., the oldest surviving heir, is Hearst's chairman. The February issue of the company's Town & Country magazine was uncharacteristically familial: it featured the model Amanda Hearst posing at San Simeon, her great-grandfather's storied castle, in a cover spread.

While there have been tremors of unrest among family members over the years — not uncommon in wealthy dynasties—George Hearst III said in an interview that the family had been uniformly supportive of the new tower.

While it is not exactly Xanadu, Hearst Tower is certainly a major upgrade for many of the company's rank and file. With its soaring entry and French Balzac limestone lobby floor, the building sets a Four Seasons tone for a magazine business that rivals have viewed as more of a Sheraton.

"I've always felt that that is not fair," Ms. Black said. "What I do believe is fair is we've been a very profit-driven company forever. But there's a big difference between being profit-driven and being cheap."

Regardless, the company's image seems certain to change. The complex, designed by Norman Foster, features a 168-seat theater with top-end acoustics, a shimmering crystal waterfall, and Café 57, a staff commissary clearly intended to vie with Condé Nast's renowned cafeteria. (In a nod to the past, the company has also rebuilt the Good Housekeeping dining room from the former building.)

The building has a gymnasium with fancy Italian equipment, which both supplies and launders workout clothes for employees. "I have to say that it's a lot more luxe than I expected," said David Granger, the editor of Esquire, whose staff is among 700 employees who have moved in as of last week.

Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan and now head of its international editions, said she was delighted to be moving to a corner office with sweeping views on the 37th floor, leaving the fourth-floor space she occupies in Cosmo's current Midtown Manhattan offices. "I exercise after lunch every day on the floor of my office and I don't want to go clear down to the gym," Ms. Gurley Brown said. "But I think, on the 37th floor, if I stay down on the floor, no one is going to see me."

Hearst's executives say the best part is the culture that will emerge from gathering so many of their employees under one roof for the first time. Thus, for Mr. Ganzi, there is no contradiction in a media company whose bosses eschew public attention erecting a gleaming, translucent landmark.

"I'm less concerned about a statement to the world," he said. "I'm more concerned about a statement to my colleagues. It's a statement about our future as well as, I think, a statement and commitment to our past."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/bu.../05hearst.html





Microsoft Takes On Net Nasties
David Frith

MICROSOFT executives love telling stories against each other. Here's one that platforms vice-president Jim Allchin told at a recent Windows Vista reviewers conference about chief executive Steve Ballmer.

It seems Steve was at a friend's wedding reception when the bride's father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look.

Allchin says Ballmer, the world's 13th wealthiest man with a fortune of about $18 billion, spent almost two days trying to rid the PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware and severe fragmentation without success.

He lumped the thing back to Microsoft's headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate.

Among the problems was a program that automatically disabled any antivirus software.

"This really opened our eyes to what goes on in the real world," Allchin told the audience.

If the man at the top and a team of Microsoft's best engineers faced defeat, what chance do ordinary punters have of keeping their Windows PCs virus-free?

Ballmer and Allchin didn't get to be such wealthy executives by ignoring a business opportunity, so last week, Microsoft launched Windows Live OneCare.

In doing so it seems to have begun a new battle in the PC security war because antivirus software vendors Symantec and McAfee have announced new products to challenge OneCare.

Described as an "all-in-one, automatic and self-updating PC care service designed to help consumers more easily protect and maintain their PCs", OneCare is at present available only in the US, where users will pay an annual fee of $US50 ($66).

DoubleClick thinks Microsoft has a hide to charge customers $66 a year to fix problems in its operating software that shouldn't be there in the first place, but no doubt many will pay up if it means an easy way of dealing with the increasing flood of viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and other computing nasties.

There is no news yet of a OneCare release date in Australia or anywhere else outside North America, but you can safely bet it will be here soon.

Microsoft does offer a free online virus scanning and tune-up service that Australians can access online, although its features are not as comprehensive as those of OneCare. Called Windows Live Safety Centre, it is at http://safety.live.com.

Rivals Symantec and McAfee, which face losing big chunks of their multibillion-dollar businesses to Microsoft, aren't taking all this lying down.

Both have promised an Australian release of the rival all-in-one security products they are rushing to market.

Symantec has announced Norton 360, a consumer PC security service that will include online identity theft protection, backup and PC tune-up capabilities, and automatic updates.

It will work with Windows XP and the coming Windows Vista.

The full international release of Norton 360 is expected towards the end of the year, but Symantec is inviting would-be users to sign up for a beta version, expected in the next few months.

You can sign up at www.symantec.com/norton360 betaprereg

McAfee is calling its OneCare killer Falcon and has predicted a release date sometime between June 21 and September 23.

It is expected to contain antivirus, anti-phishing, spyware and root-kit detection features, along with automated backups and network security.

How well Symantec/Norton and McAfee will be able to compete with the Microsoft remains to be seen.

As commentators are pointing out, Microsoft has a huge captive audience to whom it can promote the new service: the many millions who download its regular security updates.

On the other hand, Symantec and McAfee can play on the distrust that many disgruntled users feel for Microsoft and maybe undercut the $66 fee. The war has just begun.

As a footnote, Symantec has just issued an automated back-up and recovery program for consumers.

Norton Save and Restore is said to make it very easy for home PC users to preserve photos, music files, financial information and other digital data.

It sells for $99.95 and until June 20 can be bought only at Dick Smith Electronics stores. From that date it will be more widely available.
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,19345228^15865^^nbv^,00.html





Who'll Run The Internet Is Main Bout In Telecommunications Fight
Jim Abrams

A major wrestling match in Congress over control of the Internet features some strange tag teams -- rockers and evangelists vs. phone companies and the Bells' usually biggest adversary, cable TV companies.

The most far-reaching telecommunications bill in a decade has as its main purpose making it easier for phone companies to compete against cable companies in offering the equivalent of cable TV, and streamlining the approval process for both. The promise to consumers is lower prices and more choices.

But the biggest controversy is a different issue, so-called net neutrality. The idea is that all Web sites should get the same treatment from cable and phone companies for use of their broadband, high-speed Internet lines.

The rockers and evangelists _ joined by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! _ fear that telephone and cable companies who control the Internet highway will put their own products in the fast lanes and relegate those unwilling to pay premium fees to poorer quality and slower service.

In their corner are the Christian Coalition, National Religious Broadcasters and Gun Owners of America as well as liberal Web-based entities such as MoveOn.Org and recording artists REM, the Indigo Girls and Moby.

"If Congress guts net neutrality, independent music and news sites would be choked off, consumer choice would be limited and the Internet will become a private toll road auctioned off by companies like AT&T," Moby said in a statement at a recent Capitol Hill event.

Both the House and Senate bills, sponsored by the chairmen of their two commerce committees, respectively Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, address net neutrality, but in language that critics say is too weak to prevent discrimination.

Phone and cable companies contend pure net neutrality would erode Internet freedom and drive up costs to consumers because online businesses wouldn't pay a fair share of the billions of dollars being spent to provide high-speed service around the country.

"Simply put, net neutrality legislation endangers both the future of video choice and the accelerated broadband investment that is just beginning to gain traction," Verizon executive vice president Tom Tauke testified at a recent Senate hearing.

The more aggressive proposals of net neutrality, Tauke said, "really come down to one thing: government regulation of the Internet."

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, a sponsor of net neutrality legislation, said Congress must provide nondiscrimination safeguards in the wake of Supreme Court and Federal Communications Commission rulings that effectively deregulated broadband services.

"Unfortunately, if Congress does not act, the age of digital democracy will come to an end," she said. "Innovators with great ideas, but without deep pockets, will be relegated to the Internet's 'dirt road.'"

In the House, Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and the top Democrat on the panel, John Conyers of Michigan, won committee approval of their net neutrality bill last month. It requires phone and cable broadband suppliers to give nonaffiliated content producers equal opportunity to reach consumers, and to refrain from interfering with user choice of content.

They're hoping to get a vote when the broader telecommunications bill comes to the House floor, possibly as early as this week.

The main thrust of the House bill is to create a national franchising process for subscription TV to replace the current system where video providers must negotiate contracts on a muncipality-by-municipality basis.

Verizon's Tauke said these negotiations with localities can take up to two years, a disincentive for phone companies interested in expanding into video.

Robert Johnson, president of Consumers for Cable Choice, said 96 percent of Americans have no choice in landline cable TV operator, and that the United States is currently 16th in the world in deployment of broadband, just ahead of Costa Rica.

The Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit group, says it has found that cable prices are about 15 percent lower in areas where there is direct competition.

The cable industry, locked in a fierce lobbying and ad war with the phone companies over bringing TV into homes, points out that the Phoenix Center gets financial backing from the Bells. Lawrence Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center, said they have been publishing on cable competition for 13 years and "nobody from the cable industry has tried to refute our work."
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....egory=Business





Senate Judiciary Committee wants answers about FBI probe of Jack Anderson
Laurie Kellman

In a new jab at the Bush administration over its use of executive power, the Senate Judiciary Committee is demanding that the Justice Department explain the agency's investigations of journalists who publish classified information.

Specifically, Republicans and Democrats want to know more about the FBI's effort to obtain a half-century's worth of papers kept by columnist Jack Anderson _ a member of President Nixon's "enemies list" _ who died in December at 83.

Matthew Friedrich, the Justice Department's criminal division chief of staff, is facing a skeptical panel at a hearing Tuesday.

Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has chafed for months over President Bush's secretive domestic wiretapping and phonetapping programs, and maintained that national security may not justify such uses of executive power. He personally told President Bush earlier this year that "the president doesn't have a blank check."

Now, with the administration considering prosecuting journalists who publish classified information and refuse to reveal their sources, Specter wants the full story of the Anderson search.

Scheduled to testify Tuesday were Friedrich, Anderson's son Kevin and Mark Feldstein, a former investigative reporter who is writing a book about Anderson.

Feldstein says two FBI agents showed up at his home March 3 seeking the roughly 200 boxes of Anderson's papers that the family had granted him access for the book. The agents, Feldstein has said, cited national security concerns.

Members of the Judiciary Committee don't buy the explanation.

"I fail to see what possible national security interest is served by the FBI rummaging through Mr. Anderson's files many years after he published articles about these matters," ranking Democrat Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in prepared remarks.

The FBI has said that if the papers contain classified information, they belong to the government.

The FBI had long sought Anderson's papers after he published stories exposing the Keating Five, a CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro and details of the Iran-Contra affair.

Anderson's son said the FBI contacted his mother shortly after his father's funeral, expressing interest in documents that would aid the government's case against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who have been charged with disclosing classified information.

In addition, the agents told the family they planned to remove from the columnist's archive _ which had yet to be catalogued _ any document they came across that was stamped "secret" or "confidential," or was otherwise classified.

The family refused.

The younger Anderson's account is similar to that of Feldstein, a George Washington University journalism professor and Anderson biographer, who said he was visited by two agents at his Washington-area home in March.

"They flashed their badges and said they needed access to the papers," said Feldstein. Anderson donated his papers to the university, but the family had not yet formally signed them over.

FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko, a spokesman in Washington, said in an interview that the bureau wants to search the Anderson archive and remove classified materials before they are made available to the public. "It has been determined that, among the papers, there are a number of U.S. government documents containing classified information," Kolko said, declining to say how the FBI knows.

The documents contain information about sources and methods used by U.S. intelligence agencies, he said.
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....egory=Politics





Meat Loaf Claims 'Bat Out of Hell' Rights
Eric Berkowitz

Someone else might have written the "Bat Out of Hell" song, but Meat Loaf claims he should be the only one to use the phrase in connection with music. In a federal lawsuit dated May 26, the rocker, whose real name is Michael Aday, said the expression had been publicly associated with him since the 1977 release of his "Bat Out of Hell" album.

The suit claims defendant Jim Steinman, who wrote the original song of the same name, wrongly claims ownership of the phrase.

The album and its 1993 follow-up, "Bat Out of Hell II," sold 48 million copies worldwide, according to the suit.

The suit seeks damages of more than $50 million.

Steinman and Meat Loaf's manager, defendant David Sonenberg, have been trying to disrupt the October release of the third "Bat Out of Hell" album by telling the singer's distributors that Aday had no right to use the phrase, according to the suit.

