Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 14th, ‘06

[JackSpratts]

"It‘s pretty stunning that, rather than focus on whether the president broke his oath of office and broke federal law, they are going after the whistleblowers." – Anthony D. Romero


"This action by Microsoft infringed upon my freedom of speech. They even deleted my blog and gave me no chance to back up my files without any warning." – Zhao Jing


"Congressmen don't know things; they're not experts in technology. In the mid-1990's, we were meeting with a Congressman about high-definition TV standards and we were talking about pixels and so on, and he said, 'Fellas, look, I'm trying to stay with you here, but one of the first times I ever took a ride on an airplane was when I came to Washington to take my seat and I remember looking out the window and I thought part of the wing was falling off when we landed, because the flaps came up.' " – Joseph Tasker


"I can do everything a cable company can do, but I will have 100,000 channels." – David Koenig


"I'd say we more or less want everything." – Kevin Arnold


"We're not trying to make something a hit in order to make a business work. We cast a very wide net, and we're going to catch some hits in it." – Greg Scholl


"35mm film has come to the end of the roll, Nikon has said. The company will stop producing film camera bodies, along with interchangeable manual focus lenses." – Tony Smith


"Now that the glass is smashed and the store is on fire, I might as well help myself to some candy... " – Loaf


"I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all." – Albert Hofmann


"There's nothing worse then when the pizza boy rings the doorbell, the girl says she doesn't have a tip, and then they get it on." – Stormy Daniels





































January 14th, ’06





Diary of an Expat Downloader
Nicole Martinelli

Technology has taken most of the worthwhile debauchery out of life as a foreign correspondent.

There is no more hiding behind time zones, unreliable phone lines, rickety fax machines. Editors can always get you. As I found out when a tryst went tumble-dry in Rome thanks to a text message about G8 protests in Genoa. Or strollus interruptus on Saturday night in Verona following half an hour on my mobile with New York explaining a device that makes offside calls in soccer games. And moving day in Milan, when I was forced to Sherpa boxes up five floors then race down to an internet point for read-backs to London about opening night at the Scala.

Fortunately, broadband came to Italy and brought back a slight, but necessary, frisson to life abroad. Laura, a Canadian freelancer with an Italian husband in IT, was the first to get cabled up here in Milan in 2004. This was the end of TiVo envy and the beginning of a new era.

Instead of waiting weeks or months for friends and family to send tapes (Friends, Scrubs, the Sanford & Son oeuvre) to play on dual- standard VCRs, they could prepare BitTorrent files for us to download. Husband Paolo concocted a PVR using one of Via Technologies' silent Mini-ITX all-included boards, strapped in a 250-GB hard disk, and we were ready to roll. No expensive satellite fees, no ads and, best of all, no Italian voiceovers giving that eerie, fleeting impression that Jennifer Aniston can actually act.

Did we know it was wrong? Well, maybe. Did we care? Of course not. Our microcosm of the Anglo-American world (two Brits, a Canadian, an Australian and three Americans) found it finally had something to talk about back home, and a mission: to find TV worth downloading and watching together.

Alessandra Stanley, whose taste is excellent and to whose foibles we are immune, became a must-read. When she declared Desperate Housewives a "throwback to the era of sizzling nighttime soap operas like Dynasty, (which) reflects a more contemporary fascination with failure," it topped our to-be-torrented list. At the same time, the miracle that is fresh, pre-risen pizza dough hit local supermarkets, and fast feasts were easy. Paolo, the only native of our group and the only member with any demonstrable talent, slung the pies and fired up the PVR. And Desperate Pizza Friday was born.

Sure, illegally downloaded sitcoms, homemade pizza and piles of Nicorette gum hardly qualify for Ernest Hemingway liver-braising debauchment. Thanks to recent crackdowns on Euro downloaders, though, our get-togethers have that tinge of sin associated with expat journalists. These weekly soirees put us at risk of criminal charges and payment of damages. Bring it on, I say. Lock me up for watching the antics of Bree in her real voice and gabbing about it with my mother that same week. A girl has to take her sense of indecency where she can get it, after all.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,69921-0.html





File Sharing Sets Another Record
Jon Newton

Ongoing efforts by the Big Four Organized Music cartel to sue music lovers away from the p2p file sharing networks and towards corporate sites such as iTunes and Napster, which the Big Four supply and support, are working.

So say Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan, Germany) through their RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and similar international 'trade' units such as the IFPI, BPI, ARIA and CRIA.

And that's what the mainstream media are reporting.

The numbers of people using the p2p networks in the US and around the world are indeed changing significantly.

But they're going up, not down.

In America in December, 2005, on average, 6,978,715 people were simultaneously logged onto the p2p networks at any given time, says p2p research firm BigChampagne, which produces statistics centering on the file sharing phenomenon.

In 2004, the number was 5,500,314 and in 2003, 3,239,298, says the firm, which compiled statistics for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Information Technology Outlook report for 2004.

Globally, in December, 2003, 5,602,384 people were logged onto the p2p nets at the same time at any point around the clock, in 2004 the number had swelled to 7,582,248 and in December, 2005, it was 9,554,298.

Stay tuned.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/6002/Dec_record.html





Independent Music as an Answer?
Drew Wilson

You won't find these artists on MTV. You won't find them banging away behind the David Letterman Studio. You might not even see them in record stores. Where you can see them is on the Internet - many of them giving music away for free. These artists tend to be much more believable when they say, 'We're not in it for the money'.

While the RIAA continues its campaign against people who share music online and try and spread messages that say that downloading music is the equivalent of shoplifting, there are artists who actually resort to the internet as a means of showing off their latest tunes. As a bonus, most of them would rather give you a big hug rather then a lawsuit for downloading their music. Though some signed bands wouldn't mind you giving away their music, record labels tend to make the decision to pass along a cease and desist order without the consent of the artist. In the mean time, if some of these artists hear that you like the music enough to recommend to your friends, they may even be more ecstatic.

Many artists who sign in for big labels such as Virgin or Sony can very easily get ahead of themselves and sign something they didn't quite read thoroughly. The end result? Going quickly from being on every radio station across the world and back down into bankruptcy, allowing the labels to gobble up all that precious revenue the artist worked hard to making possible in the first place. It's a possibility that many artists are aiming to avoid all together by "going indie."

They won't make as much publicity as top 40 artists, but they may find themselves making more money then the artists on the production of music alone. Word is getting out that there is more to music then simply looking at the charts to determine what is worth listening to.

A common misconception is that there is nothing to listen to outside of the record labels. It is true that it's a little harder to switch from big names to independent artists as the advertising isn't always right in front of you every day, but it does help to find a genre and keep digging for the specific music because the harder one looks, the more one realises that there is actually an unimaginable amount of music to go around... free of charge. Sometimes, the individual is encouraged by the artist to re- post the tracks elsewhere for free.

Independent music may be slower to be adopted by digital hungry users then podcasting, vidcasting or simply free shows, but the content is much more available then free internet shows - likely because it's easier to create then an actual show. Many artists utilize the power of the Creative Commons to distribute their music, but many still keep it under copyright for whatever reason.

Free online legal music may be a gold mine most untouched for the average user, but, bar legislation that could effectively remove this practice for non-big label musicians to distribute online, the gold mine might always be around.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1049





Music Downloading Creates Listener Apathy: Research
AFP

Internet downloading and MP3 players are creating a generation of people who do not seriously appreciate songs or musical performances, British researchers said.

"The accessibility of music has meant that it is taken for granted and does not require a deep emotional commitment once associated with music appreciation," said music psychologist Adrian North.

North led a team from the University of Leicester, central England, that monitored 346 people over two weeks to evaluate how they related to music.

They concluded that because of greater accessibility through mass media, music was nowadays seen more as a commodity that is produced, distributed and consumed like any other.

It could also account for the popularity of television talent competitions, particularly in Britain, which allow viewers from the "iPod generation" a rare chance to engage and appreciate music and live performances, they suggested.

"In the 19th century, music was seen as a highly valued treasure with fundamental and near- mystical powers of human communication," said North.

"The pace of technological change has accelerated further over the last 20 years or so and these fundamental changes in the nature of musical experience and value have arguably become even more pronounced.

"Because so much music of different styles and genres is now so widely available via portable MP3 players and the internet, it is arguable that people now actively use music in everyday listening contexts to a much greater extent than ever before.

"The degree of accessibility and choice has arguably led to a rather passive attitude towards music heard in everyday life.

"In short, our relationship to music in everyday life may well be complex and sophisticated, but it is not necessarily characterised by deep emotional investment."

The academic's assessment follows a warning last week from rock legend Pete Townshend, The Who guitarist, that listening to rock music on an MP3 player through headphones could cause deafness.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060110...ainmentbritain





Le Filezharing

Collapse of Internet Piracy Legislation Prompts French President To Ask For Revisions

French President Jacques Chirac waded into a political row over music piracy on Thursday by asking lawmakers to improve their proposals to fine online bootleggers while safeguarding Internet freedoms.

A government bill to strengthen copyright protection collapsed in a surprise parliamentary storm late last year.

The law aimed to clamp down on private users sharing pirated material over the Internet by introducing stiffer punishments, such as fines of up to 300,000 euros ($362,800) and prison sentences of up to three years.

But deputies, both from the ruling conservatives and the opposition Socialists, threw the planned law off course at the end of December by adding amendments which would legalise file copying in exchange for a fee to cover a licensing charge.

The amendments were supported by consumer groups but opposed by music shops and some artists including veteran French rock star Johnny Hallyday.

"It's with creative people that we will win in the battle over content," Chirac said in a New Year's speech.

"We should guarantee their rights and their fair payment, by finding a balance between the fight against piracy and user freedom," he added.

French media company Vivendi Universal, which owns Universal Music, is among many in the industry who say their profits have been hit by online file sharing.

"What we need, is to favour the development of legal payments at reasonable prices," Chirac said.

His conservative government is looking for ways to revive the economy which suffers from low growth and high unemployment. Chirac says new technology is a vital prop to the economy.

He said he wanted France to pioneer the development of digital television and technologies with potential such as high-speed internet connections and high-definition television as well as television on mobile phones.

But that would need the use of frequencies in the spectrum and Chirac said this could be achieved by moving the French television to digital delivery means -- satellite, cable and the TNT terrestrial digital television platform which is being deployed in France.

"That would mean freeing up frequencies that are today used for analog television," he said. Everyone in France should have access to digital television, he added.

France is in the midst of upheaval in its pay-TV industry following a decision by Vivendi unit Canal Plus to buy its weaker rival TPS, owned by commercial channel TF1.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/05/news...opyright.reut/





Retailers Find Little to Cheer
Michael Barbaro

The nation's merchants, trotting out deep discounts before Christmas, lured enough last-minute buyers to deliver a decent, if unspectacular, sales gain of 3.2 percent in December.

The results, released yesterday, showed that retailers, like Target, that waited until closer to Christmas to flood shoppers with ads and markdowns had the strongest December.

If there is any lesson for retailers in the results, it is this: the early bird did not catch the worm.

Indeed, chains like Wal-Mart that focused on getting a jump-start on holiday sales before Thanksgiving instead fell behind last month.

Wal-Mart, in particular, "had a competitive advantage in November which they suddenly lost in December, when other companies stepped up," said Bill Dreher, a retail analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities.

Wal-Mart's sales at stores open at least a year rose a meager 2.2 percent. Because of its size - 10 percent of retail purchases are made there - its performance dragged down the entire industry.

According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, consumers spent $93.2 billion at retailers in December, up from $90.3 billion a year ago. The 3.2 percent increase beat last year's 2.7 percent gain for December, but fell below a 4.3 percent rise in 2003.

"Not bad, kind of average," was the verdict from John D. Morris, a retail analyst at Harris Nesbitt.

But marketing tactics did not tell the whole story. With home heating costs rising, retailers that cater to lower- and middle-income shoppers, like Kohl's and Sears, turned in largely disappointing results. But higher-end chains, like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, with shoppers who are more insulated from energy prices, once again thrived.

A complete picture of the holiday season will not emerge until the end of January after millions of Americans redeem gift cards and retailers can then register them as sales.

What is more, monthly same-store sales, as they are called in the industry, do not factor in online sales. Web sales rose 25 percent this holiday season, to $18.1 billion, through Christmas, according to ComScore Networks. (Two of the nation's largest electronics retailers, Best Buy and Circuit City, will not report December sales until they announce annual earnings later this month.)

Wal-Mart's performance struck Wall Street as particularly sluggish, given the chain's considerable holiday marketing campaign, which included television commercials with Garth Brooks, $400 laptops and a pledge to match competitors' "doorbuster" prices on the day after Thanksgiving.

Analysts said Wal-Mart's early advertising blitz, which tapered off in December, left it vulnerable to competition in the final weeks of the season. Unrelenting negative publicity from union-backed groups like Wake Up Wal-Mart, which organized holiday protests in front of its stores, may have also hurt the chain.

"The 2004 holiday season revealed that Wal-Mart was no longer invincible," said Bernard Sosnick, an analyst at Oppenheimer. "The 2005 holiday season did not erase that."

After a strong showing in November, when sales rose 3.6 percent, J. C. Penney also had a rather weak December. Sales grew just 2.2 percent, below a 2.7 percent analyst forecast.

Kohl's, which caters to the same lower- and middle-income consumers as Wal-Mart and J. C. Penney, missed analysts' forecasts, indicating that lower-income consumers trimmed their gift-giving budgets. (Sales at Kohl's rose 4.6 percent, below an expected 5.1 percent.)

"It's a demographic problem," said Mr. Dreher, the Deutsche Bank analyst. "If you were focused on the moderate-income sector, you were disappointed."

Sears Holding, the struggling combination of Sears and K-Mart, failed to find its footing over the holidays, with December sales sliding 11.9 percent. K-Mart delivered a 1 percent sales increase after years of falling sales, suggesting the bulk of the company's troubles rests with Sears. In a statement, Sears Holding blamed a "weaker-than-anticipated customer response to fashion offerings."

Target, the trendy discount retailer whose typical shoppers earn far more than those at Wal-Mart, said sales rose 4.7 percent. That was a reversal from November, when Target's sales growth dipped below Wal-Mart's for the first time in two years.

Federated Department Stores - still trying to integrate the weaker May Department Stores into its business - also turned around during the holidays, posting a 3.4 percent sales increase in December after a 3.4 percent decline in November.

Luxury retailers returned to their generally strong growth last month after a sluggish November. Sales rose 8.6 percent at the Neiman Marcus Group, 7.7 percent at Nordstrom and 2.4 percent at Saks.

Fickle teenage shoppers, who fall in and out of love with retailers seemingly every season, mobbed stores that sold high-priced denim and faux-fur-trimmed coats, increasing sales for the segment by 12.9 percent, Retail Metrics found.

Sales at Abercrombie & Fitch, which shuns the deep markdowns used by its rivals, leapt 29 percent. Sales at its relatively new Hollister division, aimed at the middle- school set, jumped 36 percent.

But the cheery news was largely eclipsed by word from the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday that it has begun a formal investigation into sales of Abercrombie's stock. The agency has requested information from the retailer and some current and former executives.

After a challenging fall, when it was stuck with piles of unsold denim, Aéropostale said sales rose 11.4 percent, far exceeding analysts' forecasts of a 4.4 percent gain.

Gap's hopes for a holiday turnaround, propelled by a return to the basic crew neck sweaters and knit scarves that endeared it to legions of consumers in the 1990's, did not materialize. Sales fell 9 percent across the chain: down 10 percent at Gap, 10 percent at Old Navy and 5 percent at Banana Republic.

Mr. Morris, the analyst, said Gap's decision to skip television ads for the Gap brand in favor of a colorful magazine insert hurt business. "As much as the company said it did not drive big business, it became a ritual," he said. "You saw it and kind of felt like it was time to go to the mall, and it just wasn't there."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/business/06shop.html





How p2p File Sharing Helps Artists
p2p news / p2pnet

Yesterday we ran an item by Toronto musician and indie record label producer Neil Leyton. Subject? Hollywood's Canadian MP, Sam Bulte.

Here's a comment post from Loaf, guitar player from The Pariahs, one of the bands signed up with Leyton's Fading Ways label.

Subject? File sharing >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Free Sharing Of Music Over The Web Can Help Artists
By Loaf - The Pariahs

I'd like to give the perspective of a musician and songwriter on this whole copywrite thing...

In the interest of disclosing my potential biases, my band (The Pariahs) is on Neil Leyton's Fading Ways label and I'm a good friend of Neil's. Having said that, my take on this issue isn't quite the same as Neil's, and may interest some.

First of all, I don't belive that Neil's views and those of the (many) people who attack him are mutually exclusive. Basically, the dispute boils down to this: Neil maintains that free sharing of music over the web can help artists, and that restrictive copywrite laws would hurt them. His opponents believe the opposite is true.

I see many debates between those who believe every free download equals a lost sale and those who think file trading helps record sales. What's the truth? I don't pretend to know - probably someplace in the middle. However, I'd argue that this debate is essentially beside the point.

File-trading is here to stay. I see no reason to believe that lawsuits or technical restrictions will stop it - so far the traders are running rings around the record companies. How should musicians and indie record labels deal with this phenomenon?

You notice that I don't mention the question of how major labels should react. That's because I don't care. My band will never be signed to a major label. Therefore, when Neil Leyton and Fading Ways are attacked by industry types because our tiny operation is allegedly contributing to the downfall of the ability of artists to make money from their work. I just laugh. I don't care about the traditional business model for selling CDs. It never made me any money - I was locked out of it, like most musicians.

You might argue that Fading Ways (and myself) could make more money in the old indie environment of the 80s and 90s when digital copying wasn't an issue. Perhaps this is true. But waxing nostalic about the "good old days" doesn't help us succeed now. If file trading IS stamped out some day by technological or legal change, then this would be a discussion worth having. In any case, our actions won't influence the outcome either way, so we may as well follow our immediate interests now.

In the meantime, a small label like Fading Ways can make use of digital copying to dramatically enhance the exposure of its artists.

For instance, FW distributes "Share Sampler" CDs of music that's copywrited under Creative Commons and is legal to copy and distribute. People are encouraged to share the songs in any way they want. They like this. For a very small indie label, the challenge isn't that people are stealing the music without paying -the challenge is that nobody has heard of the acts in the first place.

Major labels have a different problem. They spend millions of dollars trying to convince everybody on the planet that they really need to listen to their latest assembly-line megastar. Then people who have been exposed to this expensive media barrage can just go download the music for free. Is this a problem? Yes. Is it MY problem? Nope!

Let's say 100 people hear about The Pariahs through sharing, but only ten buy our record. Is this ten new sales or ninety lost sales? Given that for years we pretty much only sold records to people who had seen us live, this scenario is a big improvement in my view.

Old-school record companies are being squeezed by two factors, both caused by digital technology.

It used to be that unless you were independently wealthy, you needed a record deal to make a professional quality recording. This is no longer the case.

It used to be that you needed major label clout to make your music widely available -this is no longer the case either.

What do the majors still control? Access to mainstream media. Oops - mainstream media is now so tightly formatted and limited in scope that the vast majority of good music would never get played.

Is the record industry doomed? Will all musicians wind up washing dishes because they can't sell their music? Could be. What can I do about it? Not much. Neither can you. If you work for a big record company, maybe we'll wind up washing dishes together.

Here's what is different about us: I have no stake in the status quo. I am the kid who has spent his "career" with his nose pressed to the window of the candy store.

Now that the glass is smashed and the store is on fire, I might as well help myself to some candy...
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/7566





Symantec Fixes SystemWorks Vulnerability
Brian Krebs

Symantec Corp. has issued an update to its popular Norton SystemWorks software utility suite to remove a function that security researchers found could be exploited by malware to hide on a user's system.

The discovery was made in part by Mark Russinovich, the same Sysinternals researcher who investigated Sony BMG's anti-piracy software and revealed that the company was using "rootkits" to hide essential files from users and resist removal. Symantec also credits anti-virus maker F- Secure Corp.'s Blacklight team with helping to resolve the issue.

The researchers found that Norton SystemWorks and Norton SystemWorks Premier contain a feature called the "Norton Protected Recycle Bin," or "NProtect," which resides within the Microsoft Windows Recycler directory but which is hidden from Windows. NProtect actually creates a backup copy of anything the user sends to the Windows recycle bin; in the event that the user wants to reclaim any of those files (even if they are emptied from the Windows trash bin), NProtect can fetch them from the Norton bin.

It turns out that files in the Norton bin directory might not be scanned during scheduled or manual virus scans, an oversight that could potentially provide a location for an attacker to hide a malicious file on a computer running the software.

In its advisory on this problem, Symantec explains the oversight this way: "When NProtect was first released, hiding its contents helped ensure that a user would not accidentally delete the files in the directory. In light of current techniques used by malicious attackers, Symantec has re-evaluated the value of hiding this directory. We have released an update that will make the NProtect directory visible inside the Windows Recycler directory. With this update, files within the NProtect directory will be scanned by scheduled and manual scans as well as by on-access scanners like Auto-Protect."

The update and instructions for applying it are available here.

Symantec notes that it is not aware of any threats that try to take advantage of this functionality. Still, this kind of thing underscores why it is never a good idea for companies to build their software so that it can hide from Windows and the end-user.

"In this case, Symantec was using cloaking techniques to protect the end- user from themselves and from deleting files they might want to get back someday," Russinovich said. "But in the process, they've created a potential security risk and making it so that whole portions of the machine are unmanageable by Windows or the user."

Russinovich said he'd have more details about his findings -- which may soon incorporate other commercial software on the market today (including another anti-virus maker) -- in a Wednesday post on his blog.
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/secu...ec_fixes_.html





Buying Music From Anywhere and Selling It for Play on the Internet
Robert Levine

Working in the media and entertainment group of the consultants McKinsey & Company, Greg Scholl got a firsthand look at the inefficiency in the music business: the major record labels focus on creating hits, and they rarely make money on releases that sell less than a few hundred thousand copies.

Now, as chief executive of the Orchard, a music distributor that sells to iTunes, Napster, Yahoo and other digital music services, Mr. Scholl is trying to exploit that inefficiency.

The Orchard is seeking to make money by purchasing music from small independent and foreign labels, and then distributing it to digital music services. In most music stores, CD's of, say, Chinese or Kenyan pop music would be consigned to the world-music bin as a good will gesture. But the economics of online stores is changing the financial calculations of the music business, making it profitable to sell a relatively small number of copies of a song, as long as a compact disc is not manufactured and distributed.

So instead of trying to sell millions of copies of hundreds of albums, the standard music industry strategy, the Orchard hopes to sell hundreds of copies of thousands of albums. In that way, the company is anticipating that sales will follow a pattern known as "the long tail," in which a large number of only marginally popular items can eventually produce significant revenue.

"We're not trying to make something a hit in order to make a business work," Mr. Scholl said. "We cast a very wide net, and we're going to catch some hits in it."

So far, the Orchard has made deals to sell about 650,000 tracks from 72 countries to various services, including ring tone outlets. Those tracks include music from relatively well-known bands like Black Uhuru as well as thousands of Chinese pop songs. Much of that music is not yet online, and the company is not sure if all of it will ever be. The plan is to add music to various services gradually, so it can be promoted appropriately.

The Orchard is not the only company looking to strike gold in the more obscure parts of the music business. One of the Orchard's rivals, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, recently got the rights to digitally distribute 60,000 albums worth of music from a Chinese state-owned record company. The Orchard also faces competition from distribution companies owned by major labels.

The bet that executives of these businesses are making is that online services will increase demand for music that was not previously popular, just as eBay stoked the sale of old books and trinkets once considered largely worthless.

As Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research, put it: "In the world of shiny plastic discs, there are two barriers to getting the music you want: It's not in the store, or you've never heard of it. With digital distribution, the first barrier disappears. The second gets eased because of search engines, recommendation engines, technology like that."

The Orchard was founded in 1997 as a distribution company by Scott Cohen and Richard Gottehrer, a songwriter whose hits included "My Boyfriend's Back." Named after its original location, on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it began losing money and eventually acquired a reputation as being less than prompt with payments.

In 2003 the Orchard was purchased by Dimensional Associates, the private equity arm of JDS Capital Management, for what Mr. Scholl indicated was less than $10 million. Dimensional also owns the online service eMusic and a music publishing company, and was interested in the Orchard partly because of the digital distribution rights it had acquired.

"We were aware of the reputation," said Mr. Scholl, who was brought in to run the company, "and we worked to pay everyone back and begin more transparent accounting."

The Orchard, Mr. Scholl said, is a "digital aggregator," a middleman between small independent labels and digital music services. Major labels, as well as most sizable independents, deal with such services directly or through an established physical distribution company like the Alternative Distribution Alliance, owned by Warner Music.

The Orchard, as well as the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, mostly represent small labels in quantity. Along with a smattering of tracks recorded by stars before they signed with major labels, they offer an embarrassment of niches: free jazz, black metal and, in the case of the Orchard, a label that specializes in calliope music. And as the cost of putting tracks online is low, anything that can sell a few copies is worthwhile.

"I'd say we more or less want everything," remarked Kevin Arnold, founder and chief executive of the independent alliance.

Most digital distribution deals give the distributor 15 percent of the wholesale price of a track, usually somewhere around 65 cents, according to several people in the industry. Mr. Scholl said that the Orchard generally receives a higher percentage because it can effectively promote music to the services that sell it. To generate attention for some of the music from China, for example, it arranged for Jackie Chan to provide a list of his favorite tracks.

"It's the equivalent of taking the music from the backroom, where you'd have to look for it, into the store," Mr. Scholl said.

For some of the Orchard's international partners, the strategy is working. Epsa, an Argentine tango label, distributes about 500 albums through the Orchard. Laura Tesoriero, the label's chief executive, who also works with the Orchard as a representative in South America, said it had sold 10,000 digital tracks last quarter - no more than a rounding error by the standards of the United States pop music market, but enough to leave her feeling encouraged about the future of digital sales. A significant number of those sales, she expects, were to Argentines living in this country.

The most significant growth in the sale of foreign music could come as the idea of buying online gains traction among such immigrant communities.

"People in China don't think of Chinese music as world music and neither do Chinese people in the U.S.," said Yale Evelev, president of Luaka Bop, an independent label owned by David Byrne that specializes in pop music from Africa and South America.

The Orchard will face greater competition as major labels sell the music they release internationally in the United States. The EMI Group, for example, plans to make available in this country a majority of the music it sells anywhere in the world, Adam Klein, a vice president, said. As an example of the potential of this, Mr. Klein said that Hotei, a band signed by EMI in Japan, had one of the top 10 rock albums on iTunes after one of its songs appeared on the soundtrack of "Kill Bill: Volume 1."

Even with a business model that does not rely on hits, they would be welcome. "One man's niche is another man's mass market," Mike McGuire, a Gartner analyst said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/te...pagewanted=all





Korn Sells a Stake in Itself
Jeff Leeds

When the hard-rock band Korn hits the road in the coming weeks to promote its new album, it will be performing not simply a string of gigs but a running experiment in music-industry finance.

Today Korn is expected to announce an unorthodox deal with the nation's biggest concert promoter that advances the band's strategy of turning itself into an investment vehicle and redefining how the revenue pie is split in the music business.

Under the terms of the arrangement, Live Nation Inc. will share far more than is typical for a promoter, which normally receives a cut of the band's box-office sales but little else. Instead, the company is paying roughly $3 million for an estimated 6 percent stake in the band's box office, licensing, publishing, merchandise and CD revenue for its recently released album, "See You on the Other Side," and its next album, music industry executives involved in the deal say. Live Nation will also be the exclusive promoter of Korn's concerts in the United States.

"We really are stepping 50 feet back and looking over the next four to six years at the profitability of the overall Korn business," said Michael Rapino, chief executive of Live Nation. "It's new ground for all of us."