"This contention is blackmail and a holdup," said the complaint, which claimed Steinman and Sonenberg have infringed Aday's trademark rights in the phrase, and are interfering with distribution contracts.

Steinman wrote and produced the second album, and would have produced the third, but he and Aday had a falling out, according the suit.

Attempts to reach Steinman and Sonenberg for comment after business hours Monday were unsuccessful.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





On 6/6/6, the Possibilities Are Endless
Emily Vasquez

Today is June 6, 2006, also known, if you drop the zeroes, as 6/6/6. It's a number that is either portentous or meaningless, depending on who's counting. Those who are intrigued by its devilish pattern — including evangelicals, movie studios and a club in TriBeCa — are abuzz.

Given that 666 is referred to as the "number of the beast," or Antichrist, in the Book of Revelation, commercial outlets have taken advantage of the curiosity or fear linked to the date.

"The Omen," a remake of the 1976 horror film that begins with the birth of the Antichrist, opens today nationwide. Tim LaHaye, a co-author of the best-selling "Left Behind" series, is promoting his new book, "The Rapture," with the tagline "06.06.06. Will You Be Ready?"

Whatever today's 666 may bring, one dance club, the Mocca Lounge on Reade Street in Lower Manhattan, promises a party that will "either get the demons out or invoke them." Ori Raz, the owner of the club, said that to him, 666 signifies "no borders, no boundaries, everything is possible."

Rose Welsh, a numerologist who works from her TriBeCa apartment, said the number 6 has much more to do with desire, on a individual level, than with the broader forces of good and evil. Instead, she relates the number 7 to the devil because it is the number of choice, the number of the "fall from right to wrong."

Even those who believe that an apocalypse is on the horizon do not necessarily see today's date as particularly significant.

"Tuesday you're going to be fine," said Terry James, editor of the evangelical Web site raptureready.com.

"We believe that there is a coming period, Catholics call it the apocalypse, in which the Antichrist will rule," Mr. James said. "But we haven't reached it yet."

And as for the birth of the Antichrist, Mr. James, who also recently wrote "The Rapture Dialogues," said he did not think that would happen today, either. Instead, he said, it is more likely that the Antichrist "is already in the world today, just waiting in the wings."

But there is always a chance that 666 could carry weight, and more than 700 online gamblers wagered on just that at BetUS.com, a sports gambling site.

The wager of the day on the site: "Will the World End on 6-6-06?" By 6 p.m. yesterday, 216 of the 700 gamblers had bet an average of just more than $2 that yes, the world would end. The odds stood at 100,000 to 1.

And how will they collect if their bet was right on? Mike Forman, a spokesman for the site, said the company was committed to paying up. "Come rain, sleet, snow or apocalypse, our clients will receive their winnings," he said.

Elizabeth Castelli, an associate professor of religion at Barnard College, said there was a long history of people trying to make such predictions about the end of time based on the Book of Revelation.

"I don't think one can predict anything from these texts at all," Ms. Castelli said. "There are other places in Scripture that say no one will know when the end of time will be."

And Ms. Castelli added that the "end" of the world was, in the end, a religious construct. "All that is predicated on the idea that time is actually moving toward an end," she said. "And that's a pretty big assumption."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/ny.../06number.html





For Law Firm, Serial Plaintiff Had Golden Touch
Julie Creswell and Jonathan D. Glater

When it came to investing, Howard J. Vogel seemed to possess a perverse kind of Midas touch.

In early October 1997, he bought 50 shares of Oxford Health Plans. Three weeks later, the stock nose-dived, and Mr. Vogel lost about $3,000 of his investment. Still, Mr. Vogel reaped $1.1 million.

How was that possible?

Mr. Vogel was a plaintiff in a shareholder lawsuit filed by the New York securities litigation powerhouse Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach against Oxford Health. In 2003, the company, along with other parties that were sued, paid $300 million to settle.

Most of the investors received pennies on the dollar for their losses. But Mr. Vogel, then a real estate mortgage broker in Englewood, N.J., was not just a hapless investor who bought the wrong stock at the wrong time.

Mr. Vogel now says, according to a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, that he and members of his family were actually linchpins in a long-running arrangement that helped Milberg Weiss snare the lucrative lead counsel position in the Oxford Health and many other securities lawsuits, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees.

Mr. Vogel, who has since moved to Florida, is a central figure in the government's case against Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman, as the law firm is now called. Last month, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted the firm and two of its name partners on several criminal charges, including racketeering conspiracy and money laundering. The firm is accused of making $11.3 million in illegal secret payments to Mr. Vogel and two others who served as plaintiffs in more than 150 lawsuits.

The firm contends it has done nothing improper and has vowed to fight the charges against it. But Milberg Weiss is struggling to keep its lawyers and clients from walking away. Several lawyers have left the firm and a number of institutional investors, including the New York state employee pension fund, have removed it as counsel in high-profile lawsuits.

The Oxford Health lawsuit was widely watched at the time, and it takes on new significance in light of Mr. Vogel's admissions and prosecutors' charges.

It provides a window into how, even after Congress passed legislation in 1995 aimed at undermining Milberg Weiss's dominance, the firm worked feverishly to find ways to maneuver around the new landscape.

Yesterday, William W. Taylor, a lawyer at Zuckerman Spaeder who represents Milberg Weiss, said in response to questions: "On behalf of the firm, the Oxford case was handled in the highest traditions of Milberg's practice. The result obtained was exemplary and the firm is proud of the result in that case as it is in all of its cases."

The 1995 law, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, or P.S.L.R.A., was intended to make it harder for plaintiffs' lawyers to file lawsuits after merely finding a single investor who held the stock of the company to be sued. Under the law, courts were required to select the investor with the largest loss as lead plaintiff, whose lawyer then coordinated the lawsuit.

The law was meant to rein in lawyers who simply eyeballed companies that were in trouble and ran to the courthouse with a plaintiff in tow at the first hiccup in the share price.

In many ways, the law seems to have had the intended effect. Since the legislation was enacted, institutional investors like big state pension funds have led the charge in numerous shareholder lawsuits, like those involving Enron and WorldCom.

Still, the majority of federal securities lawsuits settled last year — 62 percent — had individuals as lead plaintiffs, according to NERA Economic Consulting in White Plains.

Indeed, in the cases cited by federal prosecutors in the indictment of Milberg Weiss, the law firm's frequent clients were individual investors, including Mr. Vogel; his wife, Eugenia Gladstone Vogel; and his stepson, Emile Gladstone. Mr. Vogel's lawyer would not comment for this article.

Yet while Mr. Vogel and his family were frequently named as plaintiffs, they were not always successful in winning lead-plaintiff status. That would not mean that the case was a total loss for Milberg Weiss, but its share of any settlement would almost certainly be smaller.

That is because the lead counsel in a lawsuit typically has considerable influence over how the fees will be awarded to other law firms after a settlement is reached, according to plaintiffs' lawyers.

"What typically happens in a securities litigation is you have one case filed and then you have three or four copycat" complaints, said John H. Henn, a defense lawyer at Foley Hoag in Boston. "Then they agree among themselves about on who would make the best lead plaintiff."

Or they have knock-down-drag-out courtroom brawls.

The decision over lead plaintiff in the Oxford Health case dragged on for nearly four years, took many bizarre twists along the way and featured a revolving cast of plaintiffs.

In the fall of 1997, malfunctions in Oxford Health's computer system led to unexpected losses and a steep drop in its stock price, which wiped out nearly $3 billion of the company's market value. In the days after the announcement, more than 50 class-action lawsuits were filed against the company, claiming that Oxford officials had known of the computer problems and their effects, but had misled investors by failing to disclose what they knew.

"The advantage to having a client and being on file with a class action is that you could then send out mailings or press releases, trying to find other plaintiffs who had bigger losses," said a plaintiffs' lawyer who did not want to be identified because he works in the field. "Even if you had a small client, it was at least a foot in the door that allowed you to get the process rolling."

Oxford Health was a big, juicy target for plaintiffs' lawyers.

A lawyer who tried to get his clients named lead plaintiffs in the Oxford case, Lee Squitieri, said: "It looked like a good case right out of the box. This was not what we called a 'prediction case' where the wrongdoing consisted of a prediction that turned out to be untrue. This was a better case. It involved concealing material information. That's a good case."

Milberg Weiss's biggest rival for lead plaintiff was the Colorado Public Employees' Retirement Association, which claimed it had lost more than $20 million when Oxford Health's stock fell. The mutual fund company PBHG, managed by Pilgrim Baxter & Associates, also wanted to be the lead plaintiff, contending that six of its funds had lost $4.3 million. It later dropped all but one of the funds from its claim, saying that the remaining one lost $65,000.

Undaunted by groups that, arguably, better met the requirements under the new law, Milberg Weiss aggregated a group of 35 individuals who it said had lost a total of $10 million.

Milberg Weiss's initial plaintiff in the case was Mr. Vogel. What was unknown at the time was that Mr. Vogel had acquired shares of the stock on the belief that it was on the verge of a collapse.

In late April, Mr. Vogel pleaded guilty to a single count of perjury — falsely stating in a court filing that he had not received payment other than his share of the settlement proceeds. In exchange for his cooperation, Mr. Vogel was not charged with being part of the conspiracy that Milberg Weiss is accused of. In addition, prosecutors agreed to recommend leniency in sentencing.

According to Mr. Vogel's plea agreement, he contacted "Partner E" — identified by lawyers involved in the case as Robert Sugarman, a former Milberg Weiss lawyer — and "discussed a potential securities fraud class-action lawsuit" against Oxford Health. Mr. Sugarman is said to be cooperating with federal prosecutors. Mr. Sugarman's lawyer declined to comment.

Dating back to 1991, Mr. Vogel had been a lead plaintiff in numerous lawsuits filed by Milberg Weiss for which he illegally received a cut of the law firm's fees — as much as 14 percent, according to court filings.

But in the case of Oxford, Mr. Vogel was told by Mr. Sugarman that his payment would be less than his usual percentage because the lawsuit was so large and "Milberg Weiss would have other payment obligations in the case," the indictment said.

In 1998, the lawyer representing the Colorado pension fund, Jay W. Eisenhofer, challenged whether Mr. Vogel's losses were substantial enough to meet the law's new requirements.

Patricia M. Hynes, a Milberg Weiss lawyer who was not named in the indictment and has not been accused of any wrongdoing, responded in a June 1998 hearing that among the 35 plaintiffs representing the "Vogel group" were three individuals who had lost $2 million to $3.4 million each.

Swayed by Ms. Hynes's argument, the judge overseeing the case, Charles L. Brieant of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, decided to proceed with three co-lead plaintiffs — the Colorado retirement fund, the PBHG mutual funds and the "Vogel Plaintiff Group," which now did not include Mr. Vogel because his losses were too small. Instead, it consisted of Gary Weber, Daniel Hurley and Michael Sabbia. Milberg Weiss was named co-lead counsel, along with Grant & Eisenhofer, which represented the Colorado fund, and Chitwood & Harley, which represented PBHG.

The size of the losses by the individual investors became a focal point after lawyers with Sullivan & Cromwell, which represented Oxford Health, began to dig into the trading records of the Milberg Weiss plaintiffs.

Milberg Weiss had already revised Mr. Hurley's losses, dropping them from $3.4 million to less than $1 million after realizing an error had been made in going through his trading records.

But the lawyers for Oxford argued that more than 4,000 transactions in Oxford options that they had each engaged in during the 13 months of the time period of the lawsuit had been omitted.

By their accounting, Mr. Hurley had actually made $700,747 in profits from his combined trading in stock and options, while Mr. Sabbia's loss totaled $315,000. That was a far cry from the $2 million loss that Ms. Hynes told the court in 1998 Mr. Sabbia had suffered.

Ms. Hynes claimed the Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers had used "discredited experts, flawed methodologies and erroneous 'alternative' calculations of plaintiffs' losses." By her firm's calculations, even taking the options trading activity into account, Mr. Sabbia still lost more than $1 million and Mr. Hurley more than $500,000. Those were "substantial losses by any measure," she stated in a 2000 memo to the court.

When contacted, Mr. Sabbia and Mr. Hurley said this was the first time they had been plaintiffs in lawsuits and both men said they did not receive any money from Milberg Weiss for their roles in the lawsuit. Mr. Sabbia added that he had no idea there was even any dispute surrounding the size of his loss in Oxford Health. "I lost tons," he said.

Judge Brieant rejected the defense lawyers' objections, ruling that the two Milberg Weiss clients had indeed suffered losses and could continue as lead plaintiffs.

There were problems with another Milberg Weiss plaintiff, Mr. Weber, who withdrew from the case in late 1999, weeks after he was deposed by lawyers for Oxford. A court document in the case that was recently unsealed is a letter to the judge from a Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer who said Mr. Weber "chose to lie" about his education, criminal record, history as a defendant in a civil case and his trading in Oxford securities. The National Law Journal reported on the letter in early 2000. A call to Mr. Weber's office was not returned.

Despite these setbacks, Milberg Weiss and the other lead plaintiffs' law firms reached the $300 million settlement in June 2003. Milberg Weiss's share of the legal fees totaled about $40 million, according to the Justice Department's indictment.

A few months later, Mr. Vogel contacted another Milberg Weiss lawyer, Steven G. Schulman, about his payments for Oxford and other cases, the indictment said. Mr. Schulman and another Milberg Weiss partner, David J. Bershad, were also indicted by the federal grand jury in Los Angeles last month and have taken leaves of absences from the firm. Mr. Bershad's lawyer said his client "vigorously" denied the charges. A call to Mr. Schulman's lawyer was not returned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/bu...rtner=homepage





Online Newspaper Ads Gaining Ground on Print
Julie Bosman

IN the matchup between the print and online versions of newspapers, signs of the Internet's ascendancy are growing stronger. As Colby Atwood, a newspaper analyst and a vice president at Borrell Associates, put it, "The tail is beginning to wag the dog."

According to estimates released on Friday by the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper print ad spending in the first three months of 2006 increased only 0.3 percent, to $10.5 billion, over the corresponding period last year. At the same time, spending for online advertising surged 35 percent.

"I think the handwriting is kind of on the wall that there is a large migration to the Web," Mr. Atwood said. "Increasing amounts of revenue and focus should be on the online properties. This is a transition that's taking place over several years here. It's not happening overnight, but it's definitely happening."

The numbers are still small compared with print: the first quarter of 2006 produced $613 million in online advertising, up from $454 million in the year-ago period. But it is the eighth consecutive quarter of growth for online ads, according to the association.

Analysts say the increases show that newspapers are learning how to harness the potential of online advertising as their print circulation has stumbled. Last month, the Audit Bureau of Circulations released figures showing that in the six-month period that ended in March, daily circulation of American newspapers dropped 2.5 percent, to 45.5 million, over the period a year ago.

"I think this industry is in for exceptional long-term growth from online revenue," said Jason E. Klein, the president and chief executive of the Newspaper National Network, a marketing partnership of advertisers and newspapers. Much of the current growth is coming in the technology and automotive categories, he said.

Newspapers have been helped by the general growth of online advertising: according to a report issued last week by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, total Internet advertising revenue reached a record $3.9 billion in the first three months of 2006.

But for many newspapers that are still developing an advertising model, online ads are still in their early stages, said Randy Bennett, vice president of audience and new business development for the newspaper association, which is based in Vienna, Va.

For now, classified advertising makes up roughly 60 to 70 percent of online advertising for newspapers, Mr. Bennett said. At the same time, Web sites like Craigslist that offer free classifieds are luring advertisers away from sites that charge to place ads.

One hope for online newspaper classifieds is the control their staffs can exercise over the content, unlike free sites like Craigslist, which are mostly managed and edited by anonymous users.

"I think newspapers will attempt to differentiate their classified products as authentic, reviewed and updated regularly," Mr. Bennett said. "It's a much more authentic database."

In addition to classified ads, other opportunities for growth in online advertising include interactive ads, wallpaper ads and ads with streaming video or audio.

John Morton, a newspaper industry analyst, noted that newspapers could reap gains as the traffic to their Web sites increased. "The more visitors you get, the higher price you can charge," Mr. Morton said. "And as this transformation continues, the volume will continue to increase."

On average, advertising accounts for roughly 75 to 80 percent of a newspaper's total revenue. Mr. Morton estimated that online advertising would make up 6.5 percent of newspapers' total advertising revenue in 2006, up from 5 percent last year. "What a lot of people don't understand about online advertising for newspapers is that it can be highly profitable," he said.

And there have been signs that newspaper owners are devoting more resources to their Web sites. Brian P. Tierney, the leader of a group of investors that bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News last month, said he planned to improve their Web site with added technology and content.

"Right now, the news industry is trying to hold on to the past, and Brian knows that you just can't do it," said Mary Meder, the president of Harmelin Media, a media-buying agency in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. "There's a lot of options out there for advertising, and he has to make his a viable choice."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/bu...ia/06adco.html





Google Takes Aim at Excel
John Markoff

Stepping up its attack on Microsoft's core business, Google plans to make available on Tuesday a test version of a Web-based spreadsheet program that is intended to make it simple to edit and share lists and data online.

The company said that the free program, called Google Spreadsheets, would be able to read and create files in the format used by Excel, the Microsoft spreadsheet software that is installed on millions of personal computers.

The spreadsheet service is another step in Google's steady march toward creating its own computing universe that is an alternative to desktop PC software now dominated by Microsoft. It comes just months after Google bought a small Silicon Valley company called Upstartle, creators of a Web-based word-processing program called Writely.

As Google has been moving into Microsoft's traditional desktop turf, Microsoft has been fighting back by adding online components to its software and building up its Web offerings. It is working especially hard to challenge Google's dominance in Web search services and the lucrative advertising they generate.

Google executives said Monday that the spreadsheet program would make it possible for as many as 10 people to simultaneously edit a spreadsheet document online and chat about it using Google's instant messaging program.

The new service will be able to handle several hundred formulas used to manipulate data in Excel, but not more complex functions like macros, said Jonathan Rochelle, the Google Spreadsheets product manager.

"When people want to share and collaborate, we think this product fits in well," Mr. Rochelle said.

The service was developed by Google's research arm, Google Labs. The company stressed the experimental nature of the product and said that the service would initially be offered to only a limited number of users.

The spreadsheet service is intended to appeal to small groups of business users, or to people who now use spreadsheets as de facto database programs to keep simple lists, Mr. Rochelle said. For example, soccer coaches who are juggling team lists and people planning family reunions might use it to put data in a place where it can be easily viewed and edited by others.

Mr. Rochelle said the ability for many people to collaborate was quite different from the standard method of e-mailing files back and forth. "It's a 'wow' moment with most users," he said.

For now, Google Spreadsheets lacks the ability to chart information. But Google is clearly hoping that the service and Writely will give it a head start on Microsoft in the area of so-called Web services.

Google has played down its efforts in this field. Despite widespread talk that Writely could compete with Microsoft Word, Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, said at a recent news conference that the company had no intention of using Writely to enter the word-processing marketplace. Rather, he said, Google was hoping to integrate Web-based word processing into many services that it was developing.

Last year, Microsoft responded to the growing availability of online alternatives to traditional desktop programs by announcing Windows Live and Office Live, two Microsoft-oriented Web portals.

Microsoft says that the Office Live Collaboration service permits several users to edit an Excel spreadsheet document simultaneously. But for the service to work, users must have Excel software on their personal computers. Google is hoping that many Web users will find it simpler to share the information by placing it on Google's servers.

Alan Yates, general manager for information worker business strategy at Microsoft, said that the ability to collaborate had been available to Microsoft Office users for some time. Mr. Yates said the company was watching the low end of the market closely, pointing to a number of free and online spreadsheet services now available, including OpenOffice, SimDesk and ThinkFree. But he said Excel's widespread adoption and powerful features made it superior.

"We see most consumers are really looking for more integration with their school or work life," he said. "They want more compatibility and not less."

As is almost always the case, Google executives deflected questions about how it would derive revenue from its new service.

Mr. Rochelle said that for now the company had no plans to connect the service to its AdWords advertising system, which places relevant text advertisements on Web pages.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/te...06google.html?





Bootleg Capital

35% of Scots Have Pirate DVDs One In Four Only Care About Price 31% Don't Even Know It's Crime
Derek Alexander

SCOTS are Britain's biggest customers for pirate DVDs.

More than a third of us - 35 per cent - admit to owning bootleg films, a study has found.

A quarter of Scots told researchers they would buy illegal copies of movies if they were cheaper than the originals.

And 31 per cent of those surveyed claimed not to even know that DVD piracy is against the law.

The proportion of people in Scotland who bought pirate DVDs was at least 10 per cent higher than in almost every other part of the UK.

Industry watchdogs are so worried about piracy in Scotland that they are launching a bizarre amnesty to persuade customers here to give up their dodgy DVDs.

A lorry will tour the country, giving the public the chance to hand in illegal discs to be destroyed. Those who take up the offer will be given legitimate DVDs in exchange.

The amnesty will begin tomorrow in Edinburgh's Castle Street before the lorry moves on to other parts of the country.

The scheme is the brainchild of industry body the British Video Association, who represent DVD makers. The association also commissioned the study which revealed Scotland's love affair with the black market.

Director general Lavinia Carey said: "The aim of the amnesty campaign is to make consumers in Scotland aware that DVD piracy is not a victimless crime.

"When you buy an illegal DVD, your money may well be going directly into the pockets of criminals.

"That's why we are asking people to bring their pirate DVDs along to be publicly destroyed. There's no question of anyone getting into trouble."

Watchdogs say almost 78 million fake DVDs were sold across the UK last year - an increase of two per cent on 2004.

Copyright theft is believed to cost the entertainment industry more than £718million in Britain each year.

Police, trading standards officers and the Federation Against Copyright Theft have launched a range of crackdowns aimed at putting black marketeers out of business. And courts have started handing out stiffer fines and jail sentences to bootleggers.

Carey said: "FACT are targeting all types of piracy, and especially the criminal networks involved in manufacturing and distribution. If members of the public have information that might assist us, we'll be pleased to take details in complete confidence."

Industry giants Universal Pictures and Warner Home Video UK are backing the DVD amnesty and Edinburgh City Council are also giving their support.

Councillor Sheila Gilmore said: "The sale of pirate DVDs causes huge losses every year to the industry and is thought to be linked to more serious forms of criminal activity."
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm...name_page.html





Heroin On NHS Call

VETERAN politician Margo MacDonald yesterday called for heroin addicts to be given the drug on the NHS.

The Lothians independent MSP tabled a Holyrood motion calling for a pilot scheme with medically prescribed heroin.

She said it would test the comparative effectiveness of heroin substitute methadone, which is used to treat addicts.

The call follows a trial in Germany which suggested prescribing heroin could cut drug deaths and crime.

MacDonald said: "I want such a scheme to be evaluated."
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm...name_page.html





The Worst Bill You’ve Never Heard Of
Jake

This will be a busy week in the House -- Congress goes into summer recess Friday, but not before considering the Section 115 Reform Act of 2006 (SIRA). Never heard of SIRA? That’s the way Big Copyright and their lackey’s want it, and it's bad news for you.

Simply put, SIRA fundamentally redefines copyright and fair use in the digital world. It would require all incidental copies of music to be licensed separately from the originating copy. Even copies of songs that are cached in your computer's memory or buffered over a network would need yet another license. Once again, Big Copyright is looking for a way to double-dip into your wallet, extracting payment for the same content at multiple levels.

Today, so-called "incidental" copies don't need to be licensed; they're made in the process of doing *other* things, like listening to your MP3 library or plugging into a Net radio station. If you paid for the MP3 and the radio station is up-to-date with its bookkeeping, nobody should have to pay again, right? Not if SIRA becomes law. Out of the blue, copyright holders would have created an entire new market to charge for -- and sue over. Good for them. Bad for us.

Don't let Big Copyright legalize double dipping. Fight SIRA today.

The House is going into recess for the summer at the end of this week, so you have a unique opportunity to kill this legislation. If we can stall SIRA now it would effectively kill it for the reminder of the year, giving us more time to prepare an offensive.

Please call the Members of the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property and voice your opposition to this legislation.