The deal reflects a new twist on relationships that generally involve only two players. Music acts sign contracts with record labels to distribute their CD's; the acts strike separate deals with concert promoters to market their live performances. The labels and promoters historically have not shared in each other's earnings, but under Korn's arrangement with Live Nation - and an earlier all-encompassing pact that the band struck with the music giant EMI Group - the money will flow into one shared pot. The three-way partnership is the latest example of how the various players in the music business are scrambling to keep pace with a shifting market.

Amid a sharp decline in album sales, record labels are hunting for new sources of revenue. Similarly, as the concert industry faces a drop in attendance, promoters like Live Nation - formerly the live-event division of Clear Channel Communications and recently spun off - are also looking outside their traditional field for extra cash.

For their part, recording artists are trying to find better ways to compete for fans in a marketplace crowded with other acts and competing forms of entertainment like video games. Korn's gamble is that its business partners will be more inclined to spend money promoting the band and will allow the artists more flexibility if their fortunes are tied together.

"For the promoter, this is about them having the comfort of knowing that any sacrifices or investments they make, even in touring, let alone in everything else, will come back to them," said Jeff Kwatinetz, a founder of the Firm, the management company that brokered the deal with Live Nation. "Instead of thinking about 'How do we get back $200,000 on the Fresno show?' they're thinking, 'How do we maximize the Korn brand?' They're more likely to invest dollars, ideas, thinking time."

Fans can expect to see more elaborate marketing tie-ins that involve multiple products, like free Korn song downloads with the purchase of a concert ticket.

But some industry figures expressed skepticism.

Jerry Mickelson, an owner of the Chicago-based concert promoter Jam Productions, who recently fought a legal battle with Clear Channel, said, "Any promoter already has plenty of incentive to work hard to sell tickets because of the guarantee" - the upfront fee that a promoter typically pays a band to appear. Live Nation's investment, he added, "is just a way for the promoter to attempt to monopolize the live entertainment industry and cut out competitors."

Mr. Rapino strongly disputed that, saying the corporation's investment was aimed at exploring new business models, not squeezing out rivals. In the standard concert deal, a promoter agrees to pay the performer an upfront fee or a split of future ticket sales, usually 80 percent to 90 percent of the night's box-office sales. In the Korn arrangement, Live Nation will pay for the band's production expenses - but instead of offering a predetermined appearance fee, it will put all of the ticket revenue into the partnership to be split. The corporation will also throw in a portion of the money it makes from ancillary sources, like beer and refreshment sales, in certain instances. (Such revenue is rarely shared with performers.)

There is little indication so far that the business structure devised by Korn will become the industry standard, but there are a few other examples of such arrangements. Many artists' representatives shake their heads at the prospect of sharing revenue from, say, concert tickets with a record label, because they assert that executives who sell CD's lack any expertise in marketing concert seats.

David Munns, chief executive of EMI Recorded Music's North American unit, dismisses such claims.

"I'm not going to manage their tour," he said. "I'm not telling you I want to be in the promotion business. You're not going to hear of me suddenly buying a merchandise company. I just want a piece of that income."

Mr. Munns declined to give details of the company's arrangement with Korn, but executives involved in the transaction said EMI last year agreed to make upfront payments to Korn of $25 million (partly an advance against future earnings). In exchange, EMI received a 30 percent stake in the band's licensing, ticket sales and other revenue sources. The deal was struck after Korn left its previous label, Sony Music.

Before that, EMI committed to a deal with an Irish vocal group, Celtic Woman, in which it receives a share of revenue from various sources, including ticket and merchandise sales, in addition to CD's. Three years earlier, it reached a revenue-sharing deal with the pop singer Robbie Williams.

In a similar vein, Interscope Records, an arm of the music conglomerate Universal Music Group, developed a deal with a newly created pop act, the Pussycat Dolls, in which the label shares in the artists' cosmetic line and earnings from a new themed Las Vegas nightclub bearing their name.

While EMI and now Live Nation are rolling the dice on an established American act, it is one whose commercial clout has appeared to be on the wane. Korn's best- selling album, 1998's "Follow the Leader," sold an estimated 3.8 million copies in America, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. Its last new studio album, "Take a Look in the Mirror," released in 2003, has sold roughly 1.1 million copies.

Its touring prospects in recent years have appeared uncertain, too. Korn generated more than $15 million in annual ticket sales in its heyday a few years ago, playing more than four dozen dates a year, according to Billboard. A shorter stint in 2004 generated less than $4 million.

Live Nation executives say the band will play 30 to 40 concert dates in America this year, kicking off the tour in six to eight weeks.

Its first CD under the new structure, "See You On the Other Side," has enjoyed a strong start, selling an estimated 530,000 copies in the United States since its Dec. 6 release through EMI's Virgin Records label.

Mr. Munns said the investment by Live Nation validates the concept of such revenue-sharing bets and added that the arrangement had already shifted the music company's approach to selling Korn's music. In the Britain, for example, where the band's CD sales have been softer, EMI has devoted extra money to marketing on the notion that its efforts will pay dividends when the band tours there. "The more you focus on it now, on the front end, the more the touring is going to work," he said. "We certainly are more conscious today about the value in the brand, rather than just looking at record sales."

That is the hope of the band's management.

"We've taken the biggest promoter and one of the biggest record labels and incentivized them to think long term and to think career about our band," Mr. Kwatinetz said. "We believe long-term career planning is what's been lacking in the business. We believe that's part of the solution to the woes the music business is experiencing."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/ar...ic/11band.html





Coming Soon to TV Land: The Internet, Actually
John Markoff

What would a world with television coming through the Internet be like?

Instead of tuning into programs preset and determined by the broadcast network or cable or satellite TV provider, viewers would be able to search the Internet and choose from hundreds of thousands of programs sent to them from high-speed connections.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show here this week, a future dominated by Internet Protocol TV, or IPTV, seemed possible, maybe even inevitable.

Giants like Yahoo and Google turned their attentions to offering new Internet programming. Hardware companies like Intel introduced chips and platforms that can push videos sent via an Internet connection to living room screens. And Microsoft looked for alliances that would allow its software to dominate living rooms as well as the home office.

"At one level it's clear that the dam has broken," said Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel. "There's an inevitable move to use the Internet as a distribution medium, and that's not going to stop."

The rapid emergence of the consumer electronics and computer companies as Internet video providers is certain to challenge the control of the cable, telephone and satellite companies, which seek to dominate the distribution of digital content to the home. Competition has intensified as more consumers have upgraded to digital televisions.

Indeed, the easy availability of on-demand content over the Internet is certain to accelerate consumer expectations that they will have more control over digital video content, both to watch programs when they want as well as to move video programs to different types of displays in different rooms of the home.

"Appointment-based television is dead," said William Randolph Hearst III, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. "The cable industry is really in danger of becoming commoditized."

Mr. Hearst sits on the board of Akimbo, a provider of an Internet service that permits users to download video content via the Internet to a set-top box digital video player. This week, Akimbo announced its first mainstream content deal to enable its customers to download Hollywood movies for later viewing on their televisions.

In the battle for the living room, cable, satellite, and increasingly, phone companies are trying to defend their turf by offering more choice through an array of content in video-on-demand programs.

But fending off the Internet's openness will be a struggle, one that the online companies themselves lost years ago.

At the onset of the dot-com era, large online service companies like AOL, Compuserve and MSN tried to lock customers into electronic walled gardens of digital information.

But it quickly became apparent that no single company could compete with the vast variety of information and entertainment sources provided on the Web.

The same phenomenon may well overtake traditional TV providers. Potentially, IPTV could replace the 100- or 500-channel world of the cable and satellite companies with millions of hybrid combinations that increasingly blend video, text from the Web, and even video-game-style interactivity.

Though still new, IPTV is already commercially available in limited areas both in the United States and internationally. To date, the new digital Internet content is hard to find and of uneven quality. Moreover, the consumer electronics industry is still struggling to complete copy protection agreements with Hollywood and other content providers.

But the advantage of IPTV is that it can potentially be deployed at lower cost than current cable television systems and can offer consumers features like the ability to record several programs simultaneously without having to add costly additional tuners. (And IPTV can potentially record many streams if bandwidth is available.)

A prototype of one feature of the Microsoft IPTV service, known in the industry as a matrix channel, allows several baseball games to be viewed simultaneously along with textual information like player statistics.

Internet search is also likely to play a defining role in shaping IPTV, according to executives attending the consumer electronics show.

Both Yahoo and Google announced plans to distribute video at the show, and Yahoo showed a new application intended to be used with a high-definition television to ease the search for video content, stream digital video and permit users to keep their personal information and files in sync whether they are viewing a PC, TV or mobile phone.

Proponents stress that the open- video Internet is still in its infancy and the battle may not be completely joined until a new generation of faster Internet connections reach the home. This is because to stream digital video requires about 1.5 megabits of bandwidth to send conventional NTSC video and from 6 to 8 megabits to send high-definition video.

Currently broadband data rates in the United States reach just 1.5 megabits or less, but those speeds are beginning to rise after years of delay as D.S.L. and cable companies upgrade their plant and equipment with fiber optic lines.

There are powerful companies that are now anxious to reach homes without being subjected to special content arrangements with D.S.L., cable and satellite providers.

They are companies like Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, with all of them beginning to make available an ever-widening array of video content that looks more like a world of five million channels rather than 50 or even 500.

On Thursday, Intel introduced its new ViiV computer design that is intended to bring the abilities of the personal computer to the living room. ViiV is a set of computer hardware and software technologies that will go inside computers and set-top boxes.

Several hundred consumer electronics and computer companies announced plans to build ViiV-based systems, and Mr. Otellini said that more than 100 companies, including AOL, ESPN, MTV, NBC and Turner Broadcasting, would offer digital content for ViiV-based systems.

In his presentation at the consumer show Wednesday, Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, said that its home television Media Center version of Windows would be available for the new ViiV computers.

The logjam that has prevented such digital content delivery deals has been broken, Mr. Gates said, because the consumer electronics industry has now begun to reach so-called managed-content copyright protection agreements with Hollywood.

Moreover, many industry executives expect Steven P. Jobs to extend iTunes video service of Apple Computer from his company's portable iPods into the living room, possibly as early as next week at the company's annual MacWorld Exhibition in San Francisco.

Microsoft is also cooperating with two of the largest telephone service providers. After spending more than a decade courting the cable industry, with a plan that was originally called Cablesoft, Microsoft shifted allies and is now introducing its technology with telephone service providers.

Last fall, both AT&T, formerly SBC, and Verizon began limited introductions of Microsoft's version of IPTV.

Still, critics charge that the telephone companies are intentionally crippling the Internet capabilities of their services to appear much like traditional closed cable offerings.

"They're trying to construct their own separate world to keep their walled garden," said Robert Frankston, a personal computer industry pioneer and former Microsoft researcher.

The growing tension has begun to show in the objections of existing D.S.L. and cable providers that are threatening to create surcharges for Internet content providers as well as the prospect of the deployment of a two-tiered Internet in which favored customers would in effect have special high-performance lanes reserved for their use.

"They believe that if you control the user interface you make more money than if you are a dumb pipe," said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, the Internet music and video service provider.

Microsoft executives defend the way in which the telephone companies are deploying the company's IPTV technology, saying that if consumers are exposed to the chaos and uneven quality of the open Internet, it is likely to undermine the development of the new services.

"You need to begin with something that is easy to use and not overwhelming," said Christine A. Heckart, marketing general manager for Microsoft's TV division. "If we do this well you will have an experience much like TV today, only better."

She acknowledges that today's Internet generation may be far more receptive to a more interactive experience than traditional TV and eager not to be fenced in by their television service providers.

Microsoft has an early lead in offering IPTV technology both to the industry and to consumers, but at the electronics show this year Intel showed significant independence and introduced its own software features including digital video recording abilities with its ViiV platform.

Both companies, however, are trying to change the nature of television by making it possible for small start-ups to compete with giant networks by making available content that has never before been able to reach a global audience.

One such company is International Television Networks Inc. of Laguna Niguel, Calif. It recently struck an agreement with the National Lacrosse League to broadcast all of the league's games as well as customized player descriptions.

The company has adopted a strategy of making video content available for specialized markets, which was previously not possible using traditional television broadcasting technology.

"I can do everything a cable company can do," said David Koenig, the company's founder and chief technology officer, "but I will have 100,000 channels."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/te...y/07video.html





Google Ups Ante In Online Video Gold Rush
May Wong

Google Inc. is upping the ante in the online video gold rush, allowing content owners to set their own prices in a bid to create a more flexible alternative to Apple Computer Inc.'s pioneering iTunes store.

Google's planned video expansion, announced Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show, already has lined up commitments to sell thousands of downloads, including recent television broadcasts of popular CBS shows and professional basketball games, as well as vintage episodes from series that went off the air decades ago. A launch date for the expansion has not been released.

"It's the biggest marketplace of content that was previously offline and is now brought online," said Jennifer Feikin, director of Google Video.

Since Apple began selling video downloads for its iconic iPod in October, a flurry of companies have joined forces to distribute TV programming or other video content. The company says it currently offers more than 3,000 music videos and 300 television shows for sale.

Google's flexible pricing model sets its service apart.

Apple dictates all the pricing in its iTunes store, charging $1.99 for each video download and 99 cents for each song downloaded. The restrictions already have caused considerable consternation in the music recording industry and eventually could trigger a backlash on the video side.

With Google's marketplace, content suppliers can name their own price, from zero on up. The content owners who charge for video downloads must share 30 percent of the revenue with Google.

The video providers have the option of offering content on a download-to-own or download- to-rent basis.

In a sign that content owners will likely pursue different approaches through Google Video, the National Basketball Association will sell broadcasts of its games one day after the event for $3.95. Meanwhile, public television staple Charlie Rose will post his interviews the day after a broadcast, allowing a free streaming for the first 24 hours then making it downloadable afterward for 99 cents each. Meanwhile, CBS is selling episodes of its popular "CSI" and "Survivor" series at the standard iTunes price of $1.99 per download.

Although Google's service allows content owners more pricing freedom, it isn't necessarily as liberating for users.

While all of videos downloaded through Apple can be transferred onto a portable player - albeit only its own iPod - for on-the-go viewing, that won't be true at Google's service.

Google has developed its own copy protection technology that so far prevents content owners from moving their video downloads to a mobile playing device. In instances where the content provider adopts Google's copy protection scheme, watching a video sold through Google will require users to be online so they can log on and view it via the company's video player. CBS and the NBA are among the content owners adopting Google's copy protections.

However, if a content owner posts unrestricted video on Google, the user could move the video onto pretty much any portable device. Charlie Rose is among those offering unprotected video.

In another distinction from iTunes, Google Video so far works only on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows-based PCs and not yet on Apple's Macintosh computers.

By relying on its own proprietary copy-protection technology, Google threatens to compound the frustration that some consumers feel when they buy songs from one online source like the iTunes store, only to discover the music can't be played on an incompatible gadget such as Creative Technologies' Zen player.

Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff offered a possible explanation for Google's decision: "It's arrogance."

A majority of new media players and media centers, other than Apple's and Sony's devices, are built to work with Microsoft's copy-protection technology - a setup that most entertainment companies have embraced.

"So now Google is telling Toshiba and others, 'No, you have to implement ours.' It's just crazy," Bernoff said.

Other than that potential weakness, Google appears to be laying the foundation to become a future entertainment hub along with rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft's MSN, said Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin.

Yahoo is widely expected to extend the range of its video offerings, although chief executive Terry Semel didn't announce any new initiative on that front during a Friday speech at CES.

"Yahoo and Google will both offer video, and I think at the end of the day, video is what the Web wants," Semel said in an interview afterward. "The opportunities are quite large for all the Internet players."

At the show, Semel unveiled a software platform that he said would allow Yahoo users to view customized content, including video, on Web-connected televisions and cell phones.

If Google's Video proves popular, it could help the company lessen its dependence on Internet advertising, which accounted for virtually all of its estimated profit of $1.5 billion last year. Some industry analysts view Google's lack of financial diversity as its Achilles' heel.

Hoping to build upon the popularity of its Internet-leading search engine, Google introduced its test version of its video service last June. Until Friday, it was almost exclusively a collection of home videos viewable for free through a live stream online.

Despite its limitations, Google Video saw a 58 percent increase in traffic compared to the previous month, from 1.6 million to 2.6 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen/ NetRatings. That accounted for about 3 percent of Google's traffic in November.

Besides programming from CBS, the NBA and Charlie Rose, the list of other video material that will be sold through Google includes: old episodes from "I Love Lucy," "The Twilight Zone," and "The Brady Bunch;" music videos from Sony BMG; and historic video from Getty Images.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DE FAULT





Google and Yahoo Aim at Another Screen
Saul Hansell

Two ascending Internet giants, Google and Yahoo, are to make plain today that they intend to move aggressively beyond the Internet browser and onto the television screen.

The two companies, already the most popular services for searching and organizing the vast information on the World Wide Web, want to perform the same function for television, which will increasingly be delivered over the Internet.

Indeed, much of the innovation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where top executives of both companies are speaking today, revolves around video gadgets of all sizes that connect online to new programming services.

Both Yahoo and Google have emerged as potent threats to television networks because they are drawing ad dollars to their existing sites. And they are poised to cause further disruption if they can establish themselves as major players in advertising on Internet video.

Moreover, Google and Yahoo want to play a role in the emerging market for paid downloads of video programming, a market pioneered in 2005 by Apple Computer, which introduced a video iPod player and video downloads priced at $1.99 from ABC, NBC and other sources.

One of those speaking today in Las Vegas, Terry S. Semel, Yahoo's chief executive, said in an interview yesterday that he would unveil an initiative called Yahoo Go to extend the company's personalized services - from weather forecasts to e-mail - across multiple devices, from televisions to cellphones.

Most significant, the company is to introduce free software - designed for computers hooked up to television sets - that will compete with the Windows Media Center of Microsoft.

This software will allow viewers to use a television set, not merely a computer screen, to see any of Yahoo's offerings of video content - from music videos to original news reports - and the more than one million video clips in its video search service. It will offer a TV program guide, similar to those offered on digital cable services, but Yahoo's version will include reviews and ratings of shows from its users.

Google's plans will be laid out by one of its two founders, Larry Page. A Google spokesman declined yesterday to discuss Mr. Page's speech. But several executives briefed on the company's plans said that he would announce a way to allow content producers to charge fees for Google users to watch programs on their PC's - either as downloads for later viewing or as streaming files.

Those briefed on the plans said Google would announce that CBS and the National Basketball Association would sell programming through its service, which will also be available to smaller video producers. Google's video plans were reported yesterday by The Wall Street Journal.

CBS is expected to charge $1.99 for episodes of current prime-time programs and possibly less for older programs, an executive briefed on its plans said.

In contrast, Yahoo is to offer free advertising-supported video at first, but it will start selling downloads later this year, Mr. Semel said. "Video content on Yahoo today attracts a great deal of interest from advertisers," he said. "We are enabling our users to see video for free."

Google has said it hopes to enter the video advertising business, but advertising is not part of its current service, an executive briefed on its plans said.

CBS has not agreed to sell its programs through Apple, but it may do so later, an executive briefed on its plans said. Its deal with Google is not exclusive.

Google plans to use its own software that will allow providers like CBS to limit how many copies can be made of a downloaded file. As a result, users of Google will not be able to download such protected content to portable devices.

Apple has not allowed other companies to use its own content-protection software. Most other portable video devices use protection software from Microsoft, which Google does not support. Google will allow unprotected content to be downloaded to portable devices, a person briefed on its plans said.

Yahoo's software for TV's will run on any computer that runs Windows XP and any of the forthcoming devices that use Intel's new Viiv technology. While it can be run on a computer, it will be designed to be operated by a user watching television with a remote control. The interface will be simpler and have larger type than a typical Web page.

Yahoo will initially focus on using the television to display video, photographs and some information like movie times and sports scores. A later version will add e-mail and instant messaging. The software will also allow users to record television programs onto the computer, much as users do with a TiVo recorder.

While Google is not introducing its own software for television sets, PC's that are already linked to TV's, like those that use Windows Media Center technology, will be able to play video from Google's service on large screens.

Both Google and Yahoo are also announcing deals with makers of cellphones that expand the services they make available to wireless users and make them more prominent.

Google announced yesterday that Motorola would start to make several wireless telephone models with dedicated buttons that will link to a version of Google's Web site formatted for cellphones, said Nikesh Arora, Google's vice president for European operations. No wireless carriers have agreed to deploy these phones yet.

Yahoo will introduce software meant to add functions to some phones by Nokia and Motorola, and Cingular Wireless has agreed to sell the Nokia versions in some markets in the United States. It will also be available in 10 European countries.

On some Nokia phones, the Yahoo software will automatically synchronize information on the telephone with information stored on Yahoo's Internet site. That means that when users change someone's phone number on Yahoo's site, their phones will automatically be reprogrammed with the new number.

Similarly, if they take a photograph with a camera phone, the pictures will automatically be uploaded to Yahoo's photo service. As a result, Yahoo's service can recreate all the information on a new phone if the old one is lost.

Yahoo will not charge for these services, but users will have to buy a compatible phone and pay for a wireless plan that allows for data transfer. Yahoo will offer a more limited service for Motorola phones.

Yahoo and Google are also expanding their efforts to offer computer software that runs even if people are not browsing the Internet. Yahoo will introduce a program called Yahoo Go Dashboard that runs on the edge of a computer screen and displays a range of information.

This is similar to the Google Desktop software introduced last year, which also offers various feeds of information and search functions.

Desktop software is important for both companies because it puts their brands and especially their search functions in front of users throughout the day. Advertising on Web searches provides most of Google's revenue and is vital to Yahoo as well.

This software also provides a way to combat Microsoft, which is expected to integrate its new Web search service into its coming Windows Vista operating system.

Indeed, Mr. Page will also introduce a service called Google Pack, which will allow users to install software from a range of companies from a single download. These include Google's desktop, instant message and Google Earth mapping programs as well as the Firefox browser, the Real Player from Real Networks and the Norton antivirus software from Symantec.

These programs are largely alternatives to software from Microsoft but are not integrated.

Yahoo is trying to expand into television and other devices largely by offering users a more customized experience, Mr. Semel said. "We know who you are and where you are coming from," he said. "And we can show you what matters to you, whether it's your photos or sports or music."

Ken Belson and John Markoff contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/te.../06online.html





Local news

Busy TV Fans Embrace Video Downloads
Heather Barr

Like everyone with a busy life, Pete Puccio and his friends don't always have time to watch one of their favorite TV shows, "Lost," when it airs Wednesday nights on ABC.

They could buy the first season of episodes on DVD, but Puccio's roommate didn't even leave the house to do that.

For about $2 an episode, he downloaded "Lost" episodes onto his computer from Apple's iTunes. Now the guys can watch the drama about plane crash survivors on a deserted island whenever and wherever they want.

Puccio, 25, of Danbury, likes having the option of watching his favorite shows whenever and wherever he wants.

He's not alone. In a trend that's gained steam in recent weeks, more television shows are becoming available on the Internet.

The "NBC Nightly News" streams after 10 p.m. each night on MSNBC. At iTunes Music Store (www.apple.com/itunes/), you can find and download shows from NBC, the Sci Fi Channel, USA Network, ABC and Disney.

Today, the battle likely will be joined by Google.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the giant search engine will let consumers buy video over the Internet from CBS, the National Basketball Association and other providers.

Google began making free video available last year, offering everything from amateur footage of a kid falling off a roof to the premiere episode of the television show "Everybody Hates Chris," which broadcasts on UPN, a CBS Corp. network.

The search engine always planned on making some of its video available for a fee, through distribution arrangements with content partners. According to the Journal, Google plans to announce deals with CBS and the NBA today at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez would not confirm or deny the report, saying only the company had "a number of exciting announcements that we look forward to sharing in detail" during a speech today by Google co-founder Larry Page.

The Journal said it did not know what content owners may charge for the video through Google.

Bryan Symons, 22, of Brewster, N.Y., said one of his friends bought and downloaded a couple episodes of "Lost" from iTunes. He said if he had a video iPod, he could download videos from places like Google. He sees downloading as the next logical next step for people who use a TiVo device to record shows and watch them when it's convenient.

A big fan of football and basketball, Terry Fitzgerald, 26, said he could see downloading sporting events if he wasn't able to see them on television. "I could see it could be popular," said Fitzgerald, who was shopping in Circuit City in Danbury on Thursday.

Sometimes Gino Damasco forgets to tape his favorite shows, such as "Desperate Housewives." He said the Google service would be good for catching up on the racy drama, or for watching presidential speeches or other news events he missed.

Damasco, 41, of New Milford, said he likes being able to watch things when he wants to and has time to.

"I think it is amazing," said Damasco of technology allowing people to download shows and videos to watch at their leisure. "Now you don't have to miss anything."

But, Adriane Cavanna, 27, of New Milford, said she is more than willing to wait for the reruns if she misses a TV show. But she said people like her husband, who downloads music to his iPod, could download shows that he missed.

"It is more convenient," she said of people downloading TV shows. "I could see it catching on."
http://leisure.newstimeslive.com/sto...=Entertainment





Will Time Trax Product Launch Rattle the RIAA, Again?

TraxCatcher Rips Near Perfect Individual MP3 Tracks from FM Radio
Press release

Time Trax Technologies, whose hardware and software products allow people to easily deaggregate radio broadcasts to timeshift and build free music libraries, announced a new product line at CES today. The Time Trax TraxCatcher is an FM radio dock with an MP3 player that anyone can use to 'tune and rip.'

Using the TraxCatcher is as simple as plugging it into the wall, tuning your favorite station as you would any FM radio and returning several hours later to an MP3 player of near perfectly cut, high quality MP3 files. You can grab and go with the MP3 player or use its completely integrated USB 2.0 connection to drop them on your computer to have them tagged with artist and song information and sorted for you.

The first model, the TraxCatcher Classic is designed as a very simple and easy to use entry-level product. Pre-sales begin today on the Time Trax website and delivery is slated for March 2006. Its MSRP will be $159.99.

The product line will range in price from $99.99 to $499.99. Additional features planned include HD radio, digital inputs and outputs, USB connectivity, versatile MP3 docking capabilities, clock-radio functionality and satellite radio receiver integration.

"Time Trax is interested in a productive dialogue with the recording industry to build successful and lucrative business models around reality," commented Time Trax CEO Elliott D. Frutkin. "We want input as we shape our future. We aren't interested in being a rogue trailblazer. Time Trax wants to be a welcome partner to the recording industry."

As part of its core corporate beliefs, Time Trax integrates technology and implements strategies to promote the 'fair-use' of content. For example, radio serial numbers are embedded into MP3 recordings to discourage file sharing and trading, as it provides the ability to trace the originator of the file. In 2006 the company will also add value-added services and features to its products requiring an annual subscription fee.

At the TimeTrax CES booth (# 70956 at Sands), attendees will be able to experience a live demo of the TraxCatcher as well as its satellite radio products.

About Time Trax Technologies Corp.

Time Trax makes products that let you record content from radio broadcasts as individual MP3 files. Time Trax products support satellite radio and FM broadcast radio. Time Trax is changing the landscape of traditional radio broadcast programming, so that consumers now create programming themselves, deciding what they listen to when they listen to it.

Whether through the Time Trax 10-event scheduler in its Recast product or the soon-to-be-released recommendation service, TimeTrax users control their personalized content.

TimeTrax was conceived in 2004 by Toronto, Canada software developer G. Scott MacLean. www.timetraxtech.com

Multimedia Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=5051688

http://biz.yahoo.com/bwml/060106/65642.html?.v=1





Nareos launches new p2p monitoring service
Press Release

US-Israeli start-up Nareos, a digital content commerce solutions provider, has announced the launch of PeerMind, a sophisticated online peer to peer (p2p) data mining service.

PeerMind provides detailed reports, online chart data and custom research based on 24/7 monitoring of major p2p networks.