Republicans:

Honorable Lamar S. Smith
2184 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-4236

Honorable Henry J. Hyde
2110 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-4561

Honorable Elton Gallegly
2427 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-0523
(202) 225-5811

Honorable Bob Goodlatte
2240 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5431

Honorable William L. Jenkins
1207 Longworth Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-6356

Honorable Spencer Bachus
442 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
202 225-4921

Hon. Robert Inglis
330 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-6030

Honorable Ric Keller
419 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-2176

Hon. Darrell Issa
211 Cannon House Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20515

Honorable Chris Cannon
2436 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-7751

Honorable Mike Pence
426 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3021

Honorable J. Randy Forbes
307 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-6365

Democrats:

Honorable Howard L. Berman
2221 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-4695

Honorable John Conyers, Jr.
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126

Honorable Rick Boucher
2187 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3861

Honorable Zoe Lofgren
102 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3072

Honorable Maxine Waters
2344 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-2201

Honorable Martin T. Meehan
2229 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3411

Honorable Robert Wexler
213 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3001

Honorable Anthony Weiner
1122 Longworth House Office Building
Washington DC 20515
(202) 225-6616

Honorable Adam Schiff
326 Cannon House Office Building
Washington D.C. 20515
(202) 225-4176

Honorable Linda T. Sanchez
1007 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-6676

http://ipaction.org/blog/2006/06/wor...-heard-of.html





EMI Music becomes the first major music company to make its catalog available to Qtrax: the world's first ad-supported, legitimate P2P service
Press Release

NEW YORK – JUNE 5, 2006 -- EMI Music, the world’s largest independent music company, and e-commerce software developer LTDnetwork Inc. today announced that EMI is the first major music company to make its catalog of recordings available to what will be the world’s first advertising-supported, legal peer-to-peer music distribution service. The service, called Qtrax, was developed by LTDnetwork, and at launch, will provide fans with free, advertising-funded access to high-quality, high-fidelity digital music files, as well as the option to subscribe to a premium version of the service or to purchase music tracks and albums on an a la carte basis.

Qtrax will offer two tiers of service: the first is a free, advertising-supported tier designed to work with and filter copyrighted content from existing peer-to-peer networks. The second tier is a premium subscription service which will require a monthly fee. The two-tiered business model is intended to attract a broad base of consumers to try out the service, and then graduate those consumers to purchase music permanently or subscribe.

In the ad-supported, free tier, users will be able to search the network for specific tracks, and those tracks registered with Qtrax will be made available for download in Qtrax’s proprietary “.mpq” file format. Users will then be able to play the downloaded .mpq file in full-fidelity sound quality for a pre-defined number of times. Each time a consumer plays a track, the Qtrax player will also offer fans click-to-buy purchase options, as well as the opportunity to upgrade to a premium subscription service for a flat monthly fee.

The premium subscription service tier uses Microsoft’s Janus DRM technology, which allows consumers to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to music in the Qtrax network. Subscribers will also have the ability to transfer content to Windows Media enabled portable devices for as long as the subscription stays active.

The service will also include consumer-friendly community-building and music discovery tools which enable fans to easily access to a vast selection of music and other content, all while generating revenues for artists and content owners.

“Working with Qtrax is just one way EMI is actively supporting emerging business models, technologies and platforms to deliver music to fans,” said David Munns, Chairman and CEO of EMI Music North America. “Of course, we think that any ad-supported model should be offered in a way that maintains, or even enhances the value of music, and we believe Qtrax does that by offering a good consumer experience and significant up-selling opportunities. Our collaboration with Qtrax will give us great consumer insight and help us gauge the boundaries between sampling and purchasing music. Ultimately, the feedback we get from Qtrax will help EMI be more responsive to consumer demand. The Qtrax service will also ensure that our artists are compensated for their works and that the value of their music and integrity of our content is protected.”

In addition, Qtrax will offer incentive programs that will allow fans to accrue points redeemable for additional plays for tracks acquired through the free service, or for discounts off a la carte purchases or subscription fees.

“Qtrax is an innovative approach to creating a legitimate P2P offering, so we are pleased that EMI has agreed to be the first of the major music companies to participate. In addition to offering a great consumer experience which we believe will get more consumers excited about digital music, Qtrax will ensure that artists are getting paid when their songs are accesses in a P2P environment. In addition, EMI and other music companies will share in Internet advertising revenues, which according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers reached a new record of $3.9 billion for the first quarter of 2006 in the US - a 38 percent increase over Q1 2005,” said Allan Klepfisz, President & CEO of Brilliant Technologies Corporation, parent company of LTDnetwork.

The Qtrax service is expected to enter a test phase later this year and will initially pilot the service in the United States. In preparation for the launch, EMI will immediately begin delivering and registering its content with Qtrax’s filtering system, powered by Audible Magic.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

About LTDnetwork Inc.

Based in New York, NY and founded in October 2000, LTDnetwork is a division of Brilliant Technologies Corporation (OTCBB: BLLNE). LTDnetwork has spent the last five years creating unique proprietary software at its Australian subsidiary in Melbourne. LTDnetwork specializes in the development of innovative technologies, software, and services for online retail, advertising, media and marketing companies. LTDnetwork is dedicated to providing online businesses and third party solution providers with innovative technologies, software, and services which target the consumer with the right message at the right time in what have now become the hottest areas for software applications: music downloading, automatic price comparison and highly targeted advertising.

About EMI Music

EMI is the world's largest independent music company, operating directly in 50 countries. Its EMI Music division represents more than 1,000 artists spanning all musical tastes and genres. Its record labels include Angel, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Capitol, Capitol Nashville, EMI Classics, EMI CMG, EMI Records, EMI Televisa Music, Manhattan, Mute, Parlophone and Virgin. For further information on EMI, please visit: www.emimusic.com.
http://www.emigroup.com/Press/2006/press25.htm





Hacker Said to Resell Internet Phone Service
Ken Belson and Tom Zeller Jr.

Federal authorities arrested a Miami resident today in what they said was a hacking scheme involving the resale of Internet telephone service.

The suspect, working with at least one confederate, was said to have illegally tapped into the lines of legitimate Internet phone companies, saddling them with the expense of extra traffic, while he collected more than $1 million in connection fees.

The case, one of the first involving Internet phone hacking, illustrated how Internet-based communications may be criminally exploited, and raises fresh questions about the security of phone traffic over largely unregulated networks.

Prosecutors said that starting in November 2004, Edwin Andres Pena, 23, a Venezuelan who has permanent residency in the United States and lives in Miami, used two companies he started to offer wholesale phone connections at discounted rates to small Internet phone companies.

Instead of buying access to other networks to connect his clients' calls, Mr. Pena is said to have worked with other hackers to create "what amounted to 'free' routes by surreptitiously hacking into the computer networks" of unwitting Internet phone providers, and then routing his customers' calls over those providers' systems, the federal complaint says.

To evade detection, Mr. Pena is said to have hacked into computers run by an unsuspecting investment company in Rye Brook, N.Y., commandeered its unprotected servers, and re-routed his phone traffic through them. These steps made it appear as if that company was sending calls to more than 15 Internet phone companies.

In one three-week period, for instance, prosecutors say that one of the victimized Internet phone providers, based in Newark, received about 500,000 calls that were made to look as if they came from the company in Rye Brook. The Newark company was left having to pay $300,000 in connection fees for routing the phone traffic to other carriers, without receiving any revenue for the calls, prosecutors said.

The companies in Newark and Rye Brook and others said to have been victimized were not identified by name in the complaint, which was filed with the United States District Court in Newark.

Mr. Pena, the government said, used more than $1 million he received from his customers to go on a spending spree, buying real estate in south Florida, a 40-foot Sea Ray Mercruiser motor boat, and luxury cars including a BMW and a Cadillac Escalade.

To date, most of the concern about the safety of Internet-based communications has focused on the ability of criminals to eavesdrop on calls, to fake caller ID's and to steal long-distance phone service.

In this case, Mr. Pena is said to have mimicked legitimate telecommunications brokers, who typically help connect long distance calls by buying minutes from large carriers and reselling them for a profit to smaller phone companies.

But instead of buying those minutes, he manipulated voice-over-Internet services that break conversations into data packets and route them over the Internet. Each packet carries a prefix that identifies the carrier handling the call, and its origin and destination.

Mr. Pena appended stolen prefixes to his customers' calls, allowing them to piggyback on other phone company networks.

At its core, industry experts say the scheme was not technologically complex, particularly in a budding industry still trying close its many security loopholes.

"The technical side of this a 14-year-old can do," said Tom Kershaw, the vice president for voice-over-Internet services at Verisign, an Internet security company. "There are many vulnerabilities."

Mr. Kershaw said that, for instance, a vast majority of voice packets sent by Internet phone companies are still unencrypted, making it relatively easy for outsiders to re-route them by installing new prefixes. He added that the prefixes used by Internet phones companies to identify their voice calls are also relatively easy to discover.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/te...nd-voice.html?





Disposable Cameras Defy Film's March to Obscurity

Sayaka Masuda's face was a picture of frustration when she realized she would have to buy a disposable camera in Kyoto, Japan's photogenic ancient capital.

``After I got on the bullet train from Tokyo, I realized that I'd forgotten my digital camera,'' said the biology student. ``I was really annoyed at myself.''

Thanks in no small part to the forgetfulness of consumers, disposable cameras still earn a place on kiosk and convenience store shelves 20 years after the first model was sold in this click-happy country.

Across the Pacific, a heartier appetite for disposables -- little more than a film coiled behind a lens and a flash -- has provided some relief for a film market trampled by galloping demand for cheaper and sharper digital cameras.

In the United States, the world's largest photo market, about 202 million disposable cameras were sold last year, according to the U.S.-based Photo Marketing Association.

That is down from the record 218 million gobbled up in 2004 but defies the more than 20 percent annual shrinking of the color film market as consumers go digital.

Thanks to digital cameras, gone are the days of faces out of focus and wasted shots of eyes caught mid-blink. If you don't like a photo, just erase it from the screen and snap another one.

So deep is the rot in global film sales that the world's third-largest maker of camera film, Japan's Konica Minolta, decided this year to pull the plug on making color film, while AgfaPhoto of Germany went bankrupt, sinking the once-famous Agfa brand.

But digital cameras are susceptible to theft, loss and damage and that has been another key to the longevity of disposables -- serving as a stand-in at the beach, say, or amid the cacophony of celebration and inebriation at parties and rock concerts.

Nor are disposables restricted to mere domestic duties: Oscar-winning director Ang Lee wielded one on Academy Awards night this year, and they are a staple of care packages sent to U.S. troops in Iraq.

``There's no real device that's simple, cheap and effective enough to supplant it yet,'' said Christopher Chute, senior analyst at U.S.-based IDC, a technology research firm.

``It's something people are very familiar with. It's an ingrained behavior.''

No Longer Smitten

One of the few countries to see a significant denting of sales is Japan, the world's second-largest photo market, where once-smitten consumers helped to ignite a global infatuation with disposables.

Domestic shipments slipped to 48 million in 2005, according to Japanese imaging group Photo Market, nearly half the number shipped a decade earlier when Sayaka Masuda took her first disposable on an elementary school trip to Tokyo Disneyland.

Single-use cameras are losing ground in a country famously quick to bin old technology in favor of the new, and where the incidence of theft is comparatively low.

The ubiquitous camera phone, just an arm's length away in bags and trouser pockets, is the latest predator on disposable's diminishing turf in Japan, where around 90 percent of mobile phones can take photos.

But camera phones won't really encroach on the territory of single-use cameras until the printable image is sharper, said Ken Sugiyama, a spokesman for Fuji Photo Film, which introduced the first disposables to the world in 1986.

``The influence of the camera phone is very limited toward the single-use camera,'' he said, noting that camera phones have no flash.

``Digital cameras -- that's the killer.''

Still A Niche

Given disposables' unique role as instrument of last resort, and their popularity among people shy of fiddly electronics, a shrunken niche should be maintained in Japan.

Certainly Eastman Kodak and Fuji, the world's top two makers of photo film, aren't shying away from inventing new flavors of disposables amid long-running shake-ups of their businesses due to the death rattle of film.

The latest single-use camera from Fuji features speedier film for taking clearer photos at night, adding to a range that has included models for taking underwater, panoramic and black-and-white photos.

``The move to digital cameras and the market growth of camera phones threaten sales, but there will continue to be a particular need for disposable cameras,'' said Masahiro Nakanomyo, a market analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities.

The boom in U.S. demand for digital cameras and lately camera phones may have taken a cue from Japan, but the gouging of disposables' sales may not be mimicked in the United States any time soon.

U.S. consumers tend to embrace products based on price and are more likely to use disposables, which sell for as little as $5 for 27 shots on both sides of the Pacific, as their only camera, said Chute at IDC.

``There's still a base of consumers who either can't afford digital, only own film cameras, or respond to this kind of spontaneous nature of needing a camera,'' he said.

``You open the box and 'bang' -- you can start taking pictures. And that's probably really saved the photography industry ever since they came out in the mid- to late-80s.''
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...sposables.html





Music Review | Joan Jett and the Blackhearts



Embracing a Proud Past, Joan Jett Keeps It Simple
Sia Michel

In the 1980's, when she ruled Top 40 radio, Joan Jett was the perfect embodiment of rock's primal qualities. She was young, cocky, sexy, rebellious and knew how to rock a pair of leather pants. She had a signature look (shag haircut and heavy eyeliner), a jailbait past (she joined the Runaways at age 15) and a punk-rock pedigree (she was friends with Sid Vicious and produced the Germs). It's hard to think of a cooler 80's rocker — maybe Axl Rose? But unlike Mr. Rose, with his odd behavior and even odder new face, Ms. Jett has aged with grace. At 47, she seems eerily youthful and unjaded.

Let's see Madonna pull this off: Ms. Jett arrived in a skimpy bikini top and black leather pants worn so low you could see her hipbones. Her tattooed arms were toned and sinewy; her face was girlish, as if she had just stepped out of the "Bad Reputation" video. Her fitness regime probably involves airborne kicks and rooster strutting. "Joan, you are obscenely sexy, and I want to marry you!" a woman in the audience shouted as Ms. Jett swaggered to the Runaways' classic "Cherry Bomb." Later a female fan rushed the stage and tried to kiss her.

Ms. Jett seemed revolutionary in the 80's because she acted as if being a (rare) female guitar virtuoso was no big deal. She proclaimed "I Love Rock N' Roll" with the casual sense of entitlement of a male legend. Over the years Ms. Jett grew more political, and she is now hailed as a groundbreaking feminist hero. The sold-out show at the Brooklyn club Southpaw on Tuesday was packed with adoring women in their 30's and young, hand-holding lesbian couples. When Ms. Jett sang "Do you want to touch me there?," she was rewarded with deafening screams of "Yeah!"

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts are touring to support the new album "Sinner," Ms. Jett's first studio effort since the 90's. She is celebrating the 25th anniversary of her label, Blackheart Records, by reissuing her early work. And Ms. Jett has joined this summer's Vans Warped Tour, where she is likely to upstage artists almost three decades younger.

The simplistic new punk song "Change the World" is tailor-made for that audience, with its plainspoken call to arms. The lyrics to "Androgynous" sounded especially clunky live ("She's happy with the way she looks/she's happy with her gender") but still generated cheers.

At times it sounded as if Ms. Jett had been kidnapped by a bland Midwestern bar band. But as she and her all-male backup obliged the crowd with nearly all of her hits (including her excellent "Crimson and Clover" cover), it didn't really matter. Even her voice is remarkably young, untainted by bitterness or ennui.

Ms. Jett ended the show with Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People," thrusting her pelvis against her low-slung guitar. There is nothing everyday about her: she is the hard-rock Dorian Gray.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/ar...ic/08jett.html





Democrats Question Handling of Data Breach
David Stout

Democrats on Wednesday accused the Bush administration of incompetence amid revelations that the recent loss of computer data from the Department of Veterans Affairs involved far more active-duty military people than was originally thought.

"Such incompetence is as bad or worse than anything I've seen in six administrations," Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said. "At some point, the administration has got to stop saying we'll hire or appoint political cronies, but we'll actually appoint somebody who knows how to make the government work."

Mr. Leahy appeared at a news conference with Senators Patty Murray of Washington and Jack Reed of Rhode Island in the aftermath of the latest revelation in the data-breach episode, in which information on as many as 1.1 million military people on active duty, 430,000 members of the National Guard and 645,000 members of the Reserves may have been compromised.

The Department of Veterans Affairs originally said the lost data involved 26.5 million veterans discharged from about 1975 onward. Later it said that a relatively small number of active-duty people might be included in the 26.5 million. And finally, the agency disclosed on Tuesday that the actual number of active-duty people, Guardsmen and reservists involved may be well over two million.

"It is, I think, the pattern of this administration," said Mr. Reed, a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. "Spin the story out in little pieces here and there rather than taking decisive, appropriate and responsible action."

Asked whether he was accusing department officials of acting in bad faith, or simply being mistaken about the extent of the data loss, Mr. Reed said: "Whether it's incompetence or other factors, the result's the same. It's absolutely unacceptable."

Ms. Murray, a member of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, said the troubles within the agency threatened to undermine faith in it.

"Can you imagine being a young woman with a couple of children, your spouse is overseas in Iraq, and now you find out that your address has been stolen and your personal safety is at risk?" she said.

A Veterans Department spokesman, Matt Burns, said Wednesday that the agency would continue to release information on the data breach "as additional details are learned."

Mr. Burns said that Jim Nicholson, the secretary of veterans affairs. was conducting "an up-and-down review" to ensure that such a breach did not happen again.

A laptop computer and external hard drive containing the data were stolen on May 3 in a burglary at the suburban Maryland home of a department data analyst. Some department officials learned of the theft almost immediately, but Mr. Nicholson was not notified until May 16.

Because of the time lag, the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not learn of the incident until about two weeks after the burglary, which was under investigation by the police in Montgomery County.

The data includes names, birth dates and Social Security numbers. Although there has been no indication that the information has been misused, there have been widespread concerns that it could be used for credit-card fraud and identity theft.

Loren B. Thompson, a military affairs analyst, said there were broader implications. The identities of people who leave the military and go into intelligence or private security work could be compromised by someone correlating the Veterans Affairs data with information in other data banks, Mr. Thompson said.

Such data comparisons could yield "unexpectedly interesting insights," said Mr. Thompson, the chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a conservative public policy research organization based in Arlington, Va.

Mr. Nicholson testified at a recent Senate hearing that for three years the data analyst whose house was burglarized had taken home sensitive material without authorization.

On Thursday, Mr. Nicholson will be back on Capitol Hill, testifying before the House Committee on Government Reform. Mr. Nicholson will probably be asked if he and his subordinates are sure they know the full dimensions of the data breach. The announcement on Tuesday that the breach was more serious than department officials had realized followed a comparison of electronic files by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Defense Department.

A government Web site set up to help those who may be affected lists a toll-free number, and by Tuesday night 146,685 people had phoned in, said Mr. Burns, the department spokesman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/wa...8identity.html





Arts and Crafts for the Digital Age
Michel Marriott

At first blush, the PicoCricket Kit resembles a plastic box of arts and crafts supplies, crammed with colored felt, pipe cleaners, cotton and Styrofoam balls.

But this is a craft kit for the digital age. It includes electronic sensors, motors, sound boxes, connecting cables and a palm-size, battery-powered, programmable computer.

By combining the traditional materials with high-tech ones, children as young as 9 can invent interactive jewelry, fanciful creatures that dance, musical sculptures and more, said Mitchel Resnick, an assistant professor of learning research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

Mr. Resnick, whose work with children and learning at the Media Lab helped the Lego Group create its highly successful Mindstorms robotic construction kits in 1998, said he wanted to produce something in which the emphasis was not on the building of mechanical objects.

Instead, he said he was more interested in encouraging the creation of something artistic, and delivering a technology and programming language that would let young people take more control of how their creations would behave.

"The hope is to get people started with simple projects and let their imaginations run wild," Mr. Resnick said. "I do think young people are very quick to dive in and experiment." The PicoCricket Kits, he said, "are designed to encourage that sort of experimentation."

One of the PicoCricket guides, for instance, instructs users on how to turn a birthday cake made mostly of felt, cardboard and drinking straws into an ingeniously interactive one, a cake that can be programmed to shut off the lights in its electrical candles when someone blows on them.

With a few adjustments in the cake's programming, its artificial candles will even flicker before they go out. With more programming tweaks, the cake can play birthday tunes or be joined with another homemade contraption that will toss confetti into the air.

The $250 kit is the first effort of the Playful Invention Company, or PICO, a Montreal-based company of which Mr. Resnick is a co-founder; Lego is a financial backer. (The kit will be available next month from www.picocricket.com, where orders are now being accepted.)

Besides all the parts, the kit includes building guides printed on double-sided placemats, but little more in terms of instructions.

Its central tool is PicoBlocks software, a point-and-click, drop-and-drag programming language. It appears like colored puzzle pieces that can be arranged and combined on a computer screen (PC and Mac) with a mouse. Stringing the labeled pieces together into interlocking sequences can create simple or complex commands.

A U.S.B. "beamer," which is plugged into the computer, transmits the commands to the PicoCricket computer through a series of flashing lights. Motors and sensors are plugged into the PicoCricket, which then performs according to the programming stored in its solid-state memory.

The PicoCricket's core technology, Mr. Resnick said, dates from the 1980's, when M.I.T. and Lego were developing the programmable Lego brick, which led to Mindstorms.

"Putting kids in control is what's so important to us," Mr. Resnick said, noting that girls as well as boys are drawn to the kit's creative engineering, according to M.I.T.'s research and workshops globally.

Other developers, too, are producing more open-ended building kits aimed at letting young people create and program their own computerized designs.

The Vex Robotics Design System, developed last year by Innovation First and RadioShack, was created to spur young people to have fun while being inventive. Along the way, many are given hands-on lessons in how mathematics, physics and computer programming can be useful and practical, said Joel Carter, vice president for marketing at Innovation First, a robotics company in Greenville, Tex.

Vex robot kits include instructions, but they encourage young people — generally high school age and older — to tackle problems. "Talk to the average high school students, they are a lot smarter," Mr. Carter said. "They like open-ended problems, and a lot like to take the tools that are available to solve open-ended problems."

The Vex starter kit, which costs $300, includes more than 500 parts, enough to build remote-controlled robots as well as programmable ones, Mr. Carter noted. Programming, he said, is written in easyC, a graphical variant on the C language used by professional programmers.

"It is a cool tool that works with Vex," he said of easyC, which works on Windows-based personal computers. "It makes Vex accessible and demystifies programming. Relatively young kids can program robots to get them to do what they want them to."

The programming is transferred to the robot's microprocessor by way of a serial cable plugged into the computer.

Vex systems, which include more than 20 accessories (including the easyC programming kit, sold separately for $99), have recently been acquired by Innovation First (www.vexlabs.com). This means, Mr. Carter said, that the robotics kits will not be sold exclusively in RadioShack stores, but also through other channels.

He also noted that Carnegie Mellon University had developed a curriculum that uses Vex robotics to teach math and sciences.

David Greenbaum, owner of Robot Village, a robotics store and workshop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, said the attraction of young people to robotics was only natural.

"These are such exciting times for kids when they can see robots all around them doing things like exploring the oceans and outer space, and helping the sick and elderly in hospitals," he said. "They want to be a part of that. Learning robotics technology skills gives them a big advantage in unlocking their future possibilities."

Homemade robots have become such a hot topic lately that Mark Frauenfelder, editor in chief of Make magazine, said much of the magazine's latest issue was devoted to guiding readers in building their own.

"One thing that really made a big difference is the kits," Mr. Frauenfelder said about the rising popularity in designing, building and programming personal creations. "They have whetted people's appetites. They see them online, other people home-brewing these really cool robots."

Caleb Chung and Bob Christopher, the co-founders of Ugobe, a robotic technology company in Emeryville, Calif., said they were developing an infant robotic dinosaur, Pleo, that they say will behave so believably that it will invite a relationship as much as play. (Mr. Chung was co-inventor of the Furby, the interactive plush toy.)

The Pleo (www.ugobe.com/pleo) is to be ready by the holiday season; its price has not been disclosed. Mr. Christopher said the robotic pet's technology, running on the company's Life Form operating system, would be "all about enabling the creative gene in everybody."