File-sharing is a fast-growing outlet for entertainment fans worldwide and an important source of trend information for record labels, moviemakers, software publishers, and other industry players. Nareos's client base includes record labels and digital content distributors.

Nareos currently publishes data about eDonkey2000 and Gnutella networks, used by file-sharing programs such as eMule, eDonkey, Shareaza, LimeWire, BearShare, Ares and dozens of others. Additional protocols like FastTrack and BitTorrent will be added soon.

Nareos is headquartered in Beverly Hills with R&D facilities in Israel.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/-nareo...an/1279200.htm





Trade Group Seeks to Facilitate Content and Technology Sector Collaboration
Press Release

The Distributed Computing Industry Association ( www.DCIA.info ), a trade organization with seventy-two ( 72 ) Members representing peer-to-peer ( P2P ) software providers, content rights holders, and service- and-support companies, today announced a resolution to support digital watermarking for the protection of entertainment content authorized for P2P distribution, and the formation of a new P2P Digital Watermark Working Group ( PDWG ) to foster its implementation. ( A copy of the resolution is attached ),

Digital watermarking, in the case of file-sharing environments, is the process by which imperceptible data is integrated into content during post-production that enables identification of such content as it is being redistributed. Successful commercial deployments of watermarked-based systems by the music, movie, and advertising industries have already had a significant impact on pre-release infringement and monitoring/reporting accuracy.

“We invite leading content and technology companies to join our Members in establishing business standards and practices for the use of digital watermarking to help secure licensed content in the steadily growing P2P distribution channel,” said DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty.

Qualified representatives are encouraged to call 888-864-3242 or e-mail PDWG@dcia.info for more information or to sign-up to participate in the new working group.
http://i-newswire.com/pr53876.html





Linking a Device to a Gadget That's Wired to a Gizmo
Richard Siklos

THE average American household now owns some 25 consumer electronics products - televisions and stereos and high-tech gimcracks of every imaginable flavor. That statistic brings that industry's annual convention in Las Vegas last week into stark relief. Some 130,000 people moved around a noisy, pulsing display space, with thousands of products covering a land mass that seemed roughly equivalent to Norway's.

If a company wants its products to be among that 25, it is going to have to hustle.

And, face it, even getting an order from the retailers' buyers trawling the floor is far from a guarantee of success in stores. Notably absent from the party, as always, is the iPod purveyor Apple Computer. It holds its exclusive annual gathering for the faithful, Macworld, beginning Monday in San Francisco.

Which is why it was striking that of the five keynote speeches at the Las Vegas conference - the ones where visionary chief executives tell you where the industry is headed - only one was delivered by an executive who could argue that his company's main business is good old consumer gizmos. That was Sir Howard Stringer of Sony, and more on him in a moment.

Bill Gates of Microsoft, Paul Otelini of Intel, Terry Semel of Yahoo and Larry Page of Google rounded out the list, underscoring that a gadget is only as good as what you can do with it. And all five of these titans are pursuing a singular goal of media domination: to be all things to all people, in a world where the people have all the control over how they communicate and consume media.

That battleground for things like who makes the biggest flat-screen TV with the highest-definition picture was, of course, in full force at the show. But it is now only one of two battlegrounds. The other - call it branded ubiquity - is about who controls the interaction between the consumer and that gadget and, more and more, all the other gadgets in the house as they become interconnected.

Increasingly, multiple gizmos live in a single box. Just as iPods can show videos and photographs, new generations of mobile telephones can store hundreds of songs but also take a heck of a photo or get access to a video and Web content. And there are, of course, Microsoft's Windows Media Centers and other "digital lifestyle" devices that will be powered by its software, or Intel's new Viiv technology platform.

Now there are also nascent efforts by Google and Yahoo to extend their pole positions as gatekeepers to the Internet onto any kind of screen - mobile phones and televisions in particular - where they want to be for video what they are already for text, images and audio.

Victory on this branded-ubiquity battlefield can be far more subtle than having the year's top-selling cellphone. For example, one of last week's endless announcements concerned a deal between Panasonic and Comcast for a new set-top box that will be included by Panasonic with purchases of its new line of TV's by Comcast customers. The box will come with Comcast's on-screen programming guide already built in and ready to go. The big difference between this and past cable guides, Comcast's chief executive, Brian Roberts, explained to me, is that the Comcast-Panasonic viewer will be able to switch to any device or service hooked up to the TV through the Comcast guide - even things like DVD players or access to the Internet that may have nothing to do with Comcast.

The point is that after decades of push-and-pull between consumer electronics makers and distributors like cable companies, progress is being made around the notion that giving consumers a smooth way to navigate their media and reduce the number of remote controls and set-top boxes might help sell more TV's and cable service. "Finally, there is détente," Mr. Roberts said.

When it came time to snap some photos beside the mesmerizing 103-inch plasma screen that Panasonic was introducing, Mr. Roberts hopped up on stage and made sure that the images included the most breathtaking one he knows: Comcast's interactive guide.

AMID the growing drumbeat of digital upheaval, Sir Howard Stringer had what was really his coming-out party after being put in charge last March of turning around a slumping Sony. In a presentation that included some of the razzle-dazzle he honed in his days running the CBS television network, Sir Howard had some stars (the actor Tom Hanks, the "Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown) onstage with him, along with the latest products he hopes will be Sony's stars (Bravia flat-screen TV's, PlayStation Portables, Blu-Ray DVD players).

But most notable was Sir Howard's confident effort to show that Sony's vast product line, as well as its media assets, including Sony Pictures and the Sony/BMG music joint venture, have a unifying logic.

To that end, not only has Sir Howard appointed the company's first chief marketing officer, but last month he quietly poached a senior executive from Apple Computer, Tim Schaaff, to be Sony's first companywide software chief. This week in Hawaii, Sir Howard is gathering the company's 120 top software engineers to talk about ways to coordinate efforts among the variety of media players the company has, including the PSP, a new Sony Reader for electronic books, and the next iteration of the Walkman due out later this year - its latest attempt to take back some of the thunder the iPod has stolen.

Mr. Stringer argued that Sony's content assets uniquely position it to drive new digital products and content, but he has also learned that the pursuit of branded ubiquity can be a double-edged sword. When Sony-BMG had to recall 5.7 million CD's loaded with a flawed anti-piracy technology, Mr. Stringer said he was worried that other divisions would suffer. "We took quite a beating," he said, adding that the whole point of the effort was to protect artists' rights, not to limit consumers'. "We'll just have to tread very, very carefully," he said. "We have to walk the line at Sony between the needs of technology and the consumer, and the rights of the artist, which we feel very strongly about."

Sony was right to move swiftly to limit potential harm from the episode: if there was one thing abundantly clear amid all the techno-wizardry of the consumer electronics show, it is that the way people choose to organize and tap into their media is becoming as important as - and will have a bearing on - the machines they buy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/bu.../08frenzy.html





In Love With Reality Truly, Madly, Virtually
Michael Rush

THE word "virtual" has gotten a bum rap since it appeared a few centuries ago. It means "the same, but not really." It's a simulation, an adjunct to the real deal, like virtual temperature or virtual height.

How times change. Right before our eyes, this thing that we call the world has been irrevocably altered, along with the "reality" we have counted on. Virtual reality is so permeating our lives that one day soon we may find it impossible to distinguish the virtual from the real.

In fact, there are those who are already counting on it. From Peter Jackson's largely computer-based reimagining of the love story between the ape and the blonde to PlayStation's latest interactive bloodbath, producers of entertainment are promulgating the wizardry of the digital, and the public is falling for it.

Millions of people worldwide are now exchanging reality for virtuality. "Massively multi-player online role-playing games" are challenging movies as the go-to entertainment for the 18-35 crowd. (The "King Kong" version was released the same day as the film.) Ever larger numbers of poseurs are inventing alternative virtual personalities in chat rooms. Reality, it seems, is not all it's cracked up to be.

But whatever happened to the good old-fashioned goggles-and-joystick, immersive virtual reality of the mid-90's? Although the gear was cumbersome and fearsomely expensive, illusory full-body absorption into real and imagined universes through powerful computers, graphics and head devices at one point seemed irresistible. A 1993 show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, optimistically titled "Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium," sought to jump start what was thought to be the next big thing.

So why didn't it take off? John Ippolito, the show's curator, said, "V.R.'s original promise, to construct a ghostly realm where consciousness could roam free of the constraints of flesh, became socially obsolete."

But there was a bigger, more concrete problem: while cellphones with all the whistles cost as little as $99, virtual reality environments, like medium-priced New York condos, could set you back about $1.5 million.

Until now. Virtual reality is now available to artists for about $3,000. This is the kind of watershed moment that video art enjoyed in 1965, when portable video recording equipment became available at mass-market prices.

Software to create this art can also be secured free of charge from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where researchers at the Integrated Systems Laboratory under the direction of Hank Kaczmarski have created a portable virtual reality set-up developed specifically for artists. The open-source technology, known as Syzygy, is downloadable at www.isl.uiuc.edu. Others are also accessible through the University of Indiana's "John-e-box" system (www.avl.iu.edu) and at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria (www.aec.at).

It is no accident that the University of Illinois has been the force behind Canvas. In 1992, the virtual reality pioneers Dan Sandin, Tom DeFanti and Carolina Cruz-Neira created the prototypical large-scale virtual environment known as Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, at the university's Chicago campus. Whatever the thrills of Imax or 3-D horror movies, Cave's effects are exponentially greater. When you put on the active stereo glasses and step inside the six-walled cube, it's like diving into an ocean in another galaxy with everything around you crystal clear. Your body is fully engaged as your perceptions and sense of balance are challenged.

Though the effects are slightly less encompassing than those of its forebears, the Canvas experience is nonetheless transforming, at a fraction of the cost. With as few as two projectors ($1,000 each) fitted with polarizing filters ($300 each), an up-to-date desktop computer, three rear projection screens (optional) and the Syzygy program, Canvas is open for business (at www.canvas.uiuc.edu) for artists who want to take that next step into a medium that has been largely commandeered by military strategists and those with commercial backers. All the public needs is a pair of passive stereo glasses ($1) or datagloves ($20).

Rose Marshack, a multimedia artist/musician/programmer (weren't artists waiters in the old days?), calls Canvas "the missing link I've been waiting for, the opportunity to make new art from hardware." She and the novelist Rick Powers, a onetime MacArthur fellow, are using it to create what they call a 3-D "emotional travelogue" through the 20th century.

Not one to play second fiddle to an offspring, Mr. Sandin, the Cave innovator, has developed a transportable virtuality system. With one short computer tower, two laptops, two PowerPoint projectors and a folding rear-projector screen, he travels the world exhibiting his "tele-immersive" artworks, as they are called.

All of Mr. Sandin's projects involve multiple users. "EVL: Alive on the Grid" is his name for a series of virtual art-world experiences in which audiences can interact in shared virtual spaces. In "Looking for Water," the participants become emerged in an outer-space environment based on real-time satellite images. As the navigators proceed, they experience themselves falling to Earth and landing on an archipelago whose lakes are fashioned from 3-D images in videos Mr. Sandin made on a kayaking trip.

The creation or re-creation of a super photorealist world lies at the heart of most virtual reality artworks to date, which is problematic for some artists - the New York artist John Simon, for example, who creates his own software for non-immersive virtual realities. "Each of my artworks is a small world that evolves and changes with its own rules," he says of his displays, some of which are inspired by Mondrian. "These worlds are not based on real-world physics, but rather on color theory, rhythmic motion and automatic composition."

Mimicking the real is generally not what interests artists. Altering perception is. When Bruce Nauman, Michael Snow and Peter Campus turned to video technology in the 1960's, they did so to challenge viewers' expectations by tipping them off balance, providing an ambiguous experience rather than a familiar one.

Mr. Nauman's "Spinning Spheres" from 1970, for example, is a large, and, to that extent, immersive four-screen projection featuring a spinning steel ball. Its effect is truly dizzying. Experimental film artists of that period, including Hollis Frampton and Joyce Wieland, shared a similar fascination with perception-bending.

The seductions of virtual reality probably need to be resisted before truly masterly art can emerge from it. Kathleen Harleman, director of the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says she hopes that with Canvas, "artistic imaginations will match the technological innovations - artists will not just use the technology, but free it."

For the new-media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, who generated virtual worlds in her films "Conceiving Ada" (1997) and "Teknolust" (2002), "V.R. allows someone to enjoy a second life parallel to one's former reality," she said.

Virtual reality affords incomparable access to light, space, sound, sensation, perception, visualization and disruption, all ingredients in contemporary art. "The secret, however, isn't in the contraption," Mr. Ippolito said.

Of course not. It's in the concepts. The technology is available, but is waiting to be freed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/ar...gn/08rush.html





Microsoft Challenges Linux's Legacy Claims
Peter Galli

Editor's Note: This story is part one in a series of three stories about Microsoft's Linux and open-source lab.

Microsoft Corp.'s Linux and open-source lab on the Redmond campus has been running some interesting tests of late, one of which was looking at how well the latest Windows client software runs on legacy hardware in comparison to its Linux competitors.

While this may seem strange, given Microsoft's desire to upgrade every possible customer to the latest version of Windows, often resulting in a forced hardware upgrade as well, that strategy is far more effective in the developed world than among developing nations, Bill Hilf, who is director of Platform Technology Strategy at Microsoft and runs the lab, told eWEEK in a recent interview.

The tests, which found that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box, were done in part to give Microsoft the data it needed to effectively "put to rest the myth that Linux can run on anything.

It also shows us what applications can run on those machines and software, helping us better identify the needs and challenges of the public sector in those counties," Hilf said.

There was this pervasive belief that Linux could run on older PCs and that Windows could not, he said, adding that Microsoft thus decided to test this premise by installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Pro 9.2, Mandrake 10, Linspire 4.5, Xandros Desktop 3.0, Fedora Core 3, Slackware 10.1, Knoppix 3.7; Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 out-of-the-box on older hardware to see what happened.

"Quite simply, I wanted to examine this factually, using real customer scenarios to test this hypothesis: can Linux run on older hardware than Windows? In many developing countries and public institutions, such as a local library, they typically don't have deep technical staff, so they need to use software without lots of modification and customization. This is why our testing focused on installing modern distributions of Linux and modern versions of Windows 'out of the box'—simply putting the CD-ROM in and installing—on the legacy PC hardware in our lab," Hilf said.

Asked why he believed there was such a pervasive belief that Linux could run on older hardware, Hilf said the technical capability to modify Linux, to strip it down to run with a minimal set of services and software so that it could run on all sorts of hardware devices, had generated that larger assumption that any type of Linux distribution could run on all sorts of hardware devices.

"But the average customer is not a technical expert or a Linux developer, so they do not have the skill, or more importantly, the business need, to modify the operating system this way. You could argue that this is why Red Hat and Novell SUSE exist—to provide pre-configured and tested stacks of open-source software so their customers don't need to modify their systems at that level. That's the value proposition of these companies," he said.

"There has always been and there will always be a class of technical user that wants to do this level of modification to the operating system—and it's worth noting that, with the right amount of configuration, Windows CE can also run in much the same way on all sorts of small and old devices," Hilf said.

But Charlie Ungashick, the director of product marketing, Linux and Open Source at Novell, disagreed, saying that customers did not move to Linux not because of its performance against Windows on hardware.

"It's about a more adaptable support model, the flexibility you get from choosing your own distribution, and being able to customize the technology based on your needs—not just the ones Microsoft provides for. A benchmark which compares a standard installation of an operating system on bare hardware is not reflective of how servers and desktops are used in real-world IT," he said.

It's a fact that in most environments, IT will customize any operating system—desktop or server—for deployment in order to maximize the value of that operating system on the hardware they have, he said.

In the tests run in its lab, Microsoft found that most modern commercial Linux distributions could be installed successfully on systems with a Pentium processor, with 64MB of RAM and a minimum of 2GB of hard disk space.

"Memory prevented the successful installation on a typical 1997 system, as 32MB of memory is not enough to install most Linux distributions or to run desktop applications with acceptable performance. A memory upgrade could prolong the life of such hardware, but the cost and effort of locating old memory and installing it onto all corporate clients significantly reduces the potential savings," Hilf said.

Minimum requirements for office productivity performance on a Linux system were any Pentium II (PII) system with at least 64MB of RAM, he said, adding that playback of sound and video would typically require a PII 400 or better.

"This corresponds to an average PC issued between 1998 and 1999," Hilf said.

If Linux was installed on an older system, such as an average PC of 1997, then the desktop performance falls below what is typically acceptable for a common user, he said.

These results were necessary because one of the most frequently asked questions Microsoft gets from customers, particularly in the emerging market and public sectors, is what hardware they need to run operating systems.

"As a part of this conversation, one of the misperceptions we run into is that Linux can be easily configured to run on older hardware," he said.

"The fact of the matter is that if you look at popular desktop Linux distributions from Red Hat or Novell's SUSE, they match or exceed the system requirements of Windows XP. For example, Novell Linux Desktop 9 requires a minimum of 128MB physical RAM, which is identical to the requirements of Windows XP. If you compare OpenOffice 2.0 to the system requirements of Microsoft Office and again they are identical," he said.

As such, Hilf said he was not surprised that the minimum requirement for installing and using Windows XP out of the box was much the same for any other out-of-the-box modern commercial Linux distribution.

"Windows XP Pro compares well to any of the current commercial Linux desktop systems, and outperforms their competitors on hardware compatibility, desktop and multimedia performance," he said.

While Novell's Ungashick agreed that, as a comparison of "out of the box" functionality and resource requirements of modern operating systems, what Microsoft claimed may well be true, he noted that on the desktop, Linux is far more modular and customizable than Windows, allowing it to run on a broader spectrum of hardware.

The Novell Linux Desktop, which could be easily customized and deployed as a thin client, operating on older hardware with much greater efficiency.

Since the actual computing happened on the server, this drove down client-side resource requirements, giving IT a completely standardized desktop image which could be centrally managed: one which was impervious to Windows viruses, he said.

"With Microsoft, you would need to buy additional flavors of Windows XP and server-based terminal services software to do this. The incremental license fees and migration drive up overall costs compared to Linux. Also, Linux includes OpenOffice.org, which drives down the costs for businesses who want basic office functionality for desktop users," Ungashick said.

Linux is also easier to customize for server workloads like file servers and Apache Web servers while, with Windows, there "are hundreds of dependencies which drive up the amount of software needed to run a bare server: you need Internet Information Server, .Net framework, Windows Explorer, and so on. This drives up resource requirements. Unlike Windows, Linux can be easily configured to meet the specific need of the workload at hand," Ungashick said.

With all the recent hype about low-cost PCs, such as the $100 PC and the much-speculated-about Google PC, a question that begs to be asked is whether this changes the scenario for people in developing nations or people in the developed world.

Read more here about speculation surrounding the Google PC.

Also, more importantly, would the applications and software those users need be available and run on these machines? And would they not cost more than the hardware itself and thus blow the benefits of cheaper hardware out of the water?

Asked about this, Hilf would only say that "this is precisely the challenge Microsoft is working with the industry to address."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1908912,00.asp





Verizon VCast Music & Its Dirty Little Secret
Christopher Price

While everyone has been covering the new VCast music service we reported on months ago, we have been busy investigating some of the things Verizon may be brushing under the rug.

The VCast Music Store is an extension of Microsoft's PlayForSure system. VCast Music phones connect to Windows Media Player 10, and transfer DRM music as well as a customer's existing music library. Purchased music is $1/song (when purchased on the PC and sent to the phone), or, can be purchased on the handset and later transferred back to the PC for $2/song. However, the "dirty little secret" is that MP3 support is gone from these devices, VCast Music phones will not play MP3 files, regardless if in memory or on a memory card.

Verizon boasts that the LG VX-8100 can be updated to support the VCast music store. However, they may be sued for doing it. Adding the VCast Music Store to the VX-8100 completely disables the ability to play MP3s. Any VX-8100 running firmware V05 or lower will play MP3s, any running higher than that will not. This is a concern for Mac and Linux users who do not have access to Windows Media Player 10.

You may ask why this was done? As far as we can analyze, Microsoft made an agreement to enginner VCast Music phones as WMA-only devices, in order to lock out iTunes and other competition from most interaction with the device that does not involve burning, ripping, and integrating into Windows Media Player. This type of monopolist tatic is something that iTunes has avoided, but Windows Media Player embraces.

It appears Verizon knows internally that this is a liability. In a leaked internal memo from Verizon's corporate intranet, Verizon states that customers that want MP3 support should be issued a refurbished VX-8100 with V04 firmware. However, the average consumer is to not be informed that there is a difference between what VX- 8100s support formats, and customers are encouraged without prior warning that MP3 support will be lost with the V06 update. Presumably a Mac or Linux customer could be downgraded to V04 firmware.

In short, the impact of the "VCast Music Dirty Little Secret" may or may not imapct Verizon legally, however, it will cause consumer confusion, and Microsoft and Verizon's primary answer is to purchase a Windows Media Player 10 PC and "migrate" to it so your phone will work with your music.

Update: Many are sending in a Verizon claim that MP3s are supported. However, you need to read the statement carefully. The statement says that MP3s are supported provided you use Windows Media Player 10. What is actually happening is WMP10 is converting the MP3s to WMA, much like WMA files are converted to MP3 when sent to the iPod via iTunes. However, unlike the iPod and iTunes, there is no such solution for VCast Music phones on Mac or Linux.

In addition, viewers are also sending in Verizon press releases which promote the Samsung SCH-A950 and LG VX-8100 as having built-in MP3 player support via the memory card. Removing this feature via software update can easily be considered false advertising.
http://www.pcsintel.com/modules.php?...ticle&sid=1194





Canada to Sue Sony BMG Over DRM Albums
Drew Wilson

Three lawsuits were launched in Canada. One in Quebec ((English translation by Google) in November 2005. Recently, there were complaints from Ontario and British Columbia. All the moves are aimed at Sony BMG's rootkit technology as well as the MediaMax "spyware". The technology is found in music albums, as authorized by Sony BMG.

It's not just Sony BMG that is being targeted, but a number of related companies as well including First 4 Internet. Six named individuals and one John Doe in total are planning on taking legal action against the media giants and cohorts.

The lawsuits raise a number of issues concerning the DRM in the CD's. Complaints include: violation of the Canadian Privacy Act (since MediaMax gathers users' information, uses their internet connection and sends information about the user to a third party - Sony BMG), breach of contract (as the rootkit technology was not mentioned in the End User License Agreement), violation of the Competition Act, and a host of other claims against the technology in the albums.

One complaint states, "The Plaintiff, Jarred Pacholko, is a resident of Calgary, Alberta. He purchased music CDs encoded with MediaMax and/or XPC software, and played encoded CDs on his computer(s) resulting in the installation of software on his computer(s)"

The court order also states, "If you fail to defend this proceeding, judgement may be given against you in your absence and without further notice to you."

It seems that Sony's troubles over these albums are far from over.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1051





Spielberg Loses Out At The Push Of A Button
Xan Brooks

From Jaws and Close Encounters through to War of the Worlds, Steven Spielberg movies have rarely had trouble connecting with audiences in the UK.

But the man who put a capital B into the contemporary blockbuster, whose films have grossed billions and whose name is usually the stamp of glorious cinematic success, has been humbled. By a button. Pushed, it seems, mistakenly.

This has had a profound effect on the director's latest opus, at least as far as the members of Bafta are concerned. By tomorrow they have to nominate the films they think worthy of accolade, and Spielberg's Munich was expected to be among them, tipped for awards both in Britain and at the Oscars.

But the preview DVD sent to the academy's members is unplayable on machines used in the UK. As a result the majority of Bafta's 5,000 voters will not have seen the film, due to be released in Britain on January 27, and can hardly be expected to recommend it for acclaim.

Sara Keene at Premier PR, the company coordinating Munich's Bafta campaign, blamed the mistake on human error at the laboratory where the DVDs were encrypted. "Someone pushed the wrong button," she said. "It was a case of rotten bad luck." She insisted that the film's distributor, Universal, was not at fault.

The problem, it appears, was partly down to teething troubles with the limited edition DVD players issued last year to Bafta members. Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD "screeners", but prevent the creation of pirate copies. Munich screeners were encoded for region one, which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than region two, which incorporates most of Europe.

The faulty DVDs only reached Bafta members on Saturday, which meant the film had already missed out on the first round of voting on January 4. In a further twist to the tale, a previous batch mailed out before Christmas were reportedly held up by customs officials in the UK. "It's been quite a cock-up," said one Bafta member, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"We were promised that they were going to send screeners before Christmas, but they never arrived. Now we finally have a copy but there is no way we can watch it.

"The general feeling among members is that the film has now been shut out of the nominations simply because not enough people have actually had the opportunity to see the thing."

Having organised several London preview screenings of Munich before Christmas, Premier PR hastily scheduled three more for this week.

"The trouble is that Bafta members are scattered all over the country," the Bafta voter said. "We're not all based in London."

As arguably Spielberg's most controversial film to date, Munich is a dramatisation of the 1972 Olympic hostage crisis that resulted in the death of 11 Israeli athletes. The plot follows a hit squad from the Israeli secret service, Mossad, on the trail of the Palestinian Black September group behind the kidnappings.

The film has been criticised by Israeli officials for what is perceived as Spielberg's sympathetic attitude towards the Palestinian cause, and for allegedly equating Mossad's actions with those of the terrorists. Reviews in the US have largely been positive.

DVD screeners remain a vexed issue for distributors concerned about the potential for piracy. But the evidence suggests that they play a vital role in raising a film's profile among award voters.

"There are over 5,000 Bafta members," Ms Keene explained. "With the best will in the world, they don't all come to the preview screenings. Unless you send them DVDs it is really hard to get a film nominated."

This point was brought home last year when the distributor Entertainment took the decision not to provide Bafta voters with screeners of Million Dollar Baby. Clint Eastwood's boxing drama failed to gain a single nomination at the 2005 awards. One month later it scooped the major honours at the Academy Awards.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/stor...683771,00.html





Sky Offers P2P Film Downloads

News Corp.’s U.K. satellite television arm uses peer-to-peer techniques to give subscribers movies and sports downloads.

In the first major deployment of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology for consumer video downloads, United Kingdom satellite television firm Sky, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, said Tuesday it had made feature-length movies and sports available for download over the Internet.

More than 200 movies, including recent releases such as I, Robot and Spiderman, are to be available for no additional fee to Sky’s 8 million U.K. subscribers, by virtue of the bandwidth-strain reduction techniques of Silicon Valley startup Kontiki.

The offering followed a wave of video-over-broadband announcements and previews by a range of companies including Google, DirecTV, and Intel at the International Consumer Electronics Show conference in Las Vegas last week (see Net Giants in the Living Room, Google’s Software, Video Plan, Yahoo, Google Add New Choices, Intel: Chip Maker to Media Firm).

Opening Doors
Video downloads have been held up by bandwidth issues—the files are just too large to shove down the pipes—as well as movie studios’ concerns about piracy and cannibalizing existing revenue streams like theater tickets and DVD sales.

But peer-to-peer technology distributes the bandwidth strain among users by having them share files with each other.

Kontiki adds a layer of digital rights management (supplied by Microsoft or another outside provider) and control (including delayed delivery and usage reporting) so that content providers can enjoy efficiency while content owners can rest easy about piracy.

The settings on the Sky offering make files expire after a month and limit them to play only within the U.K.

That’s why Sunnyvale, California-based Kontiki is the choice of AOL, the BBC, and Sky, along with many enterprise customers, for video publishing and delivery, jumping ahead of competitors such as Red Swoosh and Rawflow.

The U.K has been at the forefront of the race to deliver legal video over P2P, with the BBC now losing out to Sky as its P2P delivery system takes its time getting out of beta.

“People have gone from being afraid to be first to afraid to be last,” Kontiki CEO Todd Johnson told Red Herring late last year (see Top 10 Trends: Internet Video).