In the meantime, the diversity of robotic kits and the creative possibilities continue to grow, encompassing everything from mechanical insects and beasts to high-tech toy houses and spinning sculpture.

Robotics does not have to be limited anymore, said Mr. Resnick of M.I.T., "to what comes in the box."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/te...08cricket.html





QNA

Rooting Out Rootkits
J.D. Biersdorfer

Q. What exactly are rootkits, and how are they different from other types of spyware?

A. A rootkit is a collection of software programs and tools that someone can hide deep within a computer system and then use to gain access to the computer. The term comes from the Unix system, where the all-powerful administrator account that controls the computer is commonly called the "root" user account.

Rootkits are hard to detect because they can intercept the operating system's internal functions and exchange that data with false information — like purposely preventing the rootkit's own files from being listed by Windows Explorer or the Windows XP Task Manager.

Most regular spyware programs are meant to run in a stealthy manner, but cannot usually cloak themselves as thoroughly as a rootkit can. Because they can fool the operating system, rootkits can also be used to conceal spyware and other malicious programs planted on the computer.

Internet intruders often use rootkits to gain access to computers on a network. In 2005, however, it was discovered that Sony BMG Music Entertainment was using a rootkit to install and hide copy-protection software on some of its compact discs. (Several lawsuits were filed against the company after an outcry over privacy and security concerns, and Sony BMG recalled the CD's and issued software patches for the computers affected by the rootkit.)

While rootkits can be difficult to detect and remove, free software tools for Windows are available to expose them, including RootkitRevealer (http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilitie...tRevealer.html). There's also a test version of the F-Secure Blacklight rootkit detection program at www.f-secure.com/blacklight; the trial version will expire on Sept. 1. Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool can detect some rootkits as well; the company releases an updated version on the second Tuesday of every month at http://www.microsoft.com/security/ma...e/default.mspx. There is more information on rootkits at www.antirootkit.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/business/08askk.html





DRM Causing Difficulties For Libraries
Amber Maitland

The British Library's Chief Executive, Lynne Brindley, is warning that DRM systems are creating unintended consequences that affect how digital material can be stored and disseminated by libraries, which have traditionally been protected by special exceptions under IP law.

Speaking at the launch of the All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG) into Digital Rights Management, the British Library's Chief Executive, Lynne Brindley urged MPs to balance the rights of content creators with the need to maintain access in the public good.

"Digital material generally comes with a contract, and these contracts are nearly always more restrictive than existing copyright law and frequently prevent copying, archiving, and access by the visually impaired", said Brindley.

She gave the example that in a small sample of 30 licences offered to the library, only two publishers were as generous in terms of access as statutory fair dealing. Only two allowed archiving of the material, and not one permitted sopying of the whole work by the visually impaired.

If action isn't taken to clarify policy on DRM, it could have far reaching effects for institutions like the British Library who have traditionally held archival copies of material. For example, as one digital archiving method becomes extinct, DRM could prevent the library from transferring material to another, newer media for preservation.

The national library is recommending that IP law should clarify that fair dealing applies to digital as well as print items.
http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news.php?newsId=3566





Could Net2Phone Sue More Than Skype?
Dave Greenfield

Net2Phone's lawsuit against Skype may ruffle more than just the feathers of the leading VoIP service provider. It could reshape much of the industry.

The suit charges that when Skype developed a peer-to-peer architecture it violated Net2Phone's patent, number 6,108,704. The patent describes an architecture where nodes, called processing units, exchange IP addresses to establish peer-to-peer communications.

In some respect this architecture sounds strikingly similar to Skype's overlay peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. Addresses of online systems are stored in a database on a connection server. A sender queries the connection server to determine whether or not the recipient is online. If so the sender retrieves the IP address from the connection server and establishes a P2P connection with the recipient.

In other respects, though, the Net2Phone design widely diverges from today's architecture. The patent describes a system whereby P2P sessions are established through e-mail. In that instance, senders and receivers swap emails containing their IP addresses with the purposes of establishing a P2P session.

Evaluating any patent infringement case hinges on understanding the specific patent claim that the suit contends was infringed upon, says J. Matthew Buchanan, patent attorney at Dunlap, Codding, and Rogers. In this case, evaluating those claims at this stage is difficult because Net2Phone, a division of IDT, is first asking for full disclosure from Skype before naming specific claim violations.

Until the specific claims are disclosed its difficult to know thye likelyhood of Net2Phone's success against Skype. What may be easier to ascertain, however, is whether Net2Phone could pursue even bigger fish -- the rest of the VoIP industry. Most VoIP protocols use P2P connections of some kind. SIP certainly does. SIP also uses a location server, like a connection server, as defined in patent 6,108,704.

If so could Net2Phone sue any vendor in the SIP community? We'll bring in a panel of experts to try and answer that question later this week.
http://www.networkingpipeline.com/bl...KHSCJUME KJVN





P2P Media Services Raise ISP Hackles

Internet providers fear that broadcasters are delivering content without paying for bandwidth
Dave Friedlos

Internet experts have expressed concerns about the growing use of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to download media services over the web.

Services such as Sky’s broadband video download offering work on the basis that content is stored on customers’ PCs and uploaded to new users using P2P software, rather than delivering it directly from central servers.

Similar services in the US have resulted in ISPs threatening to charge content providers for use of bandwidth.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, warned against the creation of such a ‘two-tier’ internet in a speech at the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh last week.

Malcolm Hutty, head of public policy at the London Internet Exchange, says bandwidth ownership could become as controversial in the UK as in the US.

‘ISPs are concerned that content providers are getting free bandwidth access without paying for it,’ he said.

‘The content providers’ view is that customers pay for the bandwidth and can use it to move content if they like.’

Ovum analyst Jonathan Arber says there are also concerns that users could face additional costs if they have download and upload limits.

‘There has been some criticism because many users do not realise Sky is uploading from their PC for the benefit of other users,’ he said. ‘Not everyone reads the fine print.

Steve Nuttall, Sky’s director of business development, says the company makes users aware of how P2P works during the installation process. He says the Kontiki technology, delivered by Ioko, is also used by other content providers, including the BBC.

‘Sky by Broadband is designed to give users an improved experience and deliver content faster,’ he said. ‘It does not affect general usage as the Kontiki platform operates on a low priority.’
http://www.vnunet.com/actions/trackback/2157294





Got me in a stranglehold baby

Sandvine Launches New Broadband Platform
Press Release

Sandvine connected with investors today as it announced the launch of its PTS 14000 platform that enables broadband providers to deliver per-subscriber IP-based multimedia applications.

The intelligent broadband network solutions group said PTS 14000 is “the industry's most powerful platform enabling per-subscriber DPI-based policy solutions to solve both business and technology challenges in the world's largest broadband networks that are migrating to 10-Gig connectivity.”

It said the platform was a response to continued broadband subscriber growth combined with mass market adoption of applications like P2P file-sharing, VoIP and online gaming.

“The increase in bandwidth consumption due to media-rich applications...places a high premium on a service provider's ability to identify and manage traffic,” said Vince Vittore, Senior Analyst, Broadband Access Technologies, Yankee Group.

“As broadband is increasingly vital to the consumer's daily life, higher capacity and carrier-grade equipment is a requirement for success.”
http://www.sharecast.com/cgi-bin/sha...tory_id=715877





Avalanche P2P May Be In Vista
David A. Utter

Microsoft has been quietly developing its BitTorrent alternative in the UK, and the announcement that Windows Vista-equipped laptops with built-in WiFi will be able to do peer to peer connections could indicate its pending arrival in the marketplace.

A ZDNet report about a technology called "People Near Me" in Vista will enable P2P connections between laptops in close proximity.

Microsoft has already built one program, Windows MeetingSpace, that utilizes the P2P technology to permit the sharing of files between those machines. Last August, beta testers of Vista noticed that a P2P application was in place and running by default.

At that time, Microsoft said the application had been turned on for testing purposes and would be turned off by default in the final version of Vista. The article noted that the MeetingSpace application had been known as Windows Collaboration.

Last July, a few details on Avalanche became known to the public. In that model, Avalanche overcomes BitTorrent's problem of finding the rarest bit of a file by using network coding instead.

Network coding receives more detail in Microsoft's research report on Avalanche:

Instead of distributing the blocks of the file, peers produce linear combinations of the blocks they already hold. Such combinations are distributed together with a tag that describes the parameters in the combination. Any peer can generate new unique combinations from the combinations it already has. When a peer has enough independent combinations, it can decode and build the original file.

Such encoding ensures that any piece uploaded by a given peer can be of use to any other peer. Peers do not need to find specific pieces in the system to complete, any subset encoded piece will suffice.
In that research note, Microsoft specifically noted how Avalanche includes "strong security to ensure content providers are uniquely identifiable, and to prevent unauthorized parties from offering content for download. The project also ensures content downloaded to each client machine is exactly the same as the content shared by the content provider."

While the initial debut of MeetingSpace will be limited to those laptops with close proximity to other MeetingSpace users, plans by Microsoft to forge content deals with Hollywood studios could use this as a stepping stone toward those negotiations. Especially if Avalanche is part of the package.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/to...BeInVista.html





Microsoft Pulls PC-to-PC Sync From Vista
Gregg Keizer

Microsoft confirmed that it will yank yet another feature from Windows Vista, this time PC-to-PC Sync, a P2P-based technology for keeping files up-to-date on multiple machines.

"While PC-to-PC Sync is a great feature that improves productivity and collaboration we don't have it at the quality level our customers demand," a company spokesperson said in an e-mail. "As a result the decision was made to remove it from Windows Vista."

Part of a broader synchronisation update in Vista - the operating system will have a prominent Sync Center for all such chores, including synchronising PCs with servers and mobile - PC-to-PC Sync was based on peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, and would have let Vista users sync the contents of specialised folders, including the by-default Documents, Pictures, and Music, between multiple PCs on wired or wireless networks.

Analysts characterised the feature as an extension of the old Offline Files technology and the Windows XP SyncToy, with part of the P2P FolderShare utility - a 2005 acquisition by Microsoft - thrown in for good measure.

The consumer-oriented PC-to-PC Sync, however, was limited in that it would synchronise files and folders only between machines running Vista, and then apparently only between computers which had the same user account name and password (in other words, between PCs owned and used by the same person).

The departure of PC-to-PC Sync comes just days after Microsoft said it was pulling other features from Office 2007 and letting computer makers install the OS and the company's new XPS electronic document format, all under pressure from Adobe.

As it has in the past, Microsoft cited quality concerns as the reason for the feature's exit.

"From the beginning, we have made it clear that the top priority for Windows Vista is quality," the spokesperson said. "This is part of the normal beta process as we constantly evaluate, improve and fine tune the features of Windows Vista."

The spokesperson also said that PC-to-PC Sync would be the last feature to be dropped from Vista, and that it hoped to provide it in some fashion down the road.

"Work on it continues and is something we plan to deliver to our customers in the future," the spokesperson concluded.
http://www.crn.com.au/story.aspx?CIID=38709&s=p2p





Specter's Uneasy Relationship With White House Is Revealed in a Letter to Cheney
Carl Hulse and Jim Rutenberg

A senior Republican lawmaker went public on Wednesday about his often tense and complicated relationship with the Bush White House in a remarkable display of the strains within the party.

The lawmaker, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, accused Vice President Dick Cheney of meddling behind his back in the committee's business, bringing into the open a conflict that has simmered for months.

In a letter to Mr. Cheney that the senator released to the news media, Mr. Specter said the vice president had cut him out of discussions with all the other Republicans on his own committee about oversight of the administration's eavesdropping programs, a subject on which Mr. Specter has often been at odds with the White House.

The trigger for Mr. Specter's anger was a deal made by Mr. Cheney with the other Republicans on the committee to block testimony from phone companies that reportedly cooperated in providing call records to the National Security Agency.

Mr. Specter, who had been considering issuing subpoenas to compel telephone company executives to testify, learned of Mr. Cheney's actions only when he went into a closed meeting of the committee's Republicans on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after encountering the vice president at a weekly luncheon of all Senate Republicans.