Meanwhile, the Kontiki technology has been in working order for about 16 months, according to Scott Sahadi, Kontiki’s vice president of marketing and business development, in an interview Monday.

“There’s been a lot of illegal content downloaded, so we know [the audience] is there,” said Mr. Sahadi. “What’s happening is the content providers and the broadcasters are finally seeing there’s a business model, so they can distribute video to their existing customer base.”

He said pay-per-view, pay-per-download, and ad-supported deals were in the works.

Closing ‘the Window’
A close comparison for the new Sky offering is Starz’ recently announced Vongo service, according to Yankee Group analyst Michael Goodman. Vongo, which does not use P2P techniques, will make movies available for a $9.99 monthly subscription (see Starz Debuts Portable Video).

But P2P provides a back-end advantage for content providers, making it extremely cheap to deliver video. Mr. Goodman recommends that content providers should adopt the technique.

However, he added, Vongo may have the upper hand when it comes to a business model. “From a consumer’s perspective, [the Sky offering] is the same as Vongo, but Vongo is a new revenue stream for Starz,” he said.

That’s because Starz is firmly entrenched in the “windowing” system—which places contractual restrictions on when movies can be released to different venues—and it owns the electronic subscription rights to many movies.

In contrast, Sky is simply using movie downloads as a competitive edge rather than charging for the service. Mr. Goodman suggests that’s because Sky doesn’t have the rights to collect a fee for many movies.

Sky does benefit from its relationship to News Corp.’s other properties, which produce both movies and sports material, though Mr. Sahadi said the new service is to offer content from studios that are not Mr. Murdoch’s Fox.

Mr. Sahadi vouched for Sky’s offering, saying it had the “narrowest window” of any currently available service. But the paradigms are shifting. Mr. Sahadi hinted that a major content owner would team up with Kontiki to significantly “shorten the window” in the next three months.
http://www.redherring.com/Article.as...vie+Downloads#


DS Review: Sky by Broadband
Alan Jay

This is a project that Sky has been working on for almost a year, according to Sky’s developers. The service is available to anyone with two premium channels: a Sky Sports subscription gets you access to the sports streams, a Sky Movies subscription gets you access to the movie streams, and a Sky World subscription offers access to both.

To access the service, you log on to skybybroadband.com and input your address and Sky Card number. Each household may then download, onto a single PC, a copy of the Sky by Broadband software. The application looks very easy to use and it is a clean and simple interface that certainly looks very "Sky." Browsing the application is intuitive but I found that once downloaded there isn’t a single "play" menu but one each for Sport and Movies and I would have found a single unifying “Now Available for Playing” option useful. Sky have built an interesting "recommendation" system to tailor the choices it recommends to you; it isn’t anything sophisticated but, it provides some way to focus your attention and with move movies and sports clips coming this will be useful.

According to Sky, 30,000 people have already downloaded it. They are pitching it as another bonus content delivery platform similar to the positioning of Sky+ as a "loyalty bonus" for subscribers who take a minimum of two premium channels.

Currently, hundreds of titles are available on the service. Sky plans to expand this to thousands of titles of movies and sport content as the service develops. In the future Sky hopes to have some content from Sky One available, probably in the next 6 months and probably starting with their US imports. Live coverage of the UEFA Champions League is also expected to eventually join the service.

Once the software is downloaded and configured you select a film or sports clip to download. The program then does so in the background, with Sky estimating an hour for a 2 hour movie on a 2Mbps downstream connection. The files are between 800MB and 1GB in size and are compressed using Windows Media 9 Series codecs. In terms of resolution, the clips have around 540 lines although they plan to increase this by 20% for the next set of movies. In terms of bitrates, the movies are encoded with variable bitrates (running at around 800kbps), with sports running at a fixed 900kbps.

I had mixed experiences with upscaling the content to larger screens. On a 1920x1200 resolution screen with the content running full-screen, it looked less than flawless; however, at Sky's demo the content upscaled well. Therefore, I suspect that the quality of upscaling depends on where it is done, with TVs and projectors handling it better than doing it on the PC.

Files are distributed via Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology provided by Kontiki. The Kontiki software runs beneath the Sky interface as a service in Windows XP ("Kserve"). It loads at boot and acts as a peer when your PC is idle.

There are restrictions on what can be done with downloaded content. Burning it to a DVD is not permitted, and movies are automatically deleted after 30 days.

Sky by Mobile
At the same time as launching their broadband offering Sky have also extended their mobile offering; again, this can be accessed by existing Sky premium content customers (or registered Sky Bet customers). It provides a simple interface to text / image and downloadable video content; this will work across all service providers and phones with GPRS (2.5G) and 3G capabilities. In addition, Vodafone customers can for upgrade for £5 a month to the Sky TV streams offering on the 3G service. The long awaited remote programming of Sky+ will be available via this service when it becomes available later this year.

The Sky by Mobile content is available to Sky subscribers as a bonus to your subscription, but you do have to pay GPRS/3G download charges. The Vodafone TV service costs £5 a month (which is about half price). This is potentially a very interesting service offering access to Sky’s information wherever you are.
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/article/ds28064.html





They Want the World, And They Want It Now
Noreen O'Leary

NEW YORK In 1985, for the first time, more U.S. TV sets were sold with remote controls than without. It was an amazing taste of empowerment for media consumers: The ability to control one's viewing habits with a click of a button would have implications for everyone from TV programmers and advertisers to consumer-electronics companies and even makers of Barcaloungers and snack foods. Americans like to find their own open roads of experience, and it wasn't long before those early couch potatoes were on the run, navigating through cable- and satellite-delivered programs, time-shifting with VCRs, dashing about with cell phones and pecking out e-mails on laptops.

Fast-forward 20 years: If the remote ushered in the era of personalized technology, it seems a quaint precursor to things like video on demand, multi-application mobiles, MP3 players and satellite radio. This year proved to be a tipping point of sorts, as convenience has morphed into full-blown "on-demand" entitlement. It's nothing short of a technological revolution that has enabled ordinary Americans to seize ever greater control of how, when and where they consume and create media content.

"We're in [a media] era where the human is God. Consumers are now in control of content: We're consuming it, retransmitting it, creating it," says Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer at Publicis Groupe Media, who credits the shift to "plummeting hardware prices, elegant software that's become easy to use and access to an incredible amount of content."

All sorts of companies are genuflecting to that new master of the digital universe-content providers, like those in the entertainment industry; distributors, like cable and telecommunications companies; hardware and software manufacturers, like Apple; and content aggregators, like Yahoo! and Google. In what is still mostly a chaotic rush into the unknown, marketers remain largely on the fringe. There was a 25-year lag between when network TV reached mass consumption and when ad dollars caught up. It took 15 years for cable. After 10 years, is the same about to occur for the Internet? The indications are good: At year's end, as forecasters cut 2005 spending estimates for traditional media, they revised upward those for the Web, which could end up reeling in more than $12 billion in ad revenue for 2005, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau-well ahead of the previous record of $9.6 billion in 2004.

"This is going to be so big, so pervasive," says Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer at Yahoo! "We're just seeing the beginning of a world in which consumers are making decisions that programmers and marketers never dreamed they would. Those carefully crafted Thursday-night [TV] lineups won't mean anything anymore. I don't think we saw that coming. Consumers are sending a clear signal that they want whatever content they want, wherever they want it, on whatever device is the most convenient for them. Marketers need to engage with those consumers at any of those touch points."

While 74 percent of U.S. households were expected to be online this year, per Forrester Research, marketers are expected to spend just 4.6 percent ($12.9 billion) of their overall media dollars there, per eMarketer Inc. But if marketers are hesitant, Wall Street is not. Google's stock has quadrupled in value in 2005 to trade around $400. That bullish optimism, the likes of which have not been seen since the late '90s, re-energized a sleeping giant in the media world.

"This was the year that people picked up where they left off at the time of the crash," says Jonathan Nelson, co-founder and chairman of Organic. "It's gone from back burner to explosive again. Technology [development] never stopped in Silicon Valley. This time it's here to stay, because it's obviously working."

Nelson is quick to add, however, that, "unlike 2000, it's more rational now."

One reason that may be is that the Internet, after a giddy adolescence, has reached a kind of maturity. In 2005, for the first time, more Americans were connected to the Web than to wired cable TV. More than half of them have broadband, resulting in more time spent online and a richer experience that is transforming user behavior through greater interactivity and streaming video.

"With DVRs, TiVos, iPods or video on demand, clearly the technology is there [as] the American consumer is taking more and more control in ways they've never been able to do before," says Bill Rose, svp of marketing for U.S. media services at Arbitron. "It tends to fold in on itself-those consumers now have different expectations of media."

In a study this year, Arbitron and Edison Media Research concluded that one in 10 Americans consider themselves on-demand media consumers, with 27 million of them owning one or more on-demand devices. What surprised Rose was the passionate bond they said they enjoyed with such devices, some of which are still early in their product life cycles. Fifty-four percent of respondents said they "loved" their TiVos, as did 44 percent their non-TiVo DVRs; 40 percent, HDTV; 40 percent, broadband; 40 percent, satellite radios; 35 percent, iPods; 31 percent, satellite TV; and 27 percent, handheld e-mail devices like BlackBerrys. "Compare [that] with all those stories about moms and dads not being able to set the clocks on their VCRs," Rose jokes.

Teenagers still lead as early adopters. Ask any parent, and they'll describe teens who IM friends in between cell-phone calls while they surf the Net or play videogames as their customized Yahoo! music plays in the background. But the parents have caught on, too: In 2005, for instance, women were expected to become the biggest spenders in the $122 billion U.S. consumer-electronics industry, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. That shift portends significant change in how manufacturers design, market and service technology. As women make some of the major purchasing decisions in the new digital household, they'll look for the same kind of convenience, functionality and styling that they do in buying kitchen appliances. Already, Dell says nearly half its customers are females.

Facilitated by broadband, one of the year's most talked-about developments was content providers' embrace of video on demand (VOD), which will make their product available on everything from portable media players and mobile phones to gaming devices. After unveiling its video iPod in October, Apple announced a deal with ABC that allows users to download hit shows like Desperate Housewives and Lost commercial-free for $1.99 per episode. NBC and CBS quickly followed suit, partnering with DirecTV and Comcast, respectively, to offer on-demand 99-cent versions of shows after their initial broadcasts. AOL and its Time Warner sibling Warner Brothers joined the fray, offering, for free, ad- supported older titles like Welcome Back, Kotter.

"Apple was a watershed deal. It got a lot of people thinking," says Albert Cheng, evp of digital media at Disney-ABC Television Group. "Everyone had been reluctant to do anything, and then [Disney CEO] Bob Iger and [president of Disney-ABC Television Group] Anne Sweeney said, 'We have to make sure we don't fall prey to what happened in the music industry.' "

The lessons of the music companies, which struggled to control file-swappers before taking the fight through America's courts, aren't lost on Hollywood: Their own digital early adopters have made file-swapping of movies and TV shows widespread. Still, unlike audio, which loses little in translation, some wonder if consumers really want to take 10-20 minutes to download a repurposed version of Desperate Housewives to view on a 2.5-inch iPod screen.

"The iPod deal doesn't mean very much," asserts Mitch Oscar, evp and director of Carat Digital. "TV 'appointment' viewing is up to 4 hours, 22 minutes a day. With something like Desperate Housewives, you're going to want to see it when it's new, on a big-enough screen in your living room or bedroom, and you're not going to want to pay for it."

Unlike the TV networks, AOL is wooing consumers with free VOD, with ad support. "If you want to build a large-scale business model quickly, you've got to bring a lot of people into the market before they can decide if they want to pay," argues Kevin Conroy, evp of AOL Media Networks. "This doesn't preclude pay models in the future; it just takes away the obstacles for consumers."

In a fascinating glimpse of future options, AOL has taken a stake in Brightcove, a young Internet TV company that allows consumers to create their own online TV programming or stations (which can also carry advertising).

TiVo, meanwhile, threw a wrench in the works in late November, saying it would offer subscribers the ability to transfer recorded programming onto portable devices like iPods. (However, this service will not be available to the 2.5 million subscribers TiVo acquired through DirecTV, more than half its customer base.) In one of the year's stranger twists, TiVo, synonymous with ad-skipping, teamed up with ad giants like Omnicom and Interpublic to develop ways for consumers to receive more detailed marketer information, which TiVo likes to call "value-added content," according to vp of national advertising sales Davina Kent.

Consumers are taking their activism to the Web, too. Some 23,000 new blogs are created in the U.S. each day, according to Technorati, launching communities both passionate about and critical of products and services. Marketers doubtful of blogs' power can look no further than the Neistat brothers, whose 2003 Web film-an "anti-advertising project"-prompted Apple to start a battery-replacement program. (An Apple rep had no comment on that episode.)

Welcome to the age of "citizen media," says Jeff Jarvis. "My first law of media is: Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don't give the people control of media, and you will lose," says Jarvis, a co-founder of Entertainment Weekly, who runs the BuzzMachine blog and until recently was creative editor of Advance.net.

Marketers have tried to co-opt some of that authority for themselves. This year, even Procter & Gamble launched a blog, for its Secret Sparkle Spray teen deodorant, where a fictional character (disclosed as such) talks about issues affecting girls. Microsoft has a site, Channel 9, to facilitate discussion between developers and consumer geeks. Bob Lutz, vice chairman of global product development at General Motors, began his own blog, FastLane, asking for suggestions and criticisms.

Of course, marketers risk backfire with efforts that come across as PR exercises or blatant sales ploys. One company that shows how sophisticated marketers have become over the past year is Stonyfield Farm, which set up blogs like The Bovine Bugle and Creating Healthy Kids on behalf of its yogurts. Without appearing fake, they capture Stonyfield's organic, environmentally friendly ethos.

Clearly, as consumers gain unprecedented control in terms of creating and accessing content, marketers are left trying to figure out which emerging media will be the most effective. While the Web is well on its way to becoming a mainstream medium, it's also one that offers marketers the chance to make a very targeted connection to consumers.

Search engines continue to drive ad spending online, with local advertising showing some of the hottest growth prospects. In 2005, Google is expected to sell $6.1 billion in ads, more than any U.S. newspaper chain, magazine publisher or TV network, according to estimates from Anthony Noto, a Goldman Sachs analyst. A Google rep declined to comment on that figure. In the third quarter alone, Google revenue soared 96 percent to $1.6 billion.

The Web has been viewed traditionally as a direct-marketing medium, but it's no longer just for travel and credit-card companies, as mass marketers move online and, thanks to broadband, show off their products in rich, creative ways. Ford this year said it was shifting "a significant amount"-perhaps as much as 15 percent-of its $1 billion marketing budget online. It spent 20 percent of its launch budget for the Ford Fusion in nontraditional media in 2005, with a good portion going to the Web, including roadblocks on Yahoo!

Yahoo! has set its sights on consumer packaged-goods companies and now counts all of the top 20 U.S. CPG companies as customers. Buying a highly considered, high-ticket item like a car plays to the strengths of the Web. But how to convince an advertiser to market toothpaste on the Internet?

Yahoo!'s Millard has an answer. She developed an initiative with ACNielsen called Consumer Direct. Out of a sample of 61,000 monitored homes, they identified 20,000 of them as Yahoo! Households—then had them scan purchases after shopping trips, giving marketers a chance to track offline behavior. Unlike the kind of boxcar demos coveted by TV networks, companies like Yahoo! are emphasizing behavioral targeting. An auto company used to buying time in TV programs favored by men 18-34 could, on the Web, go for men in that age group who are in the market for a new car, and even live in a specific region.

"The idea that you can reach your very own mass market is a far more exciting idea for marketers," Millard says. "Look at the pressure marketers and agencies are under: Efficiency is a very big need. You can use the Web to achieve reach while still finding the right men: You can layer classic demographics and behavior and geographic levels and achieve a very, very high-quality, efficient market."

Increasingly, advertisers may use their 30-second TV spots as a portal to guide customers to the Web for the brand message. "The Internet is finally being embraced as a traditional medium. Broadband is a legitimate advertising model. If P&G and GM are walking away from traditional media and including the Internet in their media strategies, we're going to have to look at [the Web] in a different way," says Mohan Renganathan, associate director of digital strategy at MediaVest Worldwide. "We can get granular levels of tracking that I can't get from my TV buys."

That growing sophistication is indeed changing consumer behavior on the Web.

"We call it the 'Google effect,' " says Keith Mallinson, an analyst at The Yankee Group. "The aim of the portal used to be to get people there and get them to stay there—[portals] would control experience and the content they wanted you to look at. Google takes you anywhere—it's very democratic, and from an advertiser's point of view a much more targeted approach, very highly qualified and directed, as opposed to pop-ups."

Explains Google director of sales strategy Patrick Keane: "The great thing about broadband is that it turns the Internet into electricity. Behavior online is now more aligned with mall experience. 'Intended purchase' stuff is still happening, but you now have a lot of people just wandering around—users are actually using less bookmarks and navigating through searches more."

As those increasingly empowered consumers experiment in finding their way on the Internet, marketers must learn to accept that they will be along for the ride only if they're invited. The days of relying on the push of a 30-second TV spot are numbered. "In the coming year, marketers will face the challenge of [Internet] accountability"—not just on ROI, but in terms of their own responsiveness—"as marketing really shifts from transactions to a more collaborative model," says Nick Brien, CEO of Universal McCann. "As [P&G CEO] A.G. Lafley says, the customer is now the marketer, and we have to think of it as a collaborative medium."
http://www.adweek.com/aw/national/ar..._id=1001700454





Post-Christmas Comes a Geek's Gizmo-Rama
David Pogue

IF you're a nerd, geek or gadget freak, what dances in your head during the holidays isn't sugar plums. It's the prospect of the two big high-tech trade shows that kick off the new year with dazzling displays of new electronic goodies.

First, a record 150,000 industry insiders and journalists descended on Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show - and then a good number of them flew on to San Francisco for the Macworld Expo, a showcase for all things Apple.

That's if they had any strength left; the Las Vegas show alone is exhausting. You have 33 hours over four days to explore 2,500 company exhibits; that works out to 1.26 booths per minute.

In some ways, a better name for this year's event would have been the Video Electronics Show; the electronics industry believes that the public's appetite for watching TV, wherever and whenever possible, is insatiable.

There was, for example, an entire building dedicated to automotive entertainment: flat-panel screens on the backs of seats, the backs of sun visors, inside the doors and the trunk and even on the dashboard. Sharp's prototype dual-view liquid-crystal-display screen can even show one image to the driver (like a global positioning system navigation screen) and another to the passenger (like a DVD movie) simultaneously.

Flat-panel TV screens for the home were the most visible single product category; and, as usual, they're bigger and less expensive than last year's models. Panasonic and LG Electronics each displayed a plasma identified as the world's largest (103 and 102 inches, respectively). Neither screen is for sale yet, but the plasma is on the wall: at this rate, it won't be long before home theater screens are bigger than real theater screens.

Canon and Toshiba displayed a new flat-panel TV technology that was the buzz of the show: something called SED (surface-conduction electron-emitter display). It offers the superior picture quality and deep blacks of a conventional tube television, with the thin profile of a plasma.

The astonishing video quality of SED impressed everyone from average consumers to engineers from rival companies, and it's easy to see why the manufacturers claim that SED is the future of television. Toshiba says it will ship a few 55-inch models this year, although it acknowledges that the price, at first, will fall in "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" territory.

MANY booths bore the logos of Blu-ray and HD-DVD, the two blood rivals offering incompatible formats for next-generation high-definition DVD.

The Blu-ray camp boasts a longer list of movie studio endorsements. But the HD-DVD camp argues that its first player, from Toshiba, will arrive sooner (March) and cost half as much ($500). Neither camp seems to have figured out that most consumers won't buy anything at all until the format war is over.

The show's other big theme was the rise of the software/Web services conglomerate; the big keynote speeches, and some of the biggest booths, were presented by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. They announced a dizzying array of new services, many having to do, once again, with TV watching.

Google, for example, revealed Google Video, an "open video marketplace" that lets anyone, from TV networks to proud parents, post video clips for all the world to see - for a fee, if the creator so decides. Microsoft demonstrated yet another online music service, created with MTV, as well as a movie download service called Vongo, supplied by Starz Entertainment.

Apple doesn't attend the Consumer Electronics Show, but its influence was visible everywhere. The looks of pocket music players, for example, were infinitely closer to catching up with the iPod's sleek, stylish design (although the software still has miles to go). Dozens of hand-held video players were exhibited, too, to accommodate those iTunes-like video download services.

Then there was Microsoft's demonstration of Vista, the new version of Windows that is expected to be available by the end of the year. During Bill Gates's opening keynote presentation, most of the new features demonstrated were brazenly undisguised idea heists from Apple's Mac OS X.

They included a systemwide search (like Apple's Spotlight), search folders (self-updating folders that reveal files matching certain criteria), thumbnail images (not just names) of minimized windows, a three-dimensional window-switching keystroke, an iPhoto-like photo-sorting module, and a constellation of widgets (small single- purpose, single-window programs like calculators and news tickers).

At Apple's own keynote presentation, at the Macworld Expo, Steven P. Jobs began with a recitation of sales figures. Number of iPods sold during the recent holiday season: 14 million. (Total to date: 42 million, enough to blanket 14 percent of the American population with iPods.)

Next came announcements of a $50 iPod remote with built-in FM radio and an updated iLife creative software suite (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand and a new Web design program called iWeb).

At this point, the wide-eyed live audience of Macolytes held its breath. What would be the big surprise unveiling? According to the Web sites devoted to Apple rumors, the revelation would be a TiVo-like multimedia hub based on the Mac Mini. Or maybe an Apple cellphone. Or a new spreadsheet program. An iPod Shuffle with a screen. A new iMac. Or, most implausibly of all, a plasma TV.

Mr. Jobs took all of the guessers by surprise by presenting a new iMac and a PowerBook laptop, now renamed the MacBook Pro. In the cleverest bit, the laptop's magnetically attached power cord instantly detaches if tripped over, instead of yanking the laptop to the floor.

These machines look nearly identical to their predecessors. What's different is inside: a CoreDuo processor, Intel's recently announced successor to the Pentium chip. Apple had previously announced that it would begin replacing the PowerPC chips in its Macs with Intel chips by June 2006. The surprise was the six-month speed-up and the selection of the first models to renovate.

These machines make clear why Apple made this radical switch from the PowerPC chips (from I.B.M. and Freescale, the Motorola spinoff) that have driven Macs for years: the new Macs are much, much faster, yet cost exactly the same ($1,300 and up for the iMac, $2,000 for the MacBook Pro).

Apple says that according to technical benchmarks, the new laptop, for example, is four times as fast as the previous model. In the real world, even a few minutes of testing on these Macs proves that Web pages appear nearly instantaneously, huge photo libraries scroll briskly, and programs pop open after only a second or two. These Macs even start up faster - so fast that the big Apple logo makes only a fleeting appearance.

But there is a hitch: you get all of this speed only when you're running programs that have been rewritten especially for the Intel chip.

Apple has already rewritten Mac OS X and its constellation of programs (like its e-mail program, Web browser and the iLife suite). Other programs, including Microsoft Office and Photoshop, still work - the new Macs seamlessly translate older software so that the Intel chip can process it - but they run at the old speed, or even slower.

Apple warns that programs requiring speed, like professional video and sound editing software, may not run at all in this translation mode. That includes Apple's own Final Cut Pro, Aperture and other high-end software, but Apple says you can "crossgrade" to the Intel-based versions in March for $50 each.

If such programs are critical to your work, wait until they've been updated to speak the Intel chip's language before buying an Intel-based Mac.

Apple plans to switch all of its Mac models to Intel processors by the end of the year. Intriguingly, they'll all be technically capable of restarting in Microsoft Windows - not using an off-the-shelf copy, but perhaps with the assistance of a software kit written by some enterprising programmer.

None of these models will bear the "Intel Inside" logo, and Apple's advertising won't include the five-note Intel riff. Analysts say that Apple has thereby passed on millions of Intel marketing dollars; on the other hand, it's hard to imagine Apple reconciling that logo with its pride and its fondness for clean design.

Choice is good, of course. But too much choice can be paralyzing. And if the Consumer Electronics Show and the Macworld Expo are any guides, 2006 won't be just the year of TV anywhere and music everywhere; it may also be the year that high-tech decision-making becomes a full-time job.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/te...s/12pogue.html





DRM Lurks In The Background At CES
Eric Bangeman

CES is a great place to go if you want to see stuff you won't be able to get for several months. Obviously, it's also a fantastic launch platform for companies looking to get their products out in the public spotlight. As I've mentioned in my previous coverage, the theme this year is getting content— movies, TV, music, and pictures—where you want it, and when you want it. The industry knows it. As Intel CEO Paul Otellini said yesterday afternoon at his keynote:

"What consumers tell us they want is online content on that big screen in their living room ... from the couch, from the bed. We need to integrate the TV capabilities, the PC capabilities, and the Internet experience."

Lurking the background is the issue of digital rights management. We write about DRM a lot here at Ars, mainly because of the effect it has on our ability to continue consuming content in the way to which we have become accustomed. The media industry wants you to continue watching and listening to their products, but on their terms. The reasons behind this are many, and the entertainment industry would have you believe that it is necessary to combat piracy. But at the heart of the issue is that DRM can be a powerful revenue-generation tool, as it allows the studios and labels to charge you multiple times for the same content.

We've gone over the scenario before, but here it is in a nutshell. Say you want to watch a movie on HBO. You start watching it, but fall asleep. Thankfully, you set your Viiv-enabled HTPC to record it. However, the DRM under which your PC recorded the show will only allow you to watch the show on a device in your house. That's a problem, because you want to put it on your portable media player to watch on the flight you've got to catch in the morning. It turns out you can, but you'll have to pay a couple of bucks for the privilege.

Now you've got the content on your media player and you're all set to go... except you forgot to recharge it before you left and it cuts out after a few minutes. So now you've got to wait until you get back home to watch it. Problem is, the DRM governing the recording allows for only 48-hour retention. No problem. Cough up another couple bucks and you can save it until you get back home.

Consumers are not the only ones with issues. From the perspective of the entertainment industry, the problem is competing DRM methodologies. The best example is music. At CES, Microsoft is trumpeting its new PlaysForSure designation, which guarantees that the content from your music (and eventually video) service of your choice will play on players bearing the PlaysForSure logo.

The problem here is that most of the music sold online won't work on any of those players, because it's sold by Apple and therefore tied to iTunes Music Store and the iPod. And Apple has shown zero intention of letting its DRM work with anything other than Apple hardware. That's why the music labels and movie studios are anxious to find the holy grail of a unified DRM.

At his keynote yesterday morning, Sony Chairman Howard Stringer echoed that theme. Even as Ron Howard and Tom Hanks joined him on stage, he said that the "strange bedfellows" of hardware manufacturers and movie studios need to come together on some sort of standard. If they can't, both parties run the risk of missing the boat. If DRM isn't done right—meaning that it's reasonable, transparent, and doesn't get in the way of content consumption—consumers will stay away from new technologies and new hardware.

Will we see movement towards a more unified DRM? From what I've seen here at CES, I think prospects are looking good. Stringer was joined on stage at one point by Michael Dell, the chairman of Sony's biggest competitor in the PC market and a smaller competitor in consumer electronics. The aim was trumpeting Dell's support for Blu-ray, which has some powerful DRM mojo. "We have to have a relationship with everyone these days," Stringer said.

Working together sounds good, especially if it means a houseful of electronic devices that play wonderfully with each other. Next-generation optical format wars aside, indications at CES are that the players are serious about working together. It's unfortunate for consumers that the end result will be a much tighter lock down of content.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060106-5918.html





In Digital Music, Its Gates Vs Jobs
Om Malik

Napster, Real and other music pretenders you have been warned - Microsoft will own you! If you were looking for proof that you will become one of the minions in Microsoft’s grand music strategy, all you needed to do was tune in to the webcast of Bill G’s keynote at CES. Partnering with MTV for URGE, Gates’ has gone back to familiar time tested strategy: get in bed with the most powerful company in the business you eventually want to own.

Not like the company has any option, but to try and extend its game to newer playing fields, like Music, Video, IPTV or whatever! Their core markets are not growing as fast as they did, and that’s acting like a speed bump for the stock! For Microsoft, its about staying relevant. Here is my op-ed from The Wall Street Journal, from back in January 2003.

The MTV’s Microsoft-powered Urge online music service will be selling to the ultimate demographic: the teen set. MTV’s unlimited airtime resources will be hard to match for the likes of Napsters, Yahoos and Reals of the world. Because in order to match MTV’s sales channel, they will have to spend spend spend. (Just like in the PC domain, Microsoft wants to be the “engine”, get a piece of the action, while others simply butt heads. )

So in the end it will boil down to what is by now a familiar story: Bill versus Steve, Microsoft (add partner name here) versus Apple, windows media versus iTunes, some device (add brand name here) versus iPod. Justin Timberlake versus the Gorillaz! Dominatrix in pin stripes versus Diva in a black turtleneck.

Who will win? Not sure, but here is one thing which works against Bill G: coolness is not part of his company’s DNA, I mean Justin Timberlake for god sake! Even old farts like me know, he is sooooo over! What works against Apple? Steve being Steve; keeping the ecosystem closed. Come on, even the toughest bouncer outside the hottest club, once in a while lets the plebs in. How about some love for Sony and Sonos? Nothing for nothing, 2006 is shaping up to be a great year: there are skirmishes everywhere and since this is a sequel, well, let the popcorn pop, and enjoy the show!
http://gigaom.com/topics/connected-home/digital-music/





Digital Music Enjoys A Dream Week
Brian Garrity

There was so much legitimate downloading in the final week of 2005 that it recalled the impossible tallies research firms used in the late 1990s to dazzle venture capitalists and scare the daylights out of major-label executives.

In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers, Nielsen SoundScan reports.

In the process, consumers shattered the tracking firm's one-week record for download sales.

A look inside the numbers shows just how unprecedented a week it was for the download business:

- Before the week ending January 1, 2006, the record for the most downloads sold in seven days was 9.5 million tracks -- set just one week earlier.

- Sales of 20 million songs were almost three times the amount of digital tracks sold in the same seven-day span a year ago.

- Fifteen songs on the current Hot Digital Songs chart surpassed the one-week record for sales of a single track.

- Rap group D4L's "Laffy Taffy" took the top spot with 175,000 tracks sold, more than doubling the mark of 80,500 downloads Kanye West's "Gold Digger" set the week of September 17.

- Each of the top 11 titles on the Hot Digital Songs chart sold more than 100,000 downloads.

For the year, the digital track sales tally reached 352 million -- a 147% increase over 2004's total of 142.6 million.

In comparison to the volume of music that is downloaded through peer-to-peer networks, those numbers may not seem like much. P2P monitoring service Big Champagne estimates that at least 250 million tracks are downloaded worldwide each week from file-swapping services.

But a dramatic rise in the tide of authorized download sales in recent weeks suggests that changes may be afoot in the consumer's relationship to digital music.

The important question for the music business is whether 20 million downloads represents the new baseline for digital track sales. A year ago, a 33% pop in download sales in the week following Christmas permanently raised the bar on weekly download volume by 2 million tracks.

Technology and distribution executives at the major labels are not holding their breath that download sales will now run at a rate of almost triple the 7 million tracks that were being sold on average in December. They say big sales of gift cards are likely creating the current volume of such significant downloads.

Yet gift cards were available in 2004, too. If the market can retain volume gain as it did last year, the numbers are tantalizing. Last year, sales fell by about 20% in the weeks following New Year's; such a drop this year would yield a weekly volume baseline close to 16 million tracks. That would put the download market on pace for sales of 750 million to 1 billion tracks in 2006.

Likely to drive the download business is the fact that the number of iPods and other MP3 players in distribution have exploded in the last year. The Computer Electronics Assn. estimates that MP3 player revenue increased 200% to more than $3 billion in 2005.

Apple claims to have sold more than 30 million iPods to date, but will likely have shipped a total close to that number in 2005 alone.

Research firm NPD Group estimates MP3 player revenue at leading retailers topped $500 million on sales of more than 3.3 million units for the five weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas--a 65% jump in dollar volume from the 2004 holidays. Sales of MP3 accessories were big too, topping $160 million during the five-week period.

NPD figures exclude direct sales of iPods through Apple Computer and online sales.

And for the first time, sales of MP3 players are surpassing sales of personal CD players and CD shelf systems, NPD reports.

"We have definitely moved," says Stephen Baker, VP of analyst services for NPD, "from MP3 players being a computer-oriented product to a consumer-directed product."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...010800632.html





iPod To Get Built-In iTrip?
Alorie Gilbert

Listening to an iPod over a car stereo may be easier in the future, judging by an invention Apple Computer is trying to patent.

Apple's patent application (No. 20050286481), which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office made public recently, describes "a method, apparatus, and system" that wirelessly plays iPod audio files over an FM radio receiver, such as a car radio.

The invention, described as a "method for data transmission utilizing a portable multimedia device," also taps an FM radio technology known as the Radio Data System (RDS) to wirelessly transmit data, such as artist and song title, to a receiver.

Several gadget blogs have speculated that Apple will build the technology into future versions of the iPod, putting pressure on companies that sell iPod add-ons that deliver similar capabilities, such as the popular iTrip from Griffin Technologies.

"The end result will be that your stored iTunes on your iPod will not only play on these in-vehicle stereos, but also present corresponding data such as the artist's name, iTune(s) title and so forth on the RDS stereo's mini display," a blogger at Macsimum News wrote.

That blogger also noted that the technology may fit into Apple's plans to integrate iPods more seamlessly into cars. The company forged new alliances with Audi, Volkswagen and Honda on this front in September. Another dozen or so carmakers, including BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo, already offer iPod support as an optional feature.

Linking iPod with the radio seems to be a recent theme at Apple. At its annual Macworld convention on Tuesday, the company introduced the iPod Radio Remote. The device, a $49 add-on, lets users listen to FM radio over their iPod and view station and song information on their iPod screen.

But one blogger worried that the technology described in the patent application would be plagued by performance problems that have affected some iTrips and other third-party FM transmitters.

"My remaining concern is similar to the issues found in the iTrips (FM Modulators)," a blogger at Gadget Review wrote. "Often the radio broadcasts bleed into the FM modulators signal as they piggy backs on a frequency. In L.A., this is a constant problem due to the large number of stations."

Representatives from both Apple and Griffin Technologies declined to comment on the patent application.

According to the application, the proposed patent covers several kinds of audio formats and portable music players, including cell phones and portable digital assistants. But Apple clearly has the iPod in mind.

"It should be noted that the multimedia player can take the form (of) the iPod player coupled with an FM transmitter adapter to wirelessly transmit media data (i.e., songs, music, etc.) and its related information (e.g., song title, title artist, etc.)" the patent application states.
http://news.com.com/iPod+to+get+buil...3-6025543.html





Apple to Sell S.N.L. Skits for iPod Use
Julie Bosman

"Saturday Night Live" fans looking to watch classic skits from the show may not have to depend on reruns and DVD compilations for long.

Apple is set to announce today that it will sell a limited number of archived "Saturday Night" skits through its iTunes Music Store for $1.99 each, for viewing on video iPods or personal computers.

The offering is the latest expansion of Apple's iTunes video library, which includes content from television networks including NBC and ABC.

The Sci Fi Channel, Disney and USA Network have also struck deals with Apple to sell their television content, typically making shows available for purchase one day after they are broadcast.

But the only "Saturday Night" content available on iTunes was "Lazy Sunday," a spoof music video that had its debut on the Dec. 17 episode. The video, which mockingly chronicled a mundane Sunday afternoon through the rapper personas of the cast members Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg, was made available free to iTunes subscribers and quickly became an Internet sensation.

NBC first announced a deal with Apple on Dec. 6 to sell its own content on iTunes after ABC experienced success selling shows like "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives."

Under NBC's arrangement with Apple, iTunes users can purchase commercial-free episodes of new shows like "The Office," and "Surface," as well as classics like the original "Dragnet" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." An Apple spokesman said the company sold more than three million video downloads in October and November.

Deal Between ABC and BBC

By The Associated Press The British Broadcasting Corporation said yesterday that it would make about 40 video news clips available daily in the United States and Canada for Internet and cellphone subscribers through a deal with ABC News.

BBC News producers will choose segments on top world and British news, along with topical items like entertainment, business and technology news. ABC, which is part of the Walt Disney Company, did not say when it will begin offering the clips, nor did it disclose pricing details.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/te...y/10ipod.html\





Big Hit of the Holidays: 14 Million IPods Sold

Sales well above analysts' predictions
Mike Musgrove

The numbers are in: The iPod phenomenon got even bigger over the holidays.

Apple Computer Inc. sold 14 million of the music players in the last quarter of 2005, chief executive Steve Jobs said yesterday.

"We've now sold over 42 million iPods," he said in his opening speech at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Jobs also introduced the first iMac computers with new Intel Corp. processors that he said would make them two to three times as fast as previous desktop units.

The iPod sales numbers beat the expectations of industry analysts. "They surprised all of us," said Tim Bajarin, president of tech consulting and research company Creative Strategies Inc. Bajarin's company had predicted Apple would sell 12.5 million iPods in the fourth quarter.

The iPod's popularity helped account for Apple's $5.7 billion in sales for those three months -- $1 billion of which occurred in the company's chain of 135 retail stores. Jobs also said the iTunes Music Store has now sold 850 million copies of songs and has 83 percent of the online music sales market.

Apple is scheduled to report financial results for the quarter on Jan. 18.

Jobs said the company sold 1.25 million computers in the same quarter. That figure is somewhat flat for Apple, Bajarin said, but that could be because many Mac users held off from buying new machines until the machines using Intel chips are available.

Apple's personal-computer market share has been under 5 percent for several years, although industry analysts have predicted that the security concerns that continue to trouble Microsoft Windows users will encourage more consumers to switch to Apple's line of computers.

Shares of Apple closed up $4.81, or 6.3 percent, at $80.86 on the Nasdaq. Earlier in the day, shares set a new 52-week high of $81.89. Year to date, shares are up 12.5 percent from the Dec. 30 closing price of $71.89. In recent aftermarket activity, Apple was trading up an additional 31 cents.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011001675.html





Apple Shares Hit Record High On Intel News
May Wong

Apple Computer Inc. shares leapt to an all-time high on Wednesday, boosted by its decision to use Intel Corp. microprocessors to help it grab a bigger share of the desktop PC market.

Apple is tapping not only the latest chip technologies that rival makers of Windows-based computers will use but also the vast marketing power that Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company, delivers.

Apple unveiled its first two machines with Intel's Core Duo - an iMac and new laptop - on Tuesday and said it would not thwart users who would seek to run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system on the machines. With Intel processors inside the new Macs, their owners could run Microsoft Windows and software designed for it at full speed.

The move to Intel chips will boost Apple's sales and erase the perception that Macintosh computers lag behind Windows-based PCs in performance, analysts said.

"Now consumers can buy a Mac that is three times faster and for the same price," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64 research firm.

Apple shares soared $2.62, or 3.2 percent, to a split-adjusted record high of $83.48 soon after the Wednesday trading session opened on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

With the success of its iPod players and flashy retail stores, Apple has already begun siphoning customers from the Windows camp. After years of hovering around 3 percent, Apple last year cracked 4 percent of the U.S. PC market.

Apple's historic shift to Intel microprocessors came months earlier than expected as CEO Steve Jobs debuted Tuesday an iMac desktop and a notebook based on the chip makers' new two-brained processor, the Intel Core Duo.

When it first announced plans to switch in June, Apple said it expected to begin making the transition by mid-2006. On Tuesday, Jobs was joined at the Macworld Expo by Intel CEO Paul Otellini to unveil the new jointly designed computers.

Jobs said its entire Mac line will be converted to Intel by the end of 2006.

The shift comes as Apple's hugely popular iPods continue to enthrall the public. Apple brought in a record $5.7 billion in sales during the holiday quarter as it sold 14 million iPods - nearly three times as many units as it did in the same period a year ago, Jobs said. Meanwhile, Apple's online iTunes store has sold more than 850 million songs and 8 million videos to date, he said.

The company's stock shot to a 52-week high on the news.

But Tuesday's focus was on computers.

For years, Apple shunned Intel, which has provided chips that power a majority of the world's PCs, along with Microsoft's Windows software. In the late 1990s, Apple even ran TV ads with a Pentium II glued to a snail.

But Apple became increasingly frustrated in recent years as its chip suppliers, IBM Corp. and Motorola Corp.'s spinoff, Freescale Semiconductor Inc., failed to meet its needs for faster more energy efficient chips.

Of particular concern was IBM's apparent inability to develop a G5 chip that would work well in notebook computers.

Intel, on the other hand, has been focusing on developing chips specifically tailored for notebooks. During last week's International Consumer Electronics Show, Intel unveiled its latest, the Core Duo, which features two computing engines on a single piece of silicon. It was that chip that Apple decided to fit into the new iMacs and MacBooks.

Though the change to Intel has occurred faster than expected, it still poses some risks.

Besides potentially alienating a fan base that's accustomed to doing things differently, Apple's move opens up the issue of backward compatibility and the possibility that PC users might run pirated versions of Mac OS X, Apple's critically acclaimed operating system, on their generally cheaper non- Apple computers.

Jobs demonstrated new software, called Rosetta, that will let owners of the new Intel- based Macs run older applications.

Though Windows sales could benefit, Microsoft risks losing ground unless its operating systems keep up with the Mac OS X. Windows Vista, the next major update, won't be available until later this year - and its promised features copy many of those already in Mac OS X.

The change does not appear to have alienated Microsoft, however, which offers a Mac version of its popular Office productivity suite.

"We're formalizing our commitment to this platform," said Roz Ho, general manager of the Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit. "We'll continue shipping Office (for the) Mac for a minimum of five years."

The new iMacs will have the same all-in-one design and screen sizes as the previous models, with prices remaining steady at $1,299 for the 17-inch model and $1,699 for the 20-inch computer. Jobs claimed the new models are two to three times faster than the iMac G5, based on an IBM chip. The MacBook Pros - with 15.4-inch displays - start at $1,999.

All the new computers will include Apple's Front Row software and a remote control, which lets users watch videos, listen to music or browse photos from across a room.

The machines also will be bundled with Apple's newly announced iLife '06 suite of digital lifestyle programs. In one of the updates, the latest version of iPhoto will let Mac shutterbugs share pictures much like bloggers, and podcasters share content.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Non-iPods Build In the Extras
Daniel Greenberg

What's the iPod missing?

Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod has so completely captivated the imagination of music fans that rivals have been left reeling -- on Friday, the company that pioneered the MP3 player market, Rio Audio, said it was exiting the business. But the huge market for iPod accessories, estimated at more than $2 billion, shows that Apple hasn't found an answer to every buyer's wishes.

So what if you could buy a player with these extra features built right in? Apple's competitors are trying to find out if they can regain some ground that way -- in addition to charging often lower prices and offering support for such newer subscription-based services as Napster To Go, Rhapsody and Yahoo Music Unlimited.

The most common iPod add-ons provide new ways to get sound in and out of the device -- microphones to record conversations and FM tuners to let you catch up on the news on your jog. As add-ons, these capabilities pad out the weight and bulk of Apple's trim device, but when incorporated into a device, they hardly take up any extra space.

As a result, these options have become nearly standard among Apple's competitors, even in devices as small as the iPod mini. The microphones on these players are hardly hi-fi, but they do fine for recording voices in meetings and lectures. The FM tuners may not have crystal-clear reception, but they have station pre-sets and can even record radio for later listening -- perfect for listening to programs broadcast at odd times. AM support, however, is usually absent; sports fans will still need a separate radio to keep up with games on the go.

Another opening for competitors comes in batteries. The iPod's -- like all rechargeable units' -- degrade with use, delivering less playback over time. But iPod users must send their players to Apple for battery replacement, a $59 procedure. (Some third-party firms charge less.) Most, but not all, non-iPod players allow users to remove and replace their rechargeable batteries just by popping the back open. Replacement batteries typically sell for $15 to $40, are available from many dealers and don't require you to miss a day of your tunes.

While Apple now offers color screens on all of its regular-size iPods, it came to this technology after other manufacturers -- many of which now allow their users to play video as well as view photos. But the clarity of clips watched on their screens varies, and there's also the issue of finding anything worthwhile to watch: The existing video-download stores are weak, and getting video off a DVD, videotape or digital video recorder is far harder than copying songs off a CD.

Buyers of tiny, flash-memory-based portables who want to see what's playing have no choice but to shop outside of Apple's orbit. Apple's iPod Shuffle omits a display, while most competing devices include a compact, if sometimes hard-to-decipher, readout.

Music players also plug into music-management programs on a computer, an area where Apple retains a sizable advantage with its iTunes software. All other competing players require using some other application, often Microsoft's Windows Media Player software. That has been greatly improved and offers more features than iTunes but still lacks the seamless integration and ease of Apple's program.

That problem alone leaves competing players stuck in second place -- at least, among the great majority of buyers who don't covet extra features for their own sake. The other manufacturers, for all their occasional creativity, have yet to integrate all the components of a successful audio-on-the-go experience as thoroughly as Apple has.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...082700201.html





Double Trouble

Beware Phone Bills That Charge You Twice
Don Oldenburg

Need a reminder to scrutinize all charges on your bills in the new year? Try this telling tele-tale:

After switching her long-distance calls to an Internet (VOIP) service recently, Jenifer Boadwine cut back her Verizon unlimited nationwide calling plan to a cheaper Verizon regional plan to save a few bucks.

But when the Olney home-mortgage consultant got her first Verizon bill after the switch, she was stumped. "It was actually higher than when I had all my long-distance calls included," Boadwine said.

Boadwine uses Verizon's automatic-payment plan and gets her monthly bill online. So it's a synopsis of the actual bill, which is difficult to scour line by line for errors. So she shrugged and figured it might have been one of those confusing "overlap bills" that prorate charges when you've changed calling plans or phone carriers. But her next Verizon bill again seemed too high -- again, by about $40 -- so she asked her fiance, Mark Stevenson, to investigate.

"He's a little more forthright than I am," the laid-back Boadwine said. "If there is a discrepancy, even a few dollars, Mark'll find it."

Digging into the details, Stevenson, a mechanical engineer, did a double take at what looked to him like a double charge. Verizon was billing his sweetie for the local plan, for the new regional plan and also for a la carte services that are included in the regional plan. Sorry, wrong numbers!

He called Verizon to complain. "The customer service representative said that they knew they've been having an issue with their system double-billing," Stevenson said. "When I asked if they were taking any steps to remedy this by notifying their customers . . . or refunding money, they simply said 'no,' that most people call when they notice that they're being overcharged."

Verizon refunded Boadwine's overcharges, but Stevenson was troubled by the company's apparent laissez-faire attitude of overlooking erroneous charges unless customers notice and complain. "These days people are so busy. . . . I'm sure there are a large number of customers who wouldn't realize they're being ripped off month after month by their phone company," he said.

When the Consummate Consumer asked Verizon about the overcharge, Harry Mitchell, director of Verizon's Mid-Atlantic Bureau, investigated and found that "a system problem" had indeed caused incorrect billing -- and not just on Boadwine's bill. "About 150 other customers," specifically in the mid-Atlantic area, were affected, said Mitchell, adding that, overall, there are 4 million Verizon customers in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the District.

While he dared not say it and risk anyone thinking that Verizon doesn't care about those 150 customers, the implication of course is that 150 out of 4 million is a drop in the bucket. Which is true -- unless you're the drop.

Mitchell said Verizon isn't ignoring overcharged customers. "Our employee who spoke with the customer unfortunately misspoke and gave the customer erroneous information about our company policy on billing," he said, explaining that Verizon reviews its billing system to try to make sure bills are accurate. "We have identified and corrected the error, and we identified and are properly adjusting the affected customers' accounts."

But the telephone industry is notorious for unfathomable bills and billing glitches. A recent and rather significant example came last month, when Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett announced that AT&T would pay $550,000 in refunds and credits to settle charges that it had erroneously billed 49,000 consumers $3.95 a month over three months.

Last year, when the Federal Communications Commission reviewed rulemaking in Truth-in-Billing consumer protection regulations, the nation's state attorneys general told the FCC that based on the consumer complaints they receive, there is "significant consumer confusion related to misleading practices in billing for telecommunications services" and that, over the past five years, telecommunications-related complaints ranked "in the top four of all consumer complaints."

No surprise to Tom Allibone, who never gives the telephone industry a ringing endorsement. "These systemic, chronic-type billing problems, they exist all over the place," said the director of auditing at TeleTruth, a New Jersey telecommunications watchdog group, and former member of the FCC's consumer advisory committee.

Allibone said typical billing discrepancies include jacked-up Federal Universal Service Fund surcharges (he calls this a phone company "slush fund"), double-dipping on taxes and "overcharging or overbilling." Verizon and other telecommunications companies typically fall back on the "honest billing glitch" excuse when caught doing it, he says. "There was a systemic error . . . it's funny how they come back and say that."

James Hood, chief executive of Consumeraffairs.com, a consumer-advocacy organization, has little patience for companies that nickel-and-dime consumers with erroneous or stealth charges. "This is exactly the tactic that is used by low-life scam artists -- you put a small charge on a customer's credit card or phone bill each month in hopes that the consumer won't notice," he said. "Those who are exceptionally alert can usually get the charges removed, but most consumers never notice. For a company of Verizon's stature to remain quiet about a billing error is disgraceful."

Mitchell said errors occur ". . . and, when that happens, we work with affected customers to make the bill right." He recommends that customers review all of their bills for accuracy. "If they have a question or see a discrepancy, they should contact us. We will be happy to work with them to answer those questions and ensure their bill is accurate."

But Stevenson wonders what might have happened if he hadn't caught the error: "I just don't like to see big businesses take an apathetic approach to taking care of their customers," he said. "I wouldn't want my family or friends to be bilked because they simply didn't pay attention to the detailed breakdown of their bill."

Thanks, Ms. Camer

Resolution No. 2 from last week's New Year's resolutions for retailers, manufacturers, etc., advised Safeway to give its cashiers a break and not make them address
credit card or check-paying customers by name. But Dorothy Camer of Takoma Park e-mailed this week to object, saying the name-game "breaks up the 'assembly line' character of the process and encourages both the checker and the customer to look at each other."

She thinks the practice accomplishes Safeway's desire to establish a connection to the store. "I much prefer having my name pronounced incorrectly than have them talking on a cell phone while they hand me the receipt," she said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...010700173.html





Wardialing

Netgear to Offer First Wi-Fi Phone For Skype Calling

Netgear Inc. and Skype, the Web-based calling company which is a unit of eBay Inc. said on Wednesday they plan to introduce the first wireless mobile telephone for Skype.

The Netgear Wi-Fi phone is designed to work wherever a consumer is connected to a wireless Internet access point -- at home, in an office, cafe, public hotspot, or in cities where wireless access may be available citywide, the companies said.

By contrast, existing Skype phones, including cordless models, must be connected to a computer.

A variety of telephone makers including Cisco's Linksys, are seeking to cash in on the Web-based calling craze popularized by Skype, first in Europe and Asia, and increasingly in the United States.

Users can make free domestic and international calls and hold conference calls with other Skype users. Calls to regular phones incur a small fee.

"Customers can now call anyone on Skype, anywhere in the world for free without using a PC anytime they are connected to Wi-Fi," said Patrick Lo, Netgear's chairman and chief executive in a statement issued ahead of a press conference at the Consumers Electronics Show underway in Las Vegas this week.

An October report from Jupiter Research predicted that 20.4 million U.S. households will subscribe to some form of Internet-based broadband phone service by 2010.

The Netgear phone is pre-loaded with Skype's software. The user simply needs to turn on the phone and enter a username and password. The software pulls up the user's full contact list of Skype contacts to whom free calls can be made.

More information on Netgear's Skype Wi-Fi phone, including pricing and availability, is planned for the first quarter of 2006, the companies said.

In addition to the Skype Wi-Fi phone, Netgear and Skype said Netgear's RangeMax wireless network router will be optimized to work with Skype.

RangeMax is designed to avoid interference from neighboring wireless networks and to eliminate "dead spots" that can prevent consistent connections around a house.
http://today.reuters.com/investing/F...GEAR-SKYPE.xml





Talk faster

New Wi-Fi Standard Back On Track
Marguerite Reardon

After months of squabbling, the new, faster Wi-Fi standard that got derailed late in 2005 could finally be back on track, say people involved in the standards process.

A revised draft of the specification known as 802.11n is expected to be introduced at the task group's meeting next week in Hawaii, and it's expected to get the required 75 percent approval vote to make it an official standards draft.

"Things are looking very promising," said Mike Pellon, vice president of standards at Motorola. "It looks like the fragmentation has passed. For the last couple of months, all the different parties involved have been pulling together."

If the rest of the 802.11n process continues to go as planned, products supporting the faster Wi-Fi technology could show up on the market in the next 12 to 18 months, he said.

The 802.11n working group was formed within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) more than a year ago to establish a standard for the next generation of Wi-Fi technology called MIMO (multiple input/multiple output), which will quadruple data rates of wireless LANs.

This past spring, the standards became mired in squabbling between rival groups. One was led by Intel; the other by Airgo Networks, a small company with the only MIMO-based chips now shipping. The two groups eventually came to a deadlock after an Intel-backed proposal failed to move forward in the process. As a result, leaders in the IEEE instructed the two groups to form a joint proposal team to merge specifications from the two main proposals into a single draft of the standard.

But in October, Intel and 26 other companies threw a monkey wrench into the IEEE process when they announced the formation of a splinter group called the Enhanced Wireless Consortium, or EWC. Wi-Fi chipmakers Broadcom, Marvell Technology Group and Atheros Communications joined Intel in leading this new consortium. The group had planned to submit a proposal to the IEEE at its November meeting, when the joint proposal group was also expected to finalize its draft of the standard.

Striving for technical harmony
At the time the EWC was announced, several companies, including Airgo, voiced their concern that this new group would distract the industry and delay the standards work.

"We didn't want to see the process hijacked," said Greg Raleigh, CEO of Airgo. "All of the proposals out there are based on Airgo's technology, and we want to see a standard developed from an open process."

With full support from the major chip manufacturers, it seemed as though the EWC could move ahead on its own with or without an official IEEE standard. Instead of waiting for the standard to be ratified, which isn't expected until the beginning of 2007, device makers in the Intel group could have started building prestandard MIMO products with the assurance that their gear would at least be compatible with chips developed by market leaders Intel and Broadcom.

But November came and went, and no proposal was agreed upon. Behind the scenes, it became evident that device makers, even those within the EWC, still wanted the IEEE stamp of approval.

As a result, Intel and the others began working more closely with the joint proposal team, Raleigh said. This week, the two sides are expected to finalize details of the joint proposal draft that will be presented to the task group next week. Intel has confirmed that it has been working closely with the joint proposal team, as it had said it would when the EWC was formed.

"The EWC has been in discussions with the joint proposal group to harmonize all the different technical points," said Amy Martin, a spokeswoman for Intel. "There has been a lot of negotiating back and forth to find a solution that fits all parties."

Device manufacturers such as Motorola say it's important that the standards work has remained within the IEEE framework.

"The fragmentation that was happening wouldn't have been good for the market," Pellon said. "A lot of the success of Wi-Fi is because different suppliers can make products that work together, so that when you go to an airport or a hotel that has Wi-Fi, you don't have to worry if your wireless card is compatible. It just works."