Mr. Specter's tone in the letter was restrained, but he made no effort to hide his displeasure at having been outmaneuvered and, in his view, undermined, by Mr. Cheney.

"I was surprised, to say the least, that you sought to influence, really determine, the action of the committee without calling me first, or at least calling me at some point," Mr. Specter wrote. "This was especially perplexing since we both attended the Republican senators caucus lunch yesterday and I walked directly in front of you on at least two occasions en route from the buffet to my table."

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Lea Anne McBride, said Wednesday night that the vice president "has not had an opportunity to study" the letter.

"We're going to continue to work with members, listening to their legislative ideas," Ms. McBride said, although she added that it was "not necessary to have legislation to carry out the terrorist surveillance program."

She had no comment on the assertion that Mr. Cheney had worked behind the chairman's back.

Mr. Specter's evident frustration underscored the growing unease on Capitol Hill, among some Republicans as well as many Democrats, over the administration's efforts to exert executive power. At the same time, the White House has been trying to repair its relations with Congress.

One Republican with close ties to the administration, who was granted anonymity to discuss the thinking at the White House, said Mr. Specter had been increasingly nettlesome to the administration with his persistent criticism, especially of the surveillance programs.

Noting that the White House was ultimately pleased with Mr. Specter's help in securing the confirmations of Mr. Bush's Supreme Court nominees, this Republican said, "All of that good will he's built up has really been dissipated because he keeps smacking them around."

A senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the president's chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, had reached out to Mr. Specter on Friday to press the administration's case for how to handle the phone companies.

The official described the conversation as "cordial but not productive."

"That's when we started reaching out to other members," the official said. "It was not out of disrespect."

The official went on, "The chairman's position is well known, and he knows our position, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work with other members who may be more open to our position."

Mr. Specter has been the leading Republican voice raising questions about the legal underpinnings of the surveillance programs.

In his letter, Mr. Specter told Mr. Cheney that events were unfolding in a "context where the administration is continuing warrantless wiretaps in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and is preventing the Senate Judiciary Committee from carrying out its constitutional responsibility for Congressional oversight."

Mr. Cheney, by contrast, has led the White House's effort to defend the surveillance programs on legal and national security grounds.

The vice president has also been the primary force behind the administration's efforts to expand executive power in a wide variety of areas, a stance that has at times put him in direct conflict with Mr. Specter.

When Mr. Specter faced a difficult primary challenge in 2004, Mr. Bush sided with Mr. Specter, giving him vital political support.

In an interview, Mr. Specter described his relationship with Mr. Cheney as generally friendly and cordial. But he was clearly put out by the vice president's handling of the issue and his failure to pull Mr. Specter aside as he made several trips to the buffet for tuna salad and hard-boiled egg, salad dressing and fruit.

"He can talk to anybody he wants to," Mr. Specter said. "I think as a matter of basic protocol he ought not to exclude the chairman."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/wa...08specter.html





'Break-Up' tops 'X-Men' at Box Office
David Germain

Supported by real-life romantic splits and hookups, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn's "The Break-Up" pulled an upset over the mutant world of the "X-Men."

"The Break-Up" debuted more strongly than expected with $38.1 million to take over as the No. 1 weekend movie from "X-Men: The Last Stand," which slipped to second place with $34.35 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Aniston's split from Brad Pitt last year and her reported romance that began with Vaughn while filming "The Break-Up" helped keep the movie in the public eye.

"They're always in the press," said Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for Universal, which released "The Break-Up." "Every time you turn around, somebody's talking about Jennifer, or Jennifer and Brad, or Jennifer and Vince. It's not why we made the movie, though."

"The Break-Up" pulled in about $10 million more than Rocco had expected.

After putting in a record four-day debut of $122.9 million over Memorial Day weekend, 20th Century Fox's third "X-Men" movie tumbled. The movie's domestic gross dropped a steep 67 percent from its Friday-Sunday haul the first weekend.

Still, "X-Men" raised its total to a whopping $175.7 million in just 10 days, a mark it took "X2: X-Men United" 18 days to reach. Bruce Snyder, head of distribution for Fox, said the film should top out at $240 million to $250 million, beating the $157 million take for the first "X-Men" and the $215 million return for "X2."

The huge decline in the second weekend was typical given how many people saw the movie over the holiday weekend, Snyder said.

"I'm not shocked at that drop," Snyder said.

DreamWorks Animation's cartoon comedy "Over the Hedge" held up well, placing third with $20.6 million for a three-week total of $112.4 million.

Sony's "The Da Vinci Code" was No. 4 with $19.3 million, lifting its three-week domestic gross to $172.7 million. Worldwide, the Tom Hanks film adapted from Dan Brown's best-seller has grossed $581 million and should hit at least $750 million globally, said Rory Bruer, Sony head of distribution.

In its second weekend, the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" went into wider release and broke into the top 10 with $1.33 million, even though it was playing in just 77 theaters.

Released by Paramount Classics, the film averaged an impressive $17,292 a theater, compared to $12,410 in 3,070 cinemas for "The Break-Up."

Chronicling the former vice president's campaign to educate people about the perils of global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth" expands to more theaters over the next two weekends.

"It's breakups and global warming that I think really are interesting people now," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

Overall business rose slightly, with the top 12 movies taking in $128.9 million, up 1.6 percent from the same weekend last year.

After an 8 percent drop in movie attendance last year, Hollywood is positioned for a solid summer. Attendance is running about 1 percent ahead of last year's, with what looks like a solid crop of blockbusters still to come, including this Friday's animated comedy "Cars," from Disney and Pixar, and the Warner Bros. adventure "Superman Returns" on June 30.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. "The Break-Up," $38.1 million.

2. "X-Men: The Last Stand," $34.35 million.

3. "Over the Hedge," $20.6 million.

4. "The Da Vinci Code," $19.3 million.

5. "Mission: Impossible III," $4.67 million.

6. "Poseidon," $3.4 million.

7. "RV," $3.3 million.

8. "See No Evil," $2 million.

9. "An Inconvenient Truth," $1.33 million.

10. "Just My Luck," $825,000.

---

Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a joint venture of General Electric Co. and Vivendi Universal; DreamWorks is a unit of DreamWorks SKG Inc.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Classics are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney's parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros., New Line and Warner Independent are units of Time Warner Inc.; Lionsgate is owned by Lionsgate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Sexual Deviations on Parade in 'Psychopathia Sexualis'
Jeannette Catsoulis

Anyone popping in to "Psychopathia Sexualis" hoping for a classier "Basic Instinct" or perhaps a sneak peek at Woody Allen's memoirs will be sorely disappointed. Named for the notorious 1886 text by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, a German psychiatrist whose specialty was sexual perversion, the movie reconstructs four of the book's colorful case histories. But applying the scientific method to carnal behavior is one thing; applying it to moviemaking is quite another.

Trapping his kinky material in a cage of Victorian propriety, the writer and director, Bret Wood, mimics the visual style of silent cinema, complete with wooden tableaus and ornate intertitles. As hysterical violins sob in the background, we see an onanistic mama's boy discover the joys of bloodsucking, and a wealthy masochist trampled by a pair of bored-looking prostitutes. There's necrophilia, and there are sheep (thankfully unmolested), but there is not one moment of fun.

Whether in the whorehouse or the sanitarium, "Psychopathia Sexualis" is an exercise in unrelenting dullness. Its troubled characters may clamber into coffins, ogle chickens and play with leeches, but it's all pleasureless. Bodily fluids and whippings alike are delivered and received with no more enthusiasm than that of a bivalve processing its dinner. If Sharon Stone were to greet sexual deviance with such sang-froid, she'd never work again.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/06/0...es/08psyc.html





Hollywood Agencies to Leave Talent Row
Sharon Waxman

On plenty of days Bryan Lourd or Ed Limato, agent-princes of Hollywood's reigning talent empires, can still be seen striding down Wilshire Boulevard on the way to lunch with movie stars or studio moguls.

But that may all be coming to an end as two of Hollywood's biggest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency, where Mr. Lourd helps rule the roost, and International Creative Management, where Mr. Limato holds sway, pack up and move barely a mile away, to Century City.

To the uninitiated, that may seem like a paltry distance. But for the agency world, which for a decade and a half has been clustered along a narrow corridor of power and information on Wilshire Boulevard here, it is the end of something, and the beginning of a more diffuse and more corporate existence.

"When you pick up and move from someplace, it's often more than just to find space," said Lou Pitt, an agent turned manager and producer who works on the Wilshire corridor. "When you move, you redefine yourself. It gives you a chance to start fresh."

In the case of C.A.A., the symbolism is pretty clear. By early next year, the agency will abandon the famous I. M. Pei-designed building at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards that was commissioned and is still owned by the C.A.A. co-founder and fallen kingpin, Michael Ovitz, and his former colleagues Ron Meyer, Bill Haber and Robert Goldman.

The agency, now run by Mr. Lourd and six partners, will be moving into a 12-story glass and matte-steel building under construction on the Avenue of the Stars in Century City. C.A.A. representatives declined to comment for this article.

"It's a new world order," Mr. Pitt said. "The old regime is gone, the remnants of it, and now — it'll reflect their taste."

Meanwhile, I.C.M. is moving from its slick headquarters at Wilshire Boulevard and La Peer Drive (which was designed for, but never occupied by, the failed Columbia Savings and Loan Association) into several stories of MGM Tower, a skyscraper perched just off Avenue of the Stars.

In both cases the need for space is a factor. For C.A.A., the new, rented headquarters will give the agency an additional 50,000 square feet, accommodating its move toward corporate clients and its new sports division.

I.C.M. executives said the move would give the agency almost 25,000 additional square feet of office space, add two screening rooms and allow the company to consolidate its finance and accounting office, which will move from New York and Beverly Hills to a single division in Century City. An executive said the lease was not yet signed, but the move was expected to occur by next year.

But the movements are also part of a broader transformation within Hollywood's agencies, as they expand in some areas, consolidate in others and try to cope with tectonic shifts in the entertainment world, which include a decline in the studios' willingness to hire high-priced movie stars.

Another major agency, William Morris, is considering a move, though not from here. That agency, which for decades has been a fixture in its own building on El Camino Drive, off Wilshire, is negotiating to take more space in a building nearby. The owner of the neighboring building filed plans with the city in April that would allow for the razing of its parking garage to make way for the agency.

A spokesman for William Morris declined to confirm a moving plan. "We have no comment right now on what our plans are now," he said. "We just remodeled the interior of our building."

Other agencies say they are not moving. United Talent Agency, for instance, is staying put, as is nearby Endeavor. "We have a plum location," said Chris Day, a spokesman for United Talent, noting that the agency had just signed a new 10-year lease. "We're on Wilshire between Camden and Rodeo, across from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, across from Barney's, across from the Grill. We have the best location in Beverly Hills."

Guy McElwaine, a leading agent in the 1970's who is now president of the production company Morgan Creek, saw the planned moves as a largely practical response to changing conditions. "I don't see it as symbolic of anything other than the growth of the agencies from a personnel point of view," he said.

In decades past, Mr. McElwaine said, "basically most clients had one agent, unless they worked in multiple areas." He added, "Barbra Streisand worked in so many different venues, she needed a manager to orchestrate everything." Now actors have teams of agents, he observed, and hence the need for more living space.

"What's changed is information," he said. "An agency lives on information. Obviously, in this world of speed and information, you need as many people as you can to gather that information."

Before the 1990's, the agencies were scattered around Beverly Hills, on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood and farther afield. Then in the heyday of Mr. Ovitz in the late 1980's and early 90's, the buildings along Wilshire Boulevard became a kind of talent gulch, where agencies and management and production companies created a power nexis, rubbing elbows while sharpening their knives.

In that decade small armies of agents (almost always in suits and ties, preferably Armani) could be seen marching up and down Wilshire Boulevard, often in the direction of the Peninsula Hotel bar, or the Beverly Wilshire Hotel lobby, ready to pitch a client or poach one.

All of which has made a rather cozy world of cutthroat competition.

Geographically, talent row begins at C.A.A., which moved into the I. M. Pei building in 1989. It continues along Wilshire, past the Endeavor Agency; United Talent; the former quarters of Artists Management Group, now defunct; William Morris at El Camino Drive; the Gersh Agency on Cañon Drive; Brillstein-Grey at Doheny Drive; and then the Firm near Maple Drive, ending with I.C.M.