One of the key areas of contention between the EWC and the joint proposal team had to do with specifications for mobile devices. Several mobile- handset manufacturers, including Nokia and Motorola, did not initially join the Intel group because they believed that its specification was too PC- centric.

The higher transmission speeds that should result from 802.11n are supposed to help equipment makers support more multimedia applications, like voice and video, over Wi-Fi. Streaming content requires faster speeds, which 802.11n promises to deliver.

But handset makers wanted to make sure that these multimedia applications also worked on their mobile devices, which have strict size and power constraints. The initial EWC specifications did not take these issues into account, Raleigh said. But after a lot of work between the two groups, the proposal that will be presented to the task group next week will support low power and specifications for small screens.

"A lot of horse trading went on," he said. "We're pleased to see the progress that has been made, and we are thrilled to see the standard back on track in an open forum."
http://news.com.com/New+Wi-Fi+standa...3-6025788.html





Microsoft Shuts Blog's Site After Complaints by Beijing
David Barboza and Tom Zeller Jr.

Microsoft has shut the blog site of a well-known Chinese blogger who uses its MSN online service in China after he discussed a high-profile newspaper strike that broke out here one week ago.

The decision is the latest in a series of measures in which some of America's biggest technology companies have cooperated with the Chinese authorities to censor Web sites and curb dissent or free speech online as they seek access to China's booming Internet marketplace.

Microsoft drew criticism last summer when it was discovered that its blog tool in China was designed to filter words like "democracy" and "human rights" from blog titles. The company said Thursday that it must "comply with global and local laws."

"This is a complex and difficult issue," said Brooke Richardson, a group product manager for MSN in Seattle. "We think it's better to be there with our services than not be there."

The site pulled down was a popular one created by Zhao Jing, a well-known blogger with an online pen name, An Ti. Mr. Zhao, 30, also works as a research assistant in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times.

The blog was removed last week from a Microsoft service called MSN Spaces after the blog discussed the firing of the independent-minded editor of The Beijing News, which prompted 100 journalists at the paper to go on strike Dec. 29. It was an unusual show of solidarity for a Chinese news organization in an industry that has complied with tight restrictions on what can be published.

The move by Microsoft comes at a time when the Chinese government is stepping up its own efforts to crack down on press freedom. Several prominent editors and journalists have been jailed in China over the last few years and charged with everything from espionage to revealing state secrets.

Another research assistant for The New York Times, Zhao Yan (no relation to Zhao Jing), was indicted last month on charges that he passed state secrets to the newspaper, which published a report in 2004 about the timing of Jiang Zemin's decision to give up the country's top military post.

China closely monitors what people here post on the Internet and the government regularly shuts Web sites and deletes postings that are considered antigovernment. A spokeswoman for Microsoft said the company had blocked "many sites" in China. The MSN Spaces sites are maintained on computer servers in the United States.

Ms. Richardson of Microsoft said Mr. Zhou's site was taken down after Chinese authorities made a request through a Shanghai-based affiliate of the company.

The shutdown of Mr. Zhao's site drew attention and condemnation this week elsewhere online. Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, wrote on her blog, referring to Microsoft and other technology companies: "Can we be sure they won't do the same thing in response to potentially illegal demands by an overzealous government agency in our own country?"

Robert Scoble, a blogger and official "technology evangelist" for Microsoft, took a public stand against the company's action. "This one is depressing to me," he wrote on Tuesday. "It's one thing to pull a list of words out of blogs using an algorithm. It's another thing to become an agent of a government and censor an entire blogger's work."

Another American online service operating in China, Yahoo, was widely criticized in the fall after it was revealed that the company had provided Chinese authorities with information that led to the imprisonment of a Chinese journalist who kept a personal e-mail account with Yahoo. Yahoo also defended its action by saying it was forced to comply with local law.

Mr. Zhao is so well known as a blogger that he served as China's lone jury member last year in Germany for a world blog competition.

A former computer programmer, Mr. Zhao worked as a journalist for a Chinese newspaper and as a research assistant for The Washington Post before joining The New York Times in 2003.

Mr. Zhao, in an interview this evening, said he had kept a personal blog for more than a year and was regularly censored in China, even though he has tried to be careful not to write about significant issues related to his work at The Times.

He was apparently one of the first on the Internet to mention that several editors could be fired from The Beijing News. He said he posted something about possible firings on Dec. 28.

Two days later, after the top editor there was dismissed, Reuters reported that about a hundred journalists had gone on strike over the dispute and added that several Chinese blogs and Internet chat rooms were discussing the issue. The report said Mr. Zhao had used his blog to urge readers to cancel their subscriptions.

Mr. Zhao said in an interview Thursday that Microsoft chose to delete his blog on Dec. 30 with no warning. "I didn't even say I supported the strike," he said. "This action by Microsoft infringed upon my freedom of speech. They even deleted my blog and gave me no chance to back up my files without any warning."

David Barboza reported from Beijing for this article and Tom Zeller Jr. from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/te...gy/06blog.html

[JackSpratts]

Surveillance

Basis for Spying in U.S. Is Doubted
Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane

President Bush's rationale for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants rests on questionable legal ground, and Congress does not appear to have given him the authority to order the surveillance, said a Congressional analysis released Friday.

The analysis, by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan research arm of Congress, was the first official assessment of a question that has gripped Washington for three weeks: Did Mr. Bush act within the law when he ordered the National Security Agency, the country's most secretive spy agency, to eavesdrop on some Americans?

The report, requested by several members of Congress, reached no bottom-line conclusions on the legality of the program, in part because it said so many details remained classified. But it raised numerous doubts about the power to bypass Congress in ordering such operations, saying the legal rationale "does not seem to be as well grounded" as the administration's lawyers have argued.

The administration quickly disputed several conclusions in the report.

The report was particularly critical of a central administration justification for the program, that Congress had effectively approved such eavesdropping soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by authorizing "all necessary and appropriate force" against the terrorist groups responsible. Congress "does not appear to have authorized or acquiesced in such surveillance," the report said, adding that the administration reading of some provisions of federal wiretap law could render them "meaningless."

The president acknowledged last month that he had given the security agency the power to eavesdrop on the international telephone and e-mail communications of Americans and others in the United States without a warrant if they are suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.

The Justice Department is investigating the disclosure of the program, first reported in The New York Times. With Congressional hearings expected this month, the Congressional research report intensified debate on the program. Administration lawyers quickly responded that Mr. Bush had acted within his constitutional and statutory powers.

"The president has made clear that he will use his constitutional and statutory authorities to protect the American people from further terrorist attacks," said Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, adding that the program represented "a critical tool in the war on terror that saves lives and protects civil liberties at the same time."

Many Democrats and some Republicans pointed to the findings as perhaps the strongest indication that Mr. Bush might have exceeded his authority in fighting terrorism.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, who leads the House Democratic Policy Committee, said the report "raises serious questions about the president's legal authority to conduct domestic spying."

Mr. Miller said the justifications for the program were unacceptable.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said the report made "absolutely clear that the legal authorities advanced by the president in justifying domestic surveillance are on very shaky ground."

Thomas H. Kean, a Republican who was chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, weighed in for the first time in the debate. Mr. Kean said he counted himself among those who doubted the legality of the program. He said in an interview that the administration did not inform his commission about the program and that he wished it had.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress passed in 1978 after widespread abuses by intelligence agencies, created a system for court-ordered wiretaps for terrorism and espionage suspects. That system "gives very broad powers to the president and, except in very rare circumstances, in my view ought to be used," Mr. Kean said.

"We live by a system of checks and balances," he said. "And I think we ought to continue to live by a system of checks and balances."

One reason the administration has cited for not seeking to change the intelligence law and obtain specific approvals for eavesdropping was that it might "tip off" terrorists to the program. The Congressional research service found that unconvincing.

"No legal precedent appears to have been presented," the study said, "that would support the president's authority to bypass the statutory route when legislation is required" simply because of secrecy.

Opinions on domestic spying have largely broken down, though not exclusively, along partisan lines, causing splits between the top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

The analyses of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress created in 1914, are generally seen as objective and without partisan taint, said Eleanor Hill, staff director of the Congressional inquiry on the Sept. 11 attacks.

Because of its importance, the report was repeatedly reviewed by senior staff members at the research service for accuracy and bias before its release, officials there said.

Some Democrats say the administration bypassed the authority of Congress in ordering the eavesdropping. One congressman said he was actively misled. In a letter released Friday, Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, complained to the N.S.A. over what he described as deception by its director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander of the Army.

Mr. Holt, a physicist who has worked as an arms control specialist at the State Department, visited the agency on Dec. 6 for a briefing by General Alexander and agency lawyers about protecting Americans' privacy. The officials assured him, Mr. Holt said, that the agency singled out Americans for eavesdropping only under warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

After the program was disclosed, Mr. Holt wrote a blistering letter to General Alexander, expressing "considerable anger" over being misled. An agency spokesman, Don Weber, declined to comment on the letter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/po... ner=homepage





Republican Senator Defends Briefings on Domestic Spying
Scott Shane

In a sign of growing partisan division over domestic eavesdropping, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday defended the Bush administration's limited briefings for Congress on the secret program and accused the committee's top Democrat of changing her position on the issue.

Also Thursday, 27 House Democrats sent a letter to President Bush asking for information about the National Security Agency eavesdropping program, including whether communications from or to members of Congress and journalists were intercepted.

The Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, was responding to a statement Wednesday by Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California, that the law requires that the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees be informed of the N.S.A. program. By briefing only the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses and of the committees, the administration violated the law, Ms. Harman wrote in a letter to the president.

In a letter to Ms. Harman, Mr. Hoekstra said the briefings were in compliance with the National Security Act of 1947, which says the committees should be informed of intelligence activities, though "with due regard for" the need to protect secrets.

"The committee has been informed, in good faith by the president of the United States," through briefings he and Ms. Harman attended, Mr. Hoekstra wrote.

He said he was "surprised and somewhat bewildered" by Ms. Harman's letter because she had not previously complained about the briefings. Mr. Hoekstra told Ms. Harman that he found her letter to the president "completely incongruent" with her previous position.

"In the past," he said, "you have been fully supportive of this program and the practice by which we have overseen it."

The security agency's program, disclosed last month in The New York Times, involves eavesdropping without court warrants on the telephone calls and e-mail messages of people in the United States who officials say have been linked to terrorism suspects overseas.

Ordinarily, the law requires a warrant from a special intelligence court for such eavesdropping. But Mr. Bush has said he authorized the intercepts under his power as commander in chief.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, released the 27 Democrats' letter. It asks for copies of all legal opinions on the spying program; the numbers of Americans singled out; and the names of agencies getting the information the agency collected.

F.B.I. agents and N.S.A. employees have been warned by their bosses not to discuss the program.

The warnings at the security agency, which were sent after the Times article appeared, came in two e-mail messages dated Dec. 16 and Dec. 22 from Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the agency's director, to the N.S.A. work force. They were released on Thursday to The Times in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

In the Dec. 16 message, General Alexander wrote, "Rest assured that any operation, regardless of sensitivity, is conducted within the law and in the best interest of our nation."

He reminded the employees in the same message that the program remained classified.

"We do not comment on intelligence operations, actual or alleged - to do so is professionally irresponsible and may put Americans or allied personnel in peril," he wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/politics/06nsa.html





Poll: Americans Want Warrants For Spying
Katherine Shrader

A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows.

Over the past three weeks, President Bush and top aides have defended the electronic monitoring program they secretly launched shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, as a vital tool to protect the nation from al- Qaida and its affiliates.

Yet 56 percent of respondents in an AP-Ipsos poll said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism.

Agreeing with the White House, some 42 percent of those surveyed do not believe the court approval is necessary.

"We're at war," Bush said during a New Year's Day visit to San Antonio. "And as commander in chief, I've got to use the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people. ... It's a vital, necessary program."

According to the poll, age matters in how people view the monitoring. Nearly two-thirds of those between age 18 to 29 believe warrants should be required, while people 65 and older are evenly divided.

Party affiliation is a factor, too. Almost three-fourths of Democrats and one-third of Republicans want to require court warrants.

Cynthia Ice-Bones, 32, a Republican from Sacramento, Calif., said knowing about the program made her feel a bit safer. "I think our security is so important that we don't need warrants. If you're doing something we shouldn't be doing, then you ought to be caught," she said.

To snoop or not to snoop. Americans are saying what they think.

But Peter Ahr of Caldwell, N.J., a religious studies professor at Seton Hall University, said he could not find a justification for skipping judicial approvals. Nor did he believe the administration's argument that such a step would impair terrorism investigations.

"We're a nation of laws. ... That means that everybody has to live by the law, including the administration," said Ahr, 64, a Democrat who argues for checks and balances. "For the administration to simply go after wiretaps on their own without anyone else's say-so is a violation of that principle."

The eavesdropping is run by the secretive National Security Agency, the government's code-makers and code-breakers.

Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said most people think that the eavesdropping is aimed at foreign terrorists, even when the surveillance is conducted inside the country.

"They are willing to give the president quite a lot of leeway on this when it comes to the war on terror," said Franklin, who closely follows public opinion.

Some members of Congress have raised concerns about the president's actions, but none of those lawmakers who have been briefed on the program has called for its immediate halt.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has promised hearings this year. Five members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, have called for immediate inquiries.

On top of that, a memorandum circulated Friday from two legal analysts at the Congressional Research Service concluded that the justification for the monitoring may not be as strong as the administration has argued.

The NSA's activity "may present an exercise of presidential power at its lowest ebb," the 44-page memo said.

Bush based his eavesdropping orders on his presidential powers under the Constitution and a September 2001 congressional resolution authorizing him to use military force in the fight against terrorism.

The administration says the program is reviewed every 45 days and that Bush personally reauthorizes it. His top legal advisers argue its justification is sound.

The issue is full of grays for some people interviewed for the poll, including homebuilder Harlon Bennett, 21, a political independent from Wellston, Okla. He does not think the government should need warrants for suspected terrorists.

"Of course," he added, "we all could be suspected terrorists."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAU LT





Judges and Justice Dept. Meet Over Eavesdropping Program
Eric Lichtblau

The Justice Department held an unusual closed-door briefing Monday for judges on a secret foreign-intelligence court in response to concerns about President Bush's decision to allow domestic eavesdropping without warrants.

A number of judges from around the country who serve on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which issues eavesdropping warrants in terror cases, flew to Washington to hear the administration's defense of the legality and use of the program, officials said.

One federal judge who sat on the court, James Robertson, stepped down in protest last month after the surveillance operation was first publicly disclosed.

Some of the other 10 judges on the court are known to have voiced recent concerns about whether information that grew out of the National Security Agency's surveillance operation might have been used improperly in securing warrants from the court for intelligence wiretaps.

The judge who leads the court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the only judge currently sitting on the court who is known to have been briefed on the N.S.A. operation, raised objections in 2004 to aspects of the program and instructed for a time that no material obtained by the N.S.A. without warrants could be presented to the court in warrant applications, officials have said in interviews.

At Monday's briefing, judges were expected to question Justice Department officials intensely about the legal underpinnings of the program, but afterward they would say little about the session. Judge Kollar-Kotelly did not return calls seeking comment on the briefing, which was held at the Justice Department, and officials for the department and the court would not discuss any aspect.

"There is going to be no comment about today," said Sheldon Snook, an administrator for the United States District Court in Washington. "The court has never commented publicly about their business."

The Bush administration, in defending the use of the N.S.A. program, has pointed to frustrations over the speed and flexibility of the foreign-intelligence court as one reason for allowing the N.S.A. to eavesdrop without warrants.

The intelligence court's caseload has grown significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks, with more than 1,700 warrants issued as of the last public tally in 2004. Only a handful of requests for wiretaps have been turned down in recent years.

The 1978 law creating the court allows the administration to conduct emergency wiretaps and seek a formal order retroactively within 72 hours, but the White House says the system can be too cumbersome to allow for quick responses to developing terror threats.

In some cases, the Justice Department is known to have secured warrants from the foreign intelligence court in cases that grew out of the N.S.A.'s eavesdropping program. That has raised concerns among civil rights advocates.

Some defense lawyers in prominent terror cases around the country said they planned to go to court to determine whether the N.S.A. program had been used against their clients and, if so, whether courts or defense lawyers had been misled about the origins of the evidence against them.

A group of 13 law professors and former government officials weighed in Monday in the heated legal debate, writing in a letter to Congressional leaders that they had serious concerns about the legality of Mr. Bush's executive order.

The White House has strongly defended the lawfulness of the program, saying it was grounded both in the president's inherent authority under the Constitution and in a resolution passed by Congress days after the Sept. 11 attacks authorizing him to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for the attacks.

But an analysis released last Friday by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, took issue with several of the administration's main legal arguments, saying that Congress did not appear to have ever intended to give Mr. Bush the authority to conduct wiretaps without a warrant.

In the letter released Monday, the 13 law professors and former government officials went further, writing that "the Justice Department's defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/politics/10nsa.html





White House Says Web Site Counts Visitors
Anick Jesdanun

The White House said Friday its Web tracking technology is consistent with federal rules because it only counts the number of visitors anonymously and doesn't record personal information.

The White House's site uses what's known as a Web bug _ a tiny graphic image that's virtually invisible _ to anonymously keep track of the number and time of visits. The bug is sent by a server maintained by an outside contractor, WebTrends Inc., and lets the traffic-analysis company know that another person has visited a specific page on the site.

Web bugs themselves are not prohibited. However, under a directive from the White House's Office of Management and Budget, they are largely banned at government sites when linked to cookies, which are data files that let a site track Web visitors.

Cookies are not generated simply by visiting the White House site. Rather, WebTrends cookies are sometimes created when visiting other WebTrends clients. An analysis by security researcher Richard M. Smith shows such preexisting cookies have then been read when users visit the White House site.

The discovery and subsequent inquiries by The Associated Press prompted the White House to investigate. David Almacy, the White House's Internet director, said tests conducted since Thursday show that data from the cookie and the bug are not mixed _ and thus the 2003 guidelines weren't violated.

"The White House Web site is and always has been consistent with the OMB guidance," Almacy said, adding that the limited tracking is common among Web sites.

Jason Palmer, vice president of products for Portland, Ore.-based WebTrends, said Web browsers are designed to scan preexisting cookies automatically, but he insisted the company doesn't use the information to track visitors to the White House site.

Smith said the White House and WebTrends could have avoided any appearance of a problem by simply renaming the server used at WebTrends.

The Clinton administration first issued the strict rules on cookies in 2000 after its Office of National Drug Control Policy, through a contractor, had used the technology to track computer users viewing its online anti-drug advertising. The rules were updated in 2003 by the Bush administration.

Nonetheless, agencies occasionally violate the rules _ inadvertently, they contend. The CIA did in 2002, and the NSA more recently. The NSA disabled the cookies this week and blamed a recent upgrade to software that shipped with cookie settings already on.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...123000195.html





F.B.I. Tries to Dispel Surveillance Concerns
Lynette Clemetson

F.B.I. officials met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders on Wednesday in an effort to dispel anger and concern over the bureau's secret monitoring of radiation levels at Muslim sites around the country.

John Pistole, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and John Miller, the bureau's assistant director of public affairs, tried to reassure those at the session that the surveillance of mosques and Muslim businesses and homes had been based on intelligence leads.

"There was intelligence that talked about the desire to use a dirty bomb in the U.S.; there were statements from bin Laden indicating that he had those materials and that there were cells in the U.S. trained to blend into Muslim communities," Mr. Miller said after the meeting. "We explained how we work with intelligence and that we did what we did based on the patterns of Al Qaeda, not because of the patterns or activities of any mosque or Muslim neighborhood."

F.B.I. officials struck a conciliatory tone, several attendees said, and acknowledged that the bureau could have responded to their concerns more quickly. But Mr. Pistole offered few details on the monitoring, they said, and he emphasized that the program, which began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and lasted through 2003, remained classified.

Leaders of Muslim and Arab-American groups requested the meeting after the program was disclosed last month by U.S. News & World Report. The nationwide surveillance program included air monitoring of more than 100 private properties in the Washington area.

The controversy over the surveillance program comes after the F.B.I. cancelled financing for a bureau-wide training initiative intended to improve outreach to Muslim and Arab Americans. Group leaders say the news about the radiation monitoring makes such a program all the more crucial.

"This current situation reinforces the notion that our community is viewed more as suspects rather than partners," said one attendee, Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a national advocacy organization. "Formalizing outreach sets a standard for better educating agents on the best means of acquiring information, and it demonstrates that partnership is the best way of protecting our country from terrorist attacks."

In October, the F.B.I. rescinded a $1 million pledge toward a training program to institutionalize bridge-building between its field offices and Muslim groups around the country. The program, which would have cost $6 million over three years, was cancelled, in part, because of budget constraints, Mr. Miller said.

In cities with sizable numbers of Muslims and Arab-Americans, F.B.I. field offices have developed relationships with mosques, advocacy groups and community leaders. In Washington and Los Angeles, for instance, special agents meet regularly with groups. Partnerships in Detroit formed the basis for the training program that bureau officials first embraced, then rejected.

Agents engaged in the outreach program said it helped them gain cultural awareness as well as practical insights into sorting good leads from bad. Muslim, Arab and Sikh leaders said that, as a result of the outreach, they received better F.B.I. protection from hate crimes.

But national initiatives like special security registration of citizens of Arab and Muslim countries, sweeps by federal agents in Muslim and Arab neighborhoods and the freezing of Islamic charities' assets have generated complaints.

The radiation surveillance, conducted with the Department of Energy, is another irritant. Disclosures of such programs, attendees at Wednesday's meeting said, make it more difficult to convince people that forming ties with government agencies is productive.

"When things like this happen, people come to us and ask, 'What are you doing talking to the F.B.I.?' " said Imam Mohamed Magid, leader of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, a mosque in Northern Virginia commonly called the Adams Center, which serves 5,000 families.

Imam Magid, who also attended the meeting on Wednesday, has forged ties with agents in the F.B.I.'s Washington field office and organized public forums between them and community members. Now, he said, some of those in the community have questioned whether those sessions were ruses for the agency to conduct secret monitoring.

Several F.B.I. agents have also supported bringing uniformity to bureau practices.

"We're consistent in how we deal with white-collar crime and every other type of crime," said Michael E. Rolince, who was in charge of counterterrorism for the Washington office before he retired in October. "When it comes to dealing with the Arab-American and Muslim community, we have no consistent program. We have 56 different approaches in our 56 different field offices."

The canceled training program, called the Partnering for Prevention and Community Safety Initiative, was developed at Northeastern University in Boston.

"It's not 'Kumbaya, let's sit and talk about how nice things are,' " said Deborah A. Ramirez, a Northeastern law professor and former racial-profiling consultant to the Justice Department, who developed the program. "It's a structured process to learn what exists, what works and what we all need to be doing."

Mr. Miller said the bureau would support the training program if outside financing was secured.

"Now that we've let some of the pressure out of this pressure cooker," he said, "we have to address how we go about building better relationships so that when the next crisis comes, we can just call people and talk about it up front."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/po...12muslims.html





F.B.I. Is Cleared of Misconduct in Jailing of Oregon Man
David Stout

Overconfidence in its own fingerprint-identification technology and sloppy paperwork contributed to the F.B.I.'s wrongly implicating a Portland, Ore., lawyer in the deadly 2004 Madrid train bombing, a Justice Department investigation said today.

But the investigation, by the department's inspector general's office, said there had been no misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and no abuse of the USA Patriot Act in the case of the lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who was jailed for two weeks in May 2004 as a material witness before he was cleared.

Although Mr. Mayfield's Islamic faith was not a factor in the initial stages of the bombing investigation, when F.B.I. technicians erroneously concluded that a print found on a plastic bag near the Madrid attack scene matched one of Mr. Mayfield's, it may have slowed his ultimate exoneration, the Justice Department inquiry found.

The inspector general said the chain of errors that led to Mr. Mayfield's jailing was due in part to the "unusual similarity" between Mr. Mayfield's fingerprints and those found at the site of the bombing on March 11.

"However, we concluded that the examiners committed errors in the examination procedure, and that the misidentification could have been prevented through a more rigorous application of several principles of latent fingerprint identification," the inquiry found.

The report, by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, said it concurred with several changes in F.B.I. laboratory procedures put in place as a result of the Mayfield case, "particularly with respect to the development of more objective criteria for declaring an identification," but that still more changes are necessary, including stricter documentation of errors and their causes.

The F.B.I. has already apologized to Mr. Mayfield, who contends in a suit against the government that he was singled out because of his faith. The bureau, which has denied that accusation, said today it was pleased that the inspector general had found no official wrongdoing and no violation of the Patriot Act, the statute that Congress passed shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster government surveillance powers.

"We are confident that the OIG's findings and recommendations, combined with corrective measures already implemented, will significantly enhance our ability to perform our duties to the public," the F.B.I. said in a statement today. It said the arrest of Mr. Mayfield was based on "an extremely unusual confluence of events," principally the unusual similarity between his prints and those found at the scene.

The inspector general's report amounts to a cautionary tale about over-reliance on crime-fighting techniques that are sometimes considered practically foolproof, and about the dangers of guilt by association.

Mr. Mayfield, who had married an Egyptian immigrant, had represented a suspected terrorist in a child-custody case in Portland. And when the F.B.I.'s much- praised Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System seemed to show a match between a print at the bombing scene at his own, he came under heavy suspicion.

His home and office were searched. And while the inspector general found no evidence that he had been mistreated in confinement, the report noted that he was initially kept in his cell 22 hours a day. Moreover, the report said, the material-witness and search warrants issued by a federal judge were based on F.B.I. affidavits "that reflected a regrettable lack of attention to detail."

In particular, the report said, the affidavits apparently conveyed the impression that the Spanish authorities agreed with the F.B.I.'s fingerprint work - when, in fact, Spanish investigators had already told their American counterparts they had serious doubts about whether there was a match.

Over-confidence in the F.B.I.'s fingerprint system, which can electronically sift millions of prints in a very short time, and too little confidence in the skills of the Spanish authorities helped to steer the investigation in the wrong direction, the report said. So did "circular reasoning," or the temptation to find fingerprint similarities that were not really there, once several genuine similarities had been detected.

In concluding that religious prejudice had played no part in the initial, erroneous fingerprint "match," the inspector general's report noted that F.B.I. technicians did not know Mr. Mayfield's religion at first. "However, whether Mayfield's religion was a factor in the laboratory's failure to revisit its identification and discover the error in the weeks following the initial identification is a more difficult question," the inspector general said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/po...nd-terror.html





Hong Kong

Net Firms Willing To Reveal File Suspects
Jonathan Cheng

Lawyers for some of the recording industry's biggest players asked the High Court Monday to pull back the "cloak of anonymity" on illegal music file-sharers by forcing Hong Kong's four largest Internet service providers to divulge the identities of 22 alleged wrongdoers.

It was the first public hearing in a case that could determine how courts handle contentious intellectual property issues in future.

Counsel for three of the four Internet service providers, or ISPs, told the High Court they would not contest the issue and would comply should the judge order them to reveal the names.

The fourth ISP - i-Cable Webserve Ltd - is expected to fight against such an order when it presents its position in court next Monday. The three ISPs that agreed to comply are Hong Kong Broadband Network, PCCW-IMS and Hutchison Global Communications.

The legal action is aimed at uploaders who share copyrighted content through peer-to- peer file-sharing services, rather than simply those who download the files.

Martin Liao, counsel for a consortium of recording industry titans that includes local companies as well as giants like Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music, portrayed the attempt to force ISPs to divulge the identities of their subscribers as "a last resort" by an industry battered by "massive infringement" of its copyrighted material through illegal file-sharing.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a representative of Hong Kong's recording industry, claims that retail sales of music CDs in Hong Kong fell 32 percent between 2000 and 2004, from HK$926 million to HK$629 million.