In the midst of all of those companies, literally at the epicenter of talent gulch, sits the Grill on the Alley, the lunchtime gathering place for heavyweights of the industry, often seated according to their status. More than one agent is known to use the restaurant as an informal gauge of the state of Hollywood's power structure. One prominent agent is known to refer to a "Grillometer."

But with C.A.A. and I.C.M. moving across the way, there is reason for concern at the restaurant, which early this week was bustling with industry traffic. The director and political activist Rob Reiner was perched at one table, and the mogul Ron Perelman was expected at any minute.

"I don't want everyone leaving town," said Michael Goddard, the manager and maître d'hôtel at the Grill, adding, "I'd worry." He grabbed a ringing phone, listened and said, "Yes, Bud's still here." Bud Yorkin, the veteran producer, was called to the line.

Mr. Goddard estimated that 40 percent of his business came from the nearby talent agencies, most of them a short distance on foot. "We get more William Morris, Endeavor, C.A.A. than I.C.M.," he observed. "But we do get I.C.M." Suddenly, he was struck by a thought: "If they do move, we'd love to get a valet," Mr. Goddard said. "Perhaps we can get a shuttle going to Century City."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/movies/08agen.html





What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood
David Leonhardt

BETWEEN "The Godfather" and "The Godfather: Part II," Francis Ford Coppola made a movie called "The Conversation." It stars Gene Hackman as a paranoid wiretapper in Watergate-era San Francisco, and the cast includes Robert Duvall, a young Harrison Ford, the woman who played Shirley in "Laverne & Shirley" and the guy who played Fredo Corleone in "The Godfather."

The movie was nominated for best picture in 1975, and Mr. Coppola has actually called it the finest film he has ever made. After watching it this week, I wouldn't go that far, but it is certainly better than nearly anything at the multiplex right now.

Yet "The Conversation" was on its way to the movie graveyard just a few years ago. Since video stores have room for only a few thousands titles, some didn't carry it, and it was slowly being buried under the ever growing pile of newer films at other stores. It would have been easy a decade ago to imagine a time when few people would ever watch "The Conversation" again.

Then came Netflix. The Internet company with the red envelopes stocks just about all of the 60,000 movies, television shows and how-to videos that are available on DVD (and that aren't pornography). Just as important, for the sake of "The Conversation," Netflix lets users rate movies on a one- to five-star scale and make online recommendations to their friends.

The company's servers also sift through the one billion ratings in its system to tell you which movies that you might like, based on which ones you have already liked.

The result is a vast movie meritocracy that gives a film a second or third life simply because — get this — it's good. Last year, "The Conversation" (average rating: four stars) was the 13th-most-watched movie from the early 1970's on Netflix.

Its return from oblivion is a nice illustration of a brainteaser I have been giving my friends since I visited Netflix in Silicon Valley last month. Out of the 60,000 titles in Netflix's inventory, I ask, how many do you think are rented at least once on a typical day?

The most common answers have been around 1,000, which sounds reasonable enough. Americans tend to flock to the same small group of movies, just as they flock to the same candy bars and cars, right?

Well, the actual answer is 35,000 to 40,000. That's right: every day, almost two of every three movies ever put onto DVD are rented by a Netflix customer. "Americans' tastes are really broad," says Reed Hastings, Netflix's chief executive. So, while the studios spend their energy promoting bland blockbusters aimed at everyone, Netflix has been catering to what people really want — and helping to keep Hollywood profitable in the process.

Five million families now have Netflix accounts, and the company has basically reinvented the concept of a quick-turnaround mail-order business. It is, in short, one of the most impressive companies around. So why do so many people think it's doomed?

MR. HASTINGS, a friendly, goateed 45-year-old who fits the image of a California entrepreneur, founded Netflix in 1997 after running up late fees on a video rental. He figured there had to be a business in helping people avoid those fees, so his new company allowed customers to keep a fixed number of movies, usually three at a time, for as long as they wanted. When they sent one back, they got another.

Today, Netflix sends and receives 700 million little packages a year, a logistical operation that has few peers outside of FedEx, U.P.S. or the post office itself. The company's new head of operations, in fact, used to be the postmaster general.

In the San Francisco area, Netflix trucks pick up returned DVD's from post offices by 4 a.m. each weekday morning and bring them to a warehouse in a leafy Sunnyvale office park. There, workers — mainly Asian and Latino immigrants — arrive on the brightly lighted warehouse floor at 5 a.m. to begin tearing open the red envelopes and putting the discs in mechanized sorters. By 10 a.m., the workers are stuffing new envelopes to be sent out again and the discs are back at the post office the same afternoon.

Netflix has 39 of these warehouses around the country, one in each major metropolitan area. Because first-class mail service takes only a day within a 50-mile radius, most customers get a new movie two days after dropping one in a mailbox.

From the beginning, though, the company's doubters have argued that this isn't fast enough. Blockbuster's chief executive used to say Netflix would never be more than a niche business, and even now the stock trades for about $27, down about $12 from its 2004 high. One fifth of its shares are on loan to short sellers betting it will fall further.

You can understand the doubts, too. At a time when cable and phone companies are running fat data pipes into homes, Netflix can seem a lot like the Sears catalog of the early 21st century. Surely, home movies will soon look more like iTunes than Netflix. Downloading, not envelope stuffing, is the future — or so people have been saying for years.

As it happens, the movie studios have already set up their own attempt at iTunes. It's called Movielink. For $1 to $5, you can download a movie to your computer and watch it at any point in the next month. At some point, presumably, you will be able to download it to your television, too.

But here's the rub. Movielink has a library of only 1,500 movies, fewer than a good video store. Likewise, Comcast, the cable company making a push into video-on-demand, offers just 800 movies. This may not surprise you if you have ever scrolled through the pay-per-view options and found nothing to watch.

The problem is that the studios have sold the exclusive digital rights for most movies (which don't apply to physical DVD's) to a television channel, like HBO. The agreements last for years and, since they bring in millions of dollars, the studios aren't about to stop signing them.

So what's saving Netflix — allowing it to thrive when the technology to obliterate it already exists — is yet another attempt by Hollywood to hold onto a fading business model. Remember, this is the industry that filed lawsuits in the 1970's to prevent people from watching movies at home.

Even Mr. Hastings admits that the convenience of downloading will eventually make the exclusive rights deals disappear and give Netflix some real competition.

The company has been hiring engineers to build its own download site, which, with a familiar brand name and all that information about what people like to watch, may be formidable.

But it could be years — 5? 20? — before downloading approaches the size of the DVD business. Sometimes, inertia can outlast technology long enough for somebody to build a very big business. And once a business gets big, it doesn't easily go away.

"At the heart of any good investment, I tell investors, is a contrarian thesis that they and the company believe very deeply," Mr. Hastings said, "and that the rest of the world thinks is crazy."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/te...leonhardt.html





Fuck That Shit!

Congress increases indecency fines tenfold
Jim Abrams

Congress gave notice to broadcasters Wednesday that they will pay dearly for crossing the line with offensive material like Janet Jackson's 2004 Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction," passing legislation that would multiply indecency fines 10 times.

The 379-35 House vote on the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act sends the bill to President Bush for his signature. The bill, which already passed the Senate, increases the top indecency fine the Federal Communications Commission can levy from $32,500 to $325,000 per incident.

Bush said he looked forward to signing the legislation into law. "I believe that government has a responsibility to help strengthen families," he said in a statement. "This legislation will make television and radio more family friendly by allowing the FCC to impose stiffer fines on broadcasters who air obscene or indecent programming."

"This is a victory for children and families," said Senate sponsor Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan. The higher fines were needed, he said, "in a world saturated with violent and explicit media."

The measure, given impetus by Jackson's momentary exposure during the Super Bowl halftime show, was an election-year priority of conservative groups.

The Parents Television Council, an aggressive critic of indecency on the public airwaves, praised Congress for listening to Americans "fed up with the sexually raunchy and gratuitously violent content that's broadcast over the public airwaves, particularly during hours when millions of children are in the viewing audience."

Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., a chief supporter of the legislation in the House, said the tenfold increase in fines to get "the filth and triple-x smut off the public airwaves" was appropriate when a 30-second commercial aired during this year's Super Bowl cost $2.6 million, or $86,000 a second.

The bill does not apply to cable or satellite broadcasts, which are not included in FCC rules on public broadcasts, and does not try to define what is indecent.

The FCC recently denied a petition of reconsideration from CBS Corp.-owned stations facing $550,000 in fines over the Janet Jackson breast-revealing incident at the 2004 Super Bowl.

Under FCC rules and federal law, radio stations and over-the-air television channels may not air obscene material at any time, and may not air indecent material between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. when children are more likely to be in the audience.

The FCC says indecent material is that which contains sexual or excretory material that does not rise to the level of obscenity.

The legislation, while facing little resistance in Congress, had detractors warning of problems in defining what is indecent and of the erosion of First Amendment rights.

"What is at stake here is freedom of speech and whether it will be nibbled to death by election-minded politicians and self-righteous pietists," Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., said in a statement. He recalled how after the Super Bowl incident, numerous ABC affiliates refused to air the acclaimed war movie "Saving Private Ryan" because of its rough language.

Jeremy Harris Lipschultz, School of Communication director at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said that while the heavy fines may have some short-term effects, broadcasters ultimately will go with edgy programs that audiences want. "Broadcasters are in the business of attracting audiences, so they are going to be under pressure to find the edge of that envelope."

The National Association of Broadcasters said it would prefer to see the nation's 13,000 radio stations and 1,700 TV stations police themselves. "The NAB position is that we think responsible self-regulation is preferable to government regulation in areas of program content," spokesman Dennis Wharton said.

Since the 2004 Super Bowl incident, many broadcasters have voluntarily policed their broadcasts through means such as five-second delays on live broadcasts.

The legislation coming out of the Senate does not go as far as a bill sponsored by Upton that the House passed last year. That measure would have increased the maximum fine to $500,000, allowed fines for individual performers and given the FCC the authority to revoke the licenses of broadcasters fined three or more times.

The FCC has also actively responded to the increase in complaints about lewd material over the airwaves, with total fines jumping from $440,000 in 2003 to almost $8 million in 2004.

The agency recently handed down its biggest fine, $3.3 million, against more than 100 CBS affiliates that aired an episode of the series "Without a Trace" that simulated an orgy scene. That fine is now under review.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...e141329D79.DTL





Even Hilary Does Not Believe In Suing Your Customers Anymore
TG

Hilary Rosen, the ex-chairwoman of the RIAA and a much-hated character during the Napster's heyday, expresses her concern over the RIAA's present suing campaigns targeting individual p2p users in her recent blog entry. She does not seem to believe in DRM either, although leaves the elaboration of that theme to a later time.

I see no reason to doubt the honesty of her opinions expressed as a private person. Professional executives like her are like mercenaries - resourceful, determined and efficient in their jobs even if they had moral doubts about what they are doing. As long as they are paid, they will do it anyway, and there are plenty of them on the market for the media cartels to choose from.

The filesharers, on the other hand, are just private people with little or no experience of serious things like civil courts, lobbying and doing PR in the media. When faced with the professional 'killers' of the media cartels they are totally helpless and seldom see any other choices than to surrender on the spot, trying to gather together whatever loots the mercenaries demand from them. This applies today to almost the whole planet, Sweden being perhaps the only area on the globe where the odds are more even, thanks to the rising political movement of the Swedish pirates.

Despite the gloomy situation we have today, the long term prospects of the media cartels to keep up their empire are less rosy. What is happening in Sweden today will be happening in other countries within a few years. People are questioning the media cartel propaganda on a deeper level; they are starting to see things in a wider context. They are starting to see the invisible strings of control and corruption that have caused their own elected legislators to write such cartel-friendly copyright laws. They are starting to realize that the democratic mechanisms are not quite dead yet, despite the apparent depressing hegemony of corporations over the political decision-makers. If the Swedish pirates can succesfully defy their copyright laws and make a run to their parliament to rewrite the bad laws, why could it not happen elsewhere too? Why not, indeed.
http://reflectionsonp2p.blogspot.com...-in-suing.html
















Until next week,

- js.


















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