Using a series of frame-by-frame computer screenshots at Monday's hearing, Liao showed presiding judge Poon Shiu-chor how easy it was for IFPI investigators to download six songs in MP3 format in about half an hour using WinMX, a popular online peer-to-peer file-sharing network that has since shut down.

Because of the way WinMX was programmed, Liao added, the IP addresses of the file- sharers - which could be used to target the uploaders' true identities - were obscured.

Liao said that only the ISPs could reveal the IP addresses and identities of the alleged offenders, calling it a "necessary first step to protect plaintiffs' rights."

He argued that, while the ISPs themselves may be innocent of any wrongdoing, they were still compelled to "cooperate in righting the wrong they inadvertently helped to facilitate" and provide "full disclosure" of their suspect subscribers.

The court order, Liao said, would be used to request the names, addresses and Hong Kong ID numbers of the alleged offenders, presumably so that charges could be brought against them.

"We are not here to pry into their identities, or to harm them," Liao said, arguing that the court order was in the public interest for the administration of justice.

Liao argued at length that the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance, which is meant to protect the privacy interests of individuals, was not intended to restrict the power of the High Court in seeking the disclosure of information such as the identities of the alleged file- sharers.

"An uploaded song has only one purpose- to allow others with the same software to download the song," Liao said.

The hearing was the first open to the public in the months since the record industry consortium announced plans to seek legal recourse against 22 uploaders last November.

The case follows the world's first conviction of an uploader of copyrighted material, when a Tuen Mun magistrate sentenced a man to three months in prison for sharing three movies through BitTorrent, another peer-to-peer file-sharing software.

In that case, the plaintiffs were able to identify the uploader directly without seeking the cooperation of the ISP, since the BitTorrent software shows the file-sharers' genuine IP address.
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_d...412&con_type=1





Create An e-Annoyance, Go To Jail
Declan McCullagh

Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

"The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else."

It's illegal to annoy

A new federal law states that when you annoy someone on the Internet, you must disclose your identity. Here's the relevant language.

"Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."
Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called "Preventing Cyberstalking." It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet "without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy."

To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section's other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.

The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.

There's an interesting side note. An earlier version that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an "interactive computer service" to cause someone "substantial emotional harm."

That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should merely annoying someone be illegal?

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are.

Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.

In each of those three cases, someone's probably going to be annoyed. That's enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won't file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.)

Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.

"Who decides what's annoying? That's the ultimate question," Fein said. He added: "If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?"

Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material "with intent to annoy." But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn't have to worry.

"I'm certainly not going to close the site down," Fein said on Friday. "I would fight it on First Amendment grounds."

He's right. Our esteemed politicians can't seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.

It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.

If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he'd realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold.

And then he'd repeat what President Clinton did a decade ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department not to enforce it.

Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls Americans' personal freedoms. Now we'll see if the president rises to the occasion.
http://news.com.com/Create+an+e-anno...3-6022491.html





Go Ahead, Try to Stop K Street
Todd S. Purdum

IN 1872, some Republican elders, revolted by the rampant influence peddling of Ulysses S. Grant's administration, challenged him for re-election. "He has used the public service of the government as a machinery of corruption and personal influence," they complained, and "shown himself deplorably unequal to the task imposed on him by the necessities of the country."

Jack Abramoff's trading room was his Signatures restaurant, not the front of the old Willard Hotel, where favor seekers so besieged Grant that he helped popularize the label - lobbyist - that still clings to their descendants with a pejorative sting. But Mr. Abramoff's guilty plea last week to charges of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials prompted similar revulsion among some of the Grand Old Party's canniest hands.

"I think as this thing unfolds, it'll be so disgusting, and the Republicans will be under such pressure from their base, that they will have to undertake substantial reform," said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker (who himself had to pay $300,000 to settle a 1997 ethics case). "This is like Watergate."

But will things really change? After all, Grant himself won a second term, despite the failings that would eventually leave his legacy forever tainted, and his chief Republican antagonist, Horace Greeley, died defeated and insane three weeks after the election. Is corruption just a part of Washington's DNA? What else explains the grim resignation of Washington veterans who wonder when, not whether, some scandal will arise?

"The history of civilization, for starters," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, an ethics group. "This kind of problem is faced by all societies throughout all of history. It comes and goes in cycles, and becomes most prevalent when the activities are viewed as O.K. by the society where it's taking place."

For watchdogs like Mr. Wertheimer, and for many Democrats, such tolerance dates to the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990's, when new leaders like Representative Tom DeLay of Texas began a campaign to fill the capital's K Street corridor with Republican lobbyists, and made it plain that those seeking to influence legislation would have to "pay to play," in the form of political contributions and other largesse.

Mr. DeLay, who was himself indicted last year in Texas on unrelated campaign finance charges and forced to step down from his post as House majority leader, has long had close ties to Mr. Abramoff. Now Mr. Abramoff's guilty plea increases the likelihood that Mr. DeLay will lose his leadership post for good, and raises the prospect that he - and other lawmakers - may be enmeshed in new legal troubles. The sheer scale of Mr. Abramoff's misdeeds - millions of dollars in kickbacks from Indian tribes, a luxury golf outing for politicians to Scotland, misuse of a tax-exempt foundation - make this an extraordinary case.

"There are all sorts of things that have gone on of the same generic kind," said Harry C. McPherson, who came to Washington 50 years ago this month as a Senate aide to Lyndon B. Johnson and has plied his trade as a lawyer-lobbyist since leaving the White House in 1969. "But this is truly a situation where the degree changes everything. It converts something that purists about government would find unpleasant into the utterly unacceptable - into crime."

But the problem is broader than Mr. Abramoff, Mr. DeLay or even the inherent potential for abuse in one-party rule of all three branches of government. It also has to do with the astounding growth of the lobbying industry, a growth that has tracked the growth of the federal government itself. The rise of government regulation - first in the New Deal and then in the 1960's and 70's - spawned a parallel rise in the private sector's efforts to master the new system. Between the early 1970's and the mid- 1980's, the number of trade associations doubled; in the first half of the 1980's alone, the number of registered lobbyists quadrupled, according to The Washington Monthly.

A study by the Center for Public Integrity found that in the early 1990's, political donations from 19 major industries - including

pharmaceuticals, defense, commercial banking and accounting - were split about evenly between the two parties.

By 2003, the Republicans held a 2-to-1 advantage. Since 1998, the center found, more than 2,200 former federal employees had registered as federal lobbyists, as had nearly 275 former White House aides and nearly 250 former members of Congress. Many rules governing their conduct remain deliberately vague, and the House Ethics Committee has been paralyzed because of dysfunction and partisan disputes.

"The scandal here is not that the rules were broken; the scandal is the rules themselves," said Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts, who with a Republican colleague, Christopher Shays of Connecticut, and Senators John McCain and Russell D. Feingold, has been a leader in pressing to overhaul campaign finance and ethics rules. "Lobbying is part of our system, but there is a set of ethical standards and rules that ought to be followed."

Together with Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and Mr. Feingold, Mr. Meehan has introduced legislation that would, among other things, require lobbyists to file quarterly financial disclosures, instead of semiannual ones and to disclose just whom in the government they lobbied. Former members of Congress would also not be able to lobby their colleagues for two years, as opposed to the current one year. Members would be required to submit detailed itineraries and descriptions of expenses for privately sponsored travel.

Mr. Gingrich has offered more ideas. He would allow unlimited fund-raising in members' states or districts, but bar fund-raising within the District of Columbia, and would require that all contacts between lobbyists and elected and appointed officials be posted weekly on the Internet. And he would shrink a government that has only grown further with post Sept. 11, 2001, spending.

"There is $2.6 trillion spent in Washington, with the authority to regulate everything in your life," he said. "Guess what? People will spend unheard-of amounts of money to influence that. The underlying problems are big government and big money."

Of course, the record suggests that for every loophole any new law might close, lobbyists will find a way to open another. The ban on so-called "soft money" contributions to political parties led to the rise of new special-interest spending groups, for example. Entrenched industries - and entrenched incumbents of both parties - can be expected to resist change that would threaten the way they know how to do business.

For their part, some lobbyists hope legislators intent on reform resist painting with too broad a brush.

"A lot of what we do is an enormous educational effort, to avoid what we consider even well-meaning but wrong-headed legislation," said Joseph Tasker, senior vice president for government affairs of the Information Technology Association of America, which represents companies like I.B.M. and Microsoft, on issues including privacy, piracy and Internet security.

"Congressmen don't know things; they're not experts in technology," he said. "In the mid-1990's, we were meeting with a Congressman about high-definition TV standards and we were talking about pixels and so on, and he said, 'Fellas, look, I'm trying to stay with you here, but one of the first times I ever took a ride on an airplane was when I came to Washington to take my seat and I remember looking out the window and I thought part of the wing was falling off when we landed, because the flaps came up.' "

And, this being Washington, even the best-intentioned efforts to stick to the rules can lead to overreaching silliness.

In 2004, David McKean, a veteran Senate aide, published a critically praised book on Thomas "Tommy the Cork" Corcoran, perhaps the most successful Washington lobbyist of the 20th century. But the Senate ethics committee advised him not to disclose on the dust jacket the name of the senator he worked for, John Kerry, lest he be seen as using his position for commercial gain.

The restriction hampered his ability to promote his book. Indeed, when a Washington bookstore inadvertently identified Mr. McKean's position in an advertisement, he had to cancel an appearance there. A very small victory, one would guess, for the capital's reputation.

Todd S. Purdum, a former reporter for The New York Times, is national editor of Vanity Fair.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/we...dum.html?8hpib





Could Microsoft Pirate Your PC?
p2p news / p2pnet

Could Bill and the Boyz grab your computer without your permission? - asks Email Battles, going on: "Obviously. But would they? While we would like to think Redmond will always do the right thing, there's a certain blogger in China who might not share that opinion. When China told Microsoft to pull the plug on the poor wretch's blog, the company shut him down."

The observations come in an Email Battles story centering on the recent critical Microsoft WMF security debacle, and which in turn picks up on another from Ars Technica.

The "poor wretch" in question , an MSN user, made the mistake of discussing the recent Beijing newspaper strike online. Following complaints from Communist China, Bill and the Boyz scuppered him.

Meanwhile, "In the midst of a debate at Ars Technica over Microsoft's personal-best performance in handling the WMF exploit, a few quiet voices popped up," observes Email Battles, referring to a post "from Zakharov" which asked:

"Is it me or was that patch distributed with some kind of hidden higher priority? I normally leave windows auto-update set to notify me when patches are downloaded for manual installation but the WMF patch took matters into its own hands and installed itself with a reboot."

And, "According to Microsoft's documentation for Automatic Update, that shouldn't happen to an Administrative user: 'If you are an administrator for your computer, you can delay the restart; otherwise, Windows warns you and then restarts your computer for you. Make sure you save your work and remind other users to save their work, especially before scheduled installation times'."

An Email Battles tech concurred with Zakharov, says the story, noticing, "one of our XP laptops that was set to simply download updates had restarted... And had the patch." And astrashe, another Ars Technica member, agreed, saying, "I noticed the same thing. I got a message saying the patch had been installed, and that my machine had rebooted."

"You may well ask, 'What's the problem? You got protected, didn't you'?" - says Email Battles, answering, "Quite true. However, it's one thing for your neighbor to knock on your door, then wait for an invitation to enter. It is quite another for your neighbor to barge in and start moving furniture while you're entertaining guest at your pool party. And it's especially troublesome when your neighbor walks in uninvited, using the keys you trusted him to use only when authorized.

"We were frankly astounded that Microsoft might be so bold. Back at Ars Technica, mmondok reported: 'It's funny that you guys should mention the reboot as I think it may have also happened to two of my PCs as well. I never log out or turn off my computer, but both were logged out and I had the "your PC has been updated" blob show up when I logged back into the machines. I just figured it was a strange coincidence. I can't verify that it was the updates that did it, but it sure sounds like it'."

The patch, "definitely installed itself on my work PC even though I did not allow it to install when I shut down on Friday," says a 2pnet reader. "Monday morning when I started up, I got the notice saying that my PC had been updated and had required a restart, none of which I had control over."

Back to the question in our intro, "Can Microsoft take over your computer without your permission? Obviously. But would they?"

Obviously.
http://p2pnet.net/story/7556





Beating Over-the-Air, But Not Quite Perfect
Frank Ahrens

Satellite radio in a nutshell: I spent one night earlier this summer driving around and listening to the Washington Nationals close out an exciting win. Where I was driving around, however, was Charleston, W.Va., well outside the broadcast range of the Nationals' Z104/ WFED radio network. It was not, however, out of range of XM Satellite Radio, which this season began carrying every game of all 30 Major League Baseball teams and beaming them across North America.

It was terrific to be able to keep up with the team from afar; every win sounded like the World Series on the radio, thanks to the vocal fans.

So, as the final out of this particular game was recorded, the Nats' announcer enthused, "Just listen to that crowd!" It was a cruel taunt. At that precise moment, I drove into one of a handful of dead spots around Charleston where XM service drops out for several seconds.

Hence, the often-simultaneous joy and frustration of satellite radio.

Now, with nearly 6 million subscribers between them, XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. have established a foothold as a competitively priced entertainment option for auto, home and mobile use. Like the cell phone, however, satellite radio is an infant technology compared with its predecessor, which has had more than a century to perfect its delivery system. And, like an infant, it still spits up from time to time.

On the face, Sirius and XM are comparable services: Both have more than 60 channels of commercial-free music covering a broad spectrum of niches, from old-school country to today's hits, from the most experimental jazz to the spaciest New Age, from the raunchiest hip-hop to the kid-friendliest Radio Disney.

Each has channels devoted to music from the decades of the '40s to the '90s; each has bluegrass and standards channels, each has several hip-hop and classical channels and so on. XM has a fun unsigned bands channel that Sirius does not have; Sirius has a groovy, trip-hoppy electronica channel that has no XM equivalent.

Both also have more than 50 channels of news, talk and entertainment and share many of the same third-party providers: Fox News Channel, the BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC and CNN.

And both cost a fair amount of money over time: The receivers for each start at $50 (in some cases, after a mail-in rebate), and each service runs $12.95 a month before any family-plan or pay-in-advance discounts.

But over the course of their short life spans, each service has begun to develop a personality and a direction.

Music fans will find a deeper and better-defined selection of stations on XM.

Sports and talk fans, however, will gravitate toward Sirius, which broadcasts NFL and NBA games. Sirius also has swiped NASCAR from XM, starting in 2007, and will resume NHL games, assuming anyone cares. XM cannot rival this lineup. For live action, it offers only baseball, the PGA Tour, three college conferences and IndyCar racing. Through its carriage of ESPN, it also broadcasts the NBA playoffs but not the regular season.

Of course, Sirius also can claim the sui generis Howard Stern, who probably will be good for 1 million new subscribers on his own after he joins Sirius in January.

By way of disclosure, I have had XM in two successive vehicles since December 2001. Before this comparison, my exposure to Sirius was limited at best, confined largely to rental cars that featured the service. Sirius sent me a loaner boom box in early June and I spent a large part of the month -- consecutive days and otherwise, dropping in at various times of days and late nights, on weekends and weekdays, well over 100 hours -- sampling the service.

In comparing XM and Sirius, I judged two factors: programming and reception.

With the benefit of a year's head start, XM has the better music stations. Each channel has what is known in the business as "stationality": a personality that makes it instantly clear to listeners which channel they are listening to. XM achieves this with a tight but deep selection of music for each channel, custom jingles featuring each station's name and, on a few channels, and sound effects that create radio's "theater of the mind." "Hank's Place," XM's classic country station, sounds like you've stepped into a honky-tonk, right down to the coin dropping into the Rock-Ola.

The allure of satellite radio is its plethora of narrowly formatted stations with little overlap between them. When you want classic alternative such as the Clash, the Smiths and Joy Division, you go to XM channel 44, which is called "Fred." One rarely if ever hears those artists on other XM channels.

By contrast, many of Sirius's channels sound like they're dipping into the same playlist. Flipping back and forth for several hours among Sirius channels "Starlite," "Sirius Love," "Movin' Easy" and "The Bridge" proved one channel indistinguishable from the others. Same with the four heavy-metal channels. If there are subtle distinctions, they evaded me.

While listening to Sirius in a rental car in May, I heard two Sirius channels commit what is, for me, an unforgivable sin for satellite radio: playing the same song at the same time. (Worse still: It was America's "Sister Golden Hair.") This I can get from hoary FM.

Sirius does have some outstanding personalities. I don't know from show tunes but found myself listening to "Broadway's Best" one night for two hours because of the hilarious host, Seth Rudetsky, a Broadway pianist and winner of a Funniest Gay Male contest. Sirius's celebrity deejays include Eminem, who helped program a hip-hop channel, and superstar skateboarder Tony Hawk. (More dudes per hour than any other radio show, guaranteed.) XM counters with Tom Petty and Snoop Dogg.

Fairly, it should be noted that I listened to Sirius at its weakest time of the year in terms of its sports programming. A huge part of Sirius's allure is its carriage of the NFL, NBA and NHL, none of which was currently playing. Sirius in November to January -- when all three leagues are in season -- must be nirvana for sports fans.

As for service, each relies on a different set of satellites. Sirius's three spacecraft ride a set of looping orbits that bring one at a time across the United States, while XM's two spacecraft sit in a more distant orbit that keeps them in fixed spots over the country.

Here's the problem: Satellite signals, unlike sturdier AM and FM signals, travel like sunlight and can't pass through obstructions such as buildings or dense foliage.

Sirius says the changing paths of its satellites minimize the areas shadowed by any ground-bound obstacles. XM compensates for its dead zones with hundreds of land- based repeaters that pick up the satellite signals and beam them around larger cities.

In places such as Washington, XM service is nearly flawless. In smaller cities such as Charleston, which has fewer repeaters, you get dropouts when driving along a southern ridgeline and between buildings downtown. Sirius's service in those spots is better but still has hiccups. Also, because Sirius's satellites move, I had to relocate the Sirius antenna from one window to another to find the signal over several hours of listening one afternoon.

As AM and FM convert to digital broadcasts and add additional channels to their signals, over-the-air radio probably will offer new competition for satellite. Digital radio will also allow AM and FM to go beyond their current limited ability to broadcast such text info as a station's call letters or the title and artist of the current track. (XM's baseball channels, for example, not only display the score but the situation -- "BOT 8TH 1 OUT" for bottom of the eighth inning and one out -- to bring listeners instantly up to date when they tune in.)

But local terrestrial radio stations will never be able to duplicate the wide variety of music, sports and talk choices and national reach of XM and Sirius, making both satellite radio services, even with the occasional signal glitches and sometimes-inconsistent quality of programming, far superior to their over-the-air cousins.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2700203_2.html





Satellite Radio Leaves the Car to Go Home and on Walks
Eric A. Taub

When Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio first introduced their subscription audio services, both companies expected success to come primarily from the automobile market. As most radio listening is done in the car, the two companies worked to sew up exclusive licensing deals with major car manufacturers.

But in the four years since satellite radio began, new technologies are making additional demands on listeners' time and dollars.

Today, satellite radio is competing not just with broadcast radio in the car, but also with MP3 players, which can hold thousands of songs and can be hooked up to car stereo systems. And unlike bulky satellite radio receivers, pocket-size MP3 players can be carried everywhere and are useful in the gym.

To compete with portable music devices, both XM and Sirius have had to start offering their programming over a range of devices and services. Both companies charge $12.95 a month for their programming, and discounted multiyear contracts are available.

In addition to the service in cars, consumers can now hear Sirius channels on the Dish Network and on Sprint cellphones. XM can be heard by AOL subscribers, on AirTran and JetBlue flights and on DirecTV.

"We want to make our service available over as many products as possible," said Robert Law, senior vice president of Sirius's consumer electronics division.

For now, standard radios and MP3 players still have the edge on easy music delivery. Broadcast radios are cheap and are incorporated into virtually every home stereo system, while satellite radio tuners are mostly stand-alone devices. And satellite signals cannot be received without a special antenna.

To get live radio, most portable satellite receivers on the market need to be docked (they can, however, play recorded programs on the go). Some have internal antennas for receiving live broadcasts on the go, but reception tends to be spotty. Sirius and XM are trying to address these limitations with several new devices introduced at last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The latest receivers have MP3 players and advanced antennas that extend the areas where satellite programming can be easily heard. But even the newest devices do not allow reliable on-the-go reception inside buildings because, as with satellite TV, the antennas work best outside.

Satellite Radio Everywhere

The first generation of satellite tuners came with docks that allowed users to connect the tuner to a home stereo system. But customers who did not want to take their receivers in and out of the car had to buy a separate home unit and pay two subscription fees.

Now both Sirius and XM have introduced small modules that can be attached to a new generation of satellite-ready home receivers.

The new SiriusConnect Home, a 4-inch-by-3-inch device, connects with a cable to a satellite-ready receiver and activates the service.

This summer, RCA will sell three audio systems under the General Electric and RCA names, with prices ranging from $119 to $299. The RS2100 RCA Bookshelf Audio System with SiriusConnect, which costs $299, can get Sirius channels, play CD's and record MP3 tracks, FM radio and Sirius audio onto a portable MP3 player, which is included with the system.

One of XM's newest receivers, the pocket-size neXus from Samsung, ($200 and $250) uses XM's new $30 Passport cartridge, which can be plugged into any compatible device to receive XM programming. This feature, said Chance Patterson, XM's vice president for corporate affairs, "lets you avoid having to sign up for multiple subscriptions."

Bells and Whistles

The first satellite radios were simple, clunky affairs - large units with single-line text displays that could barely be seen in bright light.

Sirius's new flagship model, the recently introduced S50 ($330, before a $50 rebate), which is less than 2 inches by 4 inches in size, includes a bright color screen that shows the channel, while a female voice announces each channel's name.

With two docking stations, the S50 can be used in the car or in the house. As with a TiVo digital video recorder, the unit buffers the previous 30 minutes of programming, so listeners can pause live shows. Programs can also be scheduled to be recorded. (The receiver will turn on automatically at the preset time.)

The S50 records up to 50 hours of MP3 tracks and satellite broadcasts, and can be detached from its cradle for use while walking or in the gym. It also automatically records music based on listening patterns. But it cannot receive live satellite radio when out of its cradle.

"Studies show that portable audio units are usually used not with live, but with recorded content," Mr. Law of Sirius said.

Live satellite feeds often break up when an external antenna is not used. The company says it plans to introduce new devices by June with improved antenna technology to receive live transmissions.

XM says it has already solved the live reception problem.

Two new XM receivers, the Samsung Helix XM2go and the Pioneer Inno, identical devices that will sell for $400 when they go on the market in March, will be able to receive live XM programming on the go. Both have built-in antennas and can record up to 50 hours of radio programs or MP3 files downloaded from a PC. Any song can be bookmarked, or tagged. When the receiver is attached to its cradle and connected to a PC, it can download songs from the XM+ Napster online service.

To further improve reception quality, an optional headset with a separate antenna will also be available in the coming months.

Two less expensive models from Samsung do not include the on-the-go feature. The $200 and $250 neXus models can record either 25 or 50 hours of programming, but have to be attached to the home or car dock to receive live signals.

Receivers for the Novice

For consumers trying out satellite radio, Sirius and XM offer a range of inexpensive receivers, including some pocket-size devices.

The Sirius One radio, priced at $50, includes a one-line display and can transmit its signal through any of 100 FM channels. A thin unit, it can be hung on the sun visor or windshield, or placed on a car's dashboard. Up to 30 stations can be stored as presets.

The XM Roady XT, $80 from Delphi (now available with a $30 rebate), is the company's smallest plug-and-play unit, measuring roughly 2 inches by 4 inches. It can transmit a signal through any of 100 FM frequencies, and can display both sports scores and stock prices on its two-line display. An optional $100 pack, which will be available from Belkin by March, will include a battery and headphones with a built-in antenna. The pack will allow the Roady XT to be used as a portable unit.

XM's original on-the-go unit, the $225 Delphi XM MyFi (available with a $50 rebate), can be used in most outdoor locations, thanks to its built-in antenna, but reception can be uneven. The unit can also record up to five hours of programming for later listening. To improve on-the-go signal reception for this and other older XM2go receivers, users can purchase a $25 Belkin headset that includes a built-in antenna.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/te.../12basics.html





As His Sirius Show Begins, Radio Ponders the Stern Effect
Eric A. Taub

When Howard Stern begins his first broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio this morning, he may be playing to a diminished audience, but his impact on the future of satellite radio has already been substantial.

The next question is whether Mr. Stern's extraordinary compensation will have any effect on the way on-air talent is paid.

Last week, Sirius announced that it had granted Mr. Stern and his manager more than 34 million shares of common stock, currently worth about $225 million, because certain subscriber levels had been reached. That is on top of the $500 million that Sirius had already agreed to pay Mr. Stern for his salary and production costs. Mr. Stern now holds more shares than any other single investor, according to David J. Frear, Sirius's executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Whether or not Mr. Stern's show, which begins at 6 a.m., is a success, his decision to jump from free broadcast to subscription radio has bestowed legitimacy to a medium that many had regarded with skepticism. Sirius's number of subscribers has jumped from 660,000 at the time Mr. Stern's deal was announced in October 2004, to 3.3 million today.

"Clearly a lot of that is attributable to Howard Stern," said Jim Collins, a vice president at Sirius. As a result of its growth, the company's initial $500 million investment in Mr. Stern will be covered by the subscriber increase, Mr. Collins said. Still, XM Satellite Radio remains the leader in the industry. While Sirius added more listeners in the final quarter of 2005, XM ended the year with more than six million subscribers.

The decision by Mr. Stern to move to satellite radio may also encourage other talent to migrate to the fledgling medium.

"Actors never wanted to be on cable until some of them started to win awards," said Agnes Lukasewych, a vice president at MPG, a media planning company.

XM previously announced that both Bob Dylan and the hosts of ABC's "Good Morning America" would create shows for the company. Sirius has plans for programming from Martha Stewart and Bill Bradley.

With broadcast radio losing the large audiences attracted by Mr. Stern, Ms. Lukasewych says she expects that advertisers will need to buy more spots to reach the same number of listeners. "Terrestrial radio has to step up to the plate" and work to attract new talent, she said.

The problem will deepen over the next several years, as MP3 players and new Internet-based music ventures, such as Motorola's iRadio service, strive to grab consumers' attention.

"XM and Sirius got to their current subscriber levels fairly easily, but at what point do they reach some level of saturation due to increased competition?" said Danielle Levitas, a senior analyst with IDC. "There is value in having some sort of cachet with unique programming."

While Mr. Stern's agreement with Sirius helped put the company on the map, performers giving a second thought to satellite radio should not anticipate the lucrative arrangement that Mr. Stern was able to negotiate.

"There isn't anybody else in Howard's class. If Sirius had not done something they would have been totally in the dust," said Paul Kagan, chairman of PK Worldmedia, a Carmel, Calif., research firm. "You don't often see a network mortgaging itself to bring in a star."

XM said it did not have plans to mix up its programming because of Mr. Stern's new show.

"Our content has not changed," said Eric Logan, XM's executive vice president of programming. "We have a platform targeted at mainstream America. There are more and more people who find Howard Stern repulsive and offensive and will go away from anywhere he is."

Nor does XM expect Mr. Stern's salary to have much of an impact on the broader industry. Mr. Logan noted that a number of performers had asked to do shows without compensation, simply to be on XM. Mr. Stern's salary "is so far out of whack that it does not do anything to the economics of the business," Mr. Logan said.

Sirius has given Mr. Stern two channels to program. His four-hour show airs at 6 a.m. on both coasts, live in the East and tape-delayed in the West. In addition to the live show, programming will include Howard 100 News, a news operation "reporting on the world of Howard."

"Howard will be doing a show that he hasn't done for 15 years, because he's been held back" by the Federal Communications Commission, said Patrick Reilly, senior vice president of communications for Sirius. "It's not about swearing, it's about being candid, doing creative performance work for radio."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/bu...tern.html?8dpc





Hands-On with the Sony Reader

Sony’s new Reader is fantastic and we want one immediately. The price point is going to be painfully high, with guesstimates in between $300 and $400, but it’s everything the Librié—Sony’s first-generation, Japan-only ePaper-based eBook reader (whew)—should have been.

Not only is the display amazing (and amazingly readable), but Sony promised us that there would be no restriction on moving over your own documents to the Reader— the DRM schmutz has been greatly decreased. Not only will the Reader support PDF files natively, but Sony’s PC syncing software will automatically convert .doc files with most formatting intact. eBooks will be an optional purchase through Sony’s Connect service.

But here’s the hottest part: RSS support with images. The digital morning paper is finally about to happen.

(Please note, we think the Sony Reader is exciting as all get out, but we’re mostly just excited about a decent consumer ePaper/eInk product in general. Other units are on the way soon from other manufacturers and we’re hyped about those, as well.)

Enjoy another, larger picture of the unit displaying text after the jump.
http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/ces/li...der-146864.php





U.S. Office Joins an Effort to Improve Software Patents
John Markoff

The United States Patent and Trademark Office plans to announce today that it will cooperate with open-source software developers on three initiatives that it says will improve the quality of software patents.

The patent office has come under increasing pressure in recent years from critics who contend that it issues patents without adequate investigation of earlier inventions. As a result, conflicts over published patents have loosed an avalanche of intellectual property litigation.

At a meeting last month with companies and organizations that support open-source software (software that can be distributed and modified freely), including I.B.M., Red Hat, Novell and some universities, officials of the patent office discussed how to give patent examiners access to better information and other ways to issue higher- quality patents.

Two of the initiatives would rely on recently developed Internet technologies. An open patent review program would set up a system on the patent office Web site where visitors could submit search criteria and subscribe to electronic alerts about patent applications in specific areas.

The third initiative is focused on the creation of a patent quality index that would serve as a tool for patent applicants to use in writing their applications. It is based on work done by R. Polk Wagner, an intellectual property expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

"This is a great example of how the patent office can reach out to the community and how they can help us where we have difficulty getting prior art," said John J. Doll, the commissioner for patents.

The patent office has held similar discussions with other technology industries including biotechnology, nanotechnology and semiconductors, he said.

The open-source project, being led by I.B.M., aims to build an automated system for creating a series of categories to organize software written by open-source programmers. The system would then be made available to help patent examiners search for earlier examples in patent applications.

Mr. Doll said that Google had participated in the discussions and it was possible that its search technology would be used in the project.

Jim Stalling, vice president for intellectual property and standards at I.B.M., said, "We think that this initiative will lead to greater certainty in the patent system." He added that any improvement in the general quality of patents would lower the costs of defending patents, and that money could again be focused on financing research and development.

One frequent critic of the patent system, Gregory Aharonian, publisher of The Internet Patent News Service, said it was unlikely that the new initiatives would have a significant impact, because the patent office was not able to deal efficiently with the information it already had.

"If the patent office can't figure out how to use the resources they already have," he said, "what is the point?"

Diane Peters, general counsel for the Open Source Development Laboratories, a corporate consortium backed by Linux supporters, said that if the initiatives were successful it might lead the patent office to issue fewer but higher-quality patents.

Separately, the patent office plans to announce today that I.B.M. once again topped the list of private-sector patent recipients in 2005. The company received 2,941 patents last year, compared with 3,248 patents in 2004.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/te...gy/10blue.html





A Night to See the Stars Actually Wearing Clothes
Matt Richtel

The actress known as Tyla Wynn took to the stage late Saturday night to accept an X-rated-film award, the pornography version of an Oscar. The category was excellence in a multiperson sex scene.

Although thousands of people have watched Ms. Wynn perform intimate acts, she admitted to extreme nervousness when accepting her trophy, an opaque rectangle with the image of a man and woman intertwined.

"Speaking in front of people is hard," Ms. Wynn said, cradling her award, called the AVN.

The 23rd AVN awards presentation here was a campy mix of Hollywood cliché and X-rated clips watched with 3,000 of your closest friends and industry insiders. The acceptance speeches tended to be brief, befitting a film industry with little emphasis on dialogue.

The program highlighted that pornography is, at least in a sense, at a crossroads. The sex-film industry shows signs of gaining some mainstream acceptance - spurred in part by its leading diva and business success, Jenna Jameson - and it is reporting record sales. According to AVN Publications, which organizes the awards, it generated $4.3 billion in sales and rentals last year. That amounted to about half the size of Hollywood's box-office receipts of nearly $9 billion last year.

At the same time, prospects for the industry have been tempered by fears that the Justice Department is poised to add to a handful of obscenity prosecutions recently brought against makers of hardcore films.

Saturday night, though, was an unapologetic, hearty celebration, with a flashbulb-drenched red carpet entrance and awards presented in 104 categories, including best performances in a wide range of explicit acts and sexual positions. The more conventional were for best director, supporting actor and actress, screenplay and the most anticipated award of the evening: best feature.

That went to "Pirates," a relatively high-budget story of a group of ragtag sailors who go searching for a crew of evil pirates who have a plan for world domination. Also, many of the characters in the movie have sex with one another.

Evan Stone, the stage name of the man who won the award for best actor as the good ship's captain, said a crucial component of the movie's success was its authenticity. A consultant instructed the cast on proper ship etiquette, he said, like never letting the captain steer the vessel, a job that belongs to the first mate.

"Take the sex out of this movie, and it's Walt Disney," said Mr. Stone, who declined to give his real name.

The precise criteria for winning an AVN are not, well, explicit. About 60 reviewers judge some 6,000 films submitted throughout the year. Paul Fishbein, the president of AVN Publications, said you know a good acting and sex scene when you see one.

Still, certain things rule out a nomination. One is "if you can still hear the director's voice," Mr. Fishbein said. Another no-no is "if it's clear the cameraman is not paying attention."

The industry seems to have a sense of humor about itself, but there is an awareness that many Americans disapprove of their trade. Savanna Samson, who won an award for best actress, said in her acceptance speech that "most of my family is pretty ashamed of what I do."

Universally, the participants defend their right to make the films, but even within the sex-entertainment industry, opinions differ about what is tasteful.

"The bikini models hate the topless dancers, the topless dancers hate the nude dancers, the nude dancers hate the adult-film actors," said Stormy Daniels, 26, who won an award for best supporting actress. Ms. Daniels, who said she wished people would stop judging one another, does have her own pet peeve: tired plots.

"There's nothing worse then when the pizza boy rings the doorbell, the girl says she doesn't have a tip, and then they get it on," she said. Ms. Daniels also won an award for best screenplay for a parody, "Camp Cuddly Pines Power Tool Massacre," which presumably had a storyline more in keeping with her tastes.

When the night began, starlets paraded past more than a hundred photographers. The divas said they had agonized over what to wear. Tanya Mercado, 31, whose stage name is Gina Lynn, wore a strapless black gown from Nordstrom, bought after she had rejected two others as not fitting quite snugly enough.

Not everyone makes a big deal about the awards. Even Ms. Wynn, a winner, said in an interview the day before the ceremony that she had trouble remembering one of her sex scenes that was nominated.

"What's the movie called?" she asked, trying to distill just one title from the 150 movies that she said she performed in last year. A few moments later, it came to her - "Too Hot to Handle" - whose plot she described as two women who wear the same outfits and then have sex.

Unlike "Pirates," which has a high production value and is meant to appeal to both women and men, Ms. Wynn's film is in many ways more characteristic. More than 90 percent of the movies are called "gonzo," meaning they have little or no plot.

Steven Hirsch, chief executive of Vivid Entertainment, which made the award-winning "Devil in Miss Jones," said the awards could help market films to distributors and really bolstered sales.

Not all fans pay attention to awards, though. Ian Thomas, 34, who sells real estate in Las Vegas, said before the ceremony that he picked pornographic films based on his favorite female performers.

"If I want acting, I'll go to a mafia movie," Mr. Thomas said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/na... tner=homepage





Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child'
Craig Smith

BURG, Switzerland

ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane.

Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."

"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."

He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. "Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.

MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.

His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I knew that it was important."

When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the source of his experience, believing first that it had come from the fumes of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the fumes produced no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow ingested a trace of LSD. "LSD spoke to me," Mr. Hofmann said with an amused, animated smile. "He came to me and said, 'You must find me.' He told me, 'Don't give me to the pharmacologist, he won't find anything.' "

HE experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the most active toxin known at that time would have had little or no effect. The result with LSD, however, was a powerful experience, during which he rode his bicycle home, accompanied by an assistant. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as "bicycle day."

Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann's home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. "That was the first planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.

He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced what he called a "horror trip" when he was tired and Mr. Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are long behind him.

"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," Mr. Hofmann said. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley," who asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer.

But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."

"It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine," he said.

Mr. Hofmann lives with his wife in the house they built 38 years ago. He raised four children and watched one son struggle with alcoholism before dying at 53. He has eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. As far as he knows, no one in his family besides his wife has tried LSD.

Mr. Hofmann rose, slightly stooped and now barely reaching five feet, and walked through his house with his arm-support cane. When asked if the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly startled and said no. "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/in...07hoffman.html





America Online Buys Developer of Video Search Service
Saul Hansell

Furthering its efforts to focus on Internet video, America Online said yesterday that it had acquired Truveo, a private Silicon Valley company that runs a search engine for video clips. AOL did not disclose the value of the purchase, but an executive briefed on the transaction said the price was around $50 million.

Truveo will be integrated into AOL's existing video search, which is based on technology from Singingfish, a company AOL acquired in 2003.

Truveo's index of 1.8 million video clips will be added to AOL's existing 2.5 million clips. There is little overlap between the two, said Kevin Conroy, an executive vice president in the media networks unit of AOL, which is part of Time Warner.

Building a search engine for video has proved to be much more difficult than for Web pages. It is often hard for a search engine to determine the content of a given clip. And many clips are hard to find because the Web sites that show them require users to run special video players that typically pop up in browser windows.

Truveo has found an automated way to run these video players and create an index of the video clips that they contain. It specializes in updating its index from mainstream publishers, making it particularly useful for finding current news clips.

Other video search sites, like those from Yahoo and AOL's Singingfish, have tried to solve this problem by asking sites that publish videos to send them regular feeds, with links and information about clips on their sites.

Tim Tuttle, the chief executive of Truveo, said these feeds often do not include all the videos and are updated only daily or weekly.

"We can control how frequently we crawl the Web, and if there are breaking news stories we can get them," he said.

Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, an online news site, said AOL needed to improve its video search technology. "I have not been superimpressed with Singingfish," he said. "This deal is declaring that Singingfish is not as good as it could be."

The leading Web search engine, Google, has taken a completely different approach to video. Rather than trying to find video on other sites, it is asking publishers to upload video to be played from Google's site. Last week, Google announced that in addition to this free service, it would also allow producers to charge fees for their videos.

That service was introduced late Monday night, with a range of paid offerings including current shows like "C.S.I.," N.B.A. basketball games and reruns of "The Brady Bunch" and "The Twilight Zone."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/te.../11online.html





A Million to One

Chances Are Imitators Can't Match This Student's By-the-Pixel Web Sales Success
Don Oldenburg

Look what Alex Tew did, and you get one of those "Why didn't I think of that?" flashes. It's so simple, so cheap, so mind-bogglingly lucrative that it took the 21-year-old student from small-town Wiltshire, England, not even five months to go from broke to millionaire.

Worried about paying his college tuition last August, Tew chanced upon one of those rare original money- making ideas. How about creating an Internet Web page out of 1 million blank pixels? And then selling those pinhead-size digital picture elements that make up a computer screen for a dollar apiece, or $100 per 10-by- 10-pixel block, to advertisers who turn them into colorful tiny billboards and micro logos linked to their own Web sites?

And why not call this new marketing monstrosity "The Million Dollar Homepage" -- since Tew stood to make a million bucks?

At exactly 1:42:28 p.m. EST today, Tew can post a "sold out" sign on the Million Dollar Homepage. (You can see it at http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ . ) The spiky-haired Brit put the last thousand pixels up for auction on eBay 10 days ago with a $1 starting bid for the lot. With 24 hours to go, yesterday's bidding reached $152,300, putting him over the million-dollar mark.

"I'm half-expecting a last-minute flurry of bids. I think it is going to go higher," says Tew, whose initial investment to set up the pixel page was less than $100. "I never imagined things would get to the level that they have."

Not sure initially that a single pixel would sell, Tew felt the idea had potential, so he aimed high. "I asked myself the question, 'How could I become a millionaire?' Twenty minutes later I had the answer," he says. In the beginning, he reasoned, even 1 or 2 percent of a million dollars wouldn't be bad.

The phenomenon he created has been hailed by some as a genre-changing concept in online marketing -- otherwise an advertising badlands of spam, banner ads and pop-ups. Others say it's a brilliant, one-time marketing aberration that will never be replicated.

Whatever it is, the Million Dollar Homepage isn't a pretty site -- even as it nears completion and begins a guaranteed minimum five-year lifespan. Tew calls this head- cocking creation "a big collage of different colored ads." It looks like a bulletin board on designer steroids, an advertising train wreck you can't not look at. Think "Where's Waldo?," only more cluttered and without a Waldo. It's like getting every pop-up ad you ever got in your life, at once. It's the Internet equivalent of suddenly feeling like you want to take a shower.

But its conceptual beauty is that it's not designed at all. How the pieces fit together is totally random. Buyers create little ads and choose open ad space on a 10,000- block grid. It's more than 2,000 advertisements, their dimensions ranging from postage-stamp size to a Tart N' Tiny candy (sorry, we couldn't think of anything else small enough to compare!), displaying words normally red-flagged by spam filters -- EZ Money! Hair loss? Poker! Loans! Get Girls! Freebies! Cancer Cure! Casino!

Some of the ads are illustrations or photos -- images of bikini babes, cartoons, Che Guevara, the British flag, a marijuana leaf, a bull's-eye, the dollar sign. When you drag the cursor over any one of them, a small read-out appears identifying the advertiser -- dating services, online poker, loan companies, bookies, bloggers, ring tone sellers, snoring remedies.

Within the first month the site was getting 200,000 unique visitors daily, and more than 3.2 million in the past two weeks, Tew says. "The more people talked about the site, the more money I made," says Tew. "And the more money I made, the more people talked about the site. It's a self-perpetuating idea."

The idea has inspired a bad case of pixel envy online. More than 1,000 copycat homepages have cropped up hoping to duplicate his success -- from the Zero Dollar Homepage, which gives pixel blocks away and tries to make money from banner ads, to "The Most Expensive Pixels on the Internet" that sells space for $1,000 per pixel.

Twists and oddities also abound: The Million Pixel Gallery tries to sell art and advertising from galleries and museums, the Cover Up Osama Bin Laden site sells pixel blocks to obliterate Osama's face from the screen, and the Million Booby Homepage, well, appears to still be in the training-bra stage of development.

Few if any of the me-Tew'ers are likely to make a million dollars or even come close. Many remain barren sites without a single ad. One of the first was the Million Dollar Web Page created by Anthony Van Noordwyk, an Omaha Internet techie who launched a couple weeks after marveling at Tew's homepage. But while his unique visitors' count is up from four the first day to 2,115 Monday, he has sold just 60 ads.

"Nobody is anywhere close to being as successful as Alex's original," says Van Noordwyk, 35, who counts his sales so far in the tens of thousands. "Now that Alex's Web page is full, maybe some of the more popular pixel ad sites will catch on a bit. I am not holding my breath but I am crossing my fingers."

While a few pixel pages are dedicated to the Internet's biggest money-making venture, most copycat pages draw the line on pornography. "We had to turn them away because other advertisers wouldn't advertise," says Josh Moser, co-creator of the Million Quarter Webpage, which sells pixel blocks for 25 cents per pixel.

"This is probably going to be a fad," says Moser, 31, a Detroit Web site developer whose site went live a month after Tew's and now has 400 advertisers.

Including sales on their new site, PixelGiveaway.com, he and partner Jeremy Mlynarek, 29, have sold more than $85,000 in ads, Moser says.

Gareth "Gaz" Thomas, a 24-year-old biotechnology doctorate student from North Wales, United Kingdom, uses sex appeal to sell one-penny pixels on his SexyPixelHomepage.com site where ads gradually are blocking out a side view of a naked female torso. "How could an idea that was so unique and different spawn so many dull copycats?" says Thomas, who three months ago didn't know the first thing about creating a Web site, but has sold nearly 100 ads. "I made mine sexy so it would grab attention and it works!"

While Tew thinks the copycats are "quite funny, really," he doesn't like the "rip-off sites" that borrow heavily from his. "I like the ones that put a twist on it and improve the idea," he says, mentioning a favorite, TrumpingAlex.com, which features a photo of Tew with a Donald Trump hairstyle superimposed on his head. "But the one thing that everybody seems to be missing is that it's one of those crazy ideas that only works once. I was first to market and therefore I got 99 percent of the attention. Good luck to the imitators."

If his pixel page has any lasting value in online marketing, Tew believes it's that "very small ads have some sort of future."

And his future? He's putting his business management studies on hold. He's had job offers, business opportunities and a few new ideas he wants to explore. Not to mention a million dollars.

"The lesson is that consumers are willing to go to good ideas, things that are unique, things that are novel," says Tew. "Rather than copy each other, spend time thinking up new things. . . . Creativity works."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011001703.html





Stricter Nanotechnology Laws Are Urged

Report warns of risk to public
Rick Weiss

An independent report being released this morning concludes that current U.S. laws and regulations cannot adequately protect the public against the risks of nanotechnology -- the rapidly growing science of making invisibly small particles and molecular devices.

Unless existing laws are modified or a new one is crafted, the report warns, the immense promise of the field - - predicted to be a trillion-dollar industry by 2015 -- may be short-circuited by either a disaster or an economically damaging crisis of public confidence.

"There is a chance to still do this right and learn from previous mistakes," said study author J. Clarence Davies, an environmental policy analyst who played major roles in the Johnson, Nixon and first Bush administrations and is now with Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank on environmental and energy issues.

"We know from what happened with agricultural biotechnology and nuclear power that if you don't have public support, or at least public tolerance, a field's potential is not going to be realized. For nanotechnology, I don't think existing systems or laws can serve this purpose," said Davies, who researched and wrote the report for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a research and policy arm of the Smithsonian Institution.

Several government officials and industry representatives disputed the findings yesterday. Among them was E. Clayton Teague, director of the National Nanotechnology Coordinating Office, which oversees the federal government's approximately $1 billion annual investment in nanotechnology.

"We still have so much to learn," he said. "You get one paper that says it's extremely toxic and harmful, and another that says it's not only not toxic but it's beneficial. All the agencies we talk with . . . have generally said to us that with the information that's currently available, their regulatory authorities should be adequate."

Nanotechnology involves manipulating atoms to make things that are smaller than one one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair. At that size, even conventional materials exhibit unconventional physical and chemical properties, making them valuable for a wide variety of products. Already, nanomaterials are being used in computers, cosmetics, stain-resistant fabrics, sports equipment, paints and medical diagnostic tests. Scientists also hope to use nanomaterials to help clean up polluted sites.

But nanoparticles' peculiar characteristics are potentially hazardous. Animal studies have shown that at least some can cause deadly airway blockages or can migrate from nasal passages into the brain and other organs, where they may cause metabolic problems. Other studies suggest they can trigger environmental damage that would be difficult to reverse once the minuscule particles disperse into soil and water.

The report outlines the range of laws and regulations in place to protect people and the environment from such risks, and finds each one wanting when it comes to nanotechnology.

The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), for example, requires manufacturers to tell the Environmental Protection Agency about new chemicals they want to market and gives the agency the authority to restrict those that pose undue risks.

But under TSCA's "low volume" clause, chemicals made in quantities of 11 tons or less are largely exempt. That may be reasonable for conventional chemicals, the report states. But given the extreme chemical reactivity of nanomaterials -- the very trait that makes them so special -- the mere fact that relatively small quantities are being made is hardly an assurance of safety, it concludes.

Moreover, because most nanomaterials are ordinary chemicals that differ only in their particle size, makers have been avoiding TSCA restrictions by classifying their products as conventional chemicals, even though their tiny size is precisely what makes them different. The EPA, which favors a "voluntary" regulatory regimen for nanotechnology, has not yet decided how to deal with that loophole.

Other laws are weak because they do not require safety studies before products are marketed, Davies said. The Federal Hazardous Substances Act and the provisions of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that deal with cosmetics -- many of which are made with nano-ingredients -- allow the government to respond only after it is clear that people are being harmed.

Moreover, the report notes, the agencies in charge of implementing the nation's protective laws are understaffed. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has 25 percent fewer employees than it did in 1980, even though it must oversee more workplaces than ever -- including nanotech factories with their uncertain risks -- Davies said. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which administers the Hazardous Substances Act, today employs 446 people, less than half the number there in 1980.

The Food and Drug Administration yesterday reiterated that existing regulations are "probably adequate for most nanotechnology products."

"We are continuing to learn about the important scientific developments in this area and will evaluate and learn about the benefits this new technology will yield," the agency said in a statement.

David Rejeski, who leads the Woodrow Wilson Center's nanoscience program, warned that nanoscale materials are increasingly being enhanced with biologically active coatings that will only increase their health and environmental risks. He said it would help if companies were required to tell regulators more about what they are up to.

"The behaviors of these substances are going to get very complicated," Rejeski said. "But there hasn't been a big discussion yet. We're data-starved."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011001520.html





First Tests: FX-60 Powers Superfast PCs

AMD's latest chip breaks records, while Intel's new Extreme Edition shows more modest gains.
Kirk Steers

AMD today launched its top-of-the-line Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU, andPC World's exclusive tests show the pricey new processor is indeed dominant. The processor powered a pair of our test PCs to the best benchmark scores we've ever seen and outpaced a reference system using Intel's latest Extreme Edition processor.

How much faster is the FX-60? Our fastest test machine notched a WorldBench 5 score about 8 percent higher than our previous top dog, a comparably configured PC with AMD's 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU.

The FX-60 processor marks the transition of AMD's premium line of FX processors to dual-core technology, replacing the single-core Athlon 64 FX-55, which also runs at 2.6 GHz. The single-core FX-57, which runs at 2.8 GHz, will remain available until it is replaced by a future 2.8-GHz successor to the FX-60, according to AMD.

More evolution than revolution, the $1031 FX-60 CPU is essentially a faster version of the same core (code-named Toledo) that comprises the dual-core, 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and the 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ chips. It comes with the same 1MB of Level 2 cache and incorporates the same on-chip memory controller that works only with DDR RAM. (Intel's processors support the faster DDR2 memory standard; however, AMD-based systems consistently outperform comparable Intel-based systems.) AMD expects to launch a CPU with DDR2 support by year's end, according to the company.

We tested three new shipping FX-60 systems: the $4250 Poly 939N4-SLI2/FX60 from Polywell, the $4499 Ultimate M6 Sniper II from ABS, and the $3499 Gamer Ultra XLC from CyberPower. Each of the systems came with almost identical hardware: an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard, two high-performance 74GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives striped in a RAID 0 array, and two SLI EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards. The CyberPower and Polywell machines had 512MB of graphics memory; ABS's had 256MB.

Two of the systems, the Ultimate M6 Sniper II and the Poly 939N4-SLI2/FX60, came with 2GB of RAM and posted record-breaking scores of 141 and 140, respectively, on the PC World Test Center's WorldBench 5 benchmark. The previous top mark of 130 was set by Xi Computer's MTower 64 AGE-SLI , which runs on AMD's 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+. The third FX-60 system, the Gamer Ultra XLC, came with 1GB of RAM and turned in a WorldBench 5 score of 123.

Intel isn't ceding the high-end market to AMD's FX line. On January 16 the company will launch its latest high-end processor, the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 . No vendor systems featuring the new chip are available yet, but aPC World-built reference system featuring the processor scored higher than any Intel-based PC we've tested. However, it was no match for the FX-60 systems.

Intel's new dual-core 3.46-MHz chip, which will sell for about $1000, comes with 2MB of Level 2 cache per core (double that of its successor, the Pentium Extreme Edition 840).

Other new features include a faster frontside bus (now running at 1066 MHz), which connects the CPU with RAM, as well as Intel's Virtualization Technology , which allows a PC with the appropriate software to run multiple operating systems simultaneously without having to reboot.

We benchmarked the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 using a reference system that included an Intel D975XBS motherboard; 2GB of DDR2-887 RAM from Crucial Technologies; a single EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX KO graphics card with 256MB of memory; two 7200-rpm, 160GB Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS hard drives striped in a RAID 0 array; and an Antec Turbo-Cool 510 ATX-PFC power supply.

The Intel system's WorldBench score of 109 was more than 10 percent faster than any dual-core Intel-based system we've tested, but it paled in comparison to the new FX-60-based machines.

High-end systems running on the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 will be available on January 16 from Alienware, CyberPower, Polywell, and others, according to the companies. Dell said it will launch a system using the chip sometime in the first quarter of 2006.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011001509.html





IBM, Sony, Toshiba Extend Partnership
Brian Bergstein

The partnership among IBM Corp., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. that produced the vaunted Cell microprocessor is being extended for another five years to focus on advancing chip designs at extremely small scales.

The companies planned to announce Thursday that their next joint research project will aim toward chips with features smaller than 32 nanometers - 32 billionths of a meter.

Today's chips generally are built with components as small as 90 nanometers, though 65-nanometer-based chips are emerging. It's part of the microprocessing industry's constant fight to wring performance improvements and cost efficiencies out of ever smaller chips.

Other efforts in the 30-nanometer range are already occurring, including a partnership between IBM and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Research into molecular computing is aiming even smaller, toward chips with features that might operate in the space of 2 to 3 nanometers.)

Lisa Su, a vice president in IBM's semiconductor research and development center, said this partnership is different because of Sony's and Toshiba's expertise with the specific needs of chips for consumer devices.

The Cell chip already produced by the IBM-Sony- Toshiba pact packs eight processors. With its powerful graphics capabilities, Cell is the heart of Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 video game system and next-generation Toshiba TVs, but it has yet to win much wider acceptance.

Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, said the companies appear to have concluded that costs and complexities of 32-nanometer technology would be so immense that "partnering is the best way to go."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Bye-Bye Hard-Drive, Hello Flash
Michael Kanellos

The world as notebook users know it is about to change in a flash.

Manufacturers of NAND flash memory say they will expand the market for their chips over the next few years and colonise devices that now rely on hard drives or other types of memory. In turn, this could mean phones that can record several hours of video, or smaller notebooks with twice or more the battery life.

The NAND noise will be particularly strong at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, with manufacturers showing off the solid-state technology as an increasingly important component in mobile phones and talking up how it will find its way into notebook hard drives in 2006.

By about the turn of the decade, NAND could even replace hard drives entirely in some mini notebooks because of the increasing amount of data the chips can hold, according to Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron Technology, one of the world's largest memory makers. Flash also takes up less space and uses less energy.

"The average notebook has 30GB (of hard drive storage). How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory? Five or six years," he said. "I'm not saying drives will go away. There will always be a need for storage, but when was the last time you tapped out a drive?"

Jim Handy, an analyst at Semico Research, says NAND won't replace notebook hard drives as long as Microsoft keeps expanding the number of storage-heavy features in its software, but it will become standard in video cameras, displacing tape, recordable DVDs and mini drives. Flash-based cameras, already a staple in Japan, are smaller, and the cost premium associated with the chips can be hidden in a US$500 camera.

"Video is not a hard-drive area. I expect it will go with flash," Handy said.

NAND flash will also begin to appear in car navigation systems and play a role in large data storage systems at corporations and government agencies in the relatively near future, said Jon Kang, senior vice president of Samsung Electronics' technical marketing group. Kang's enthusiasm is understandable: Samsung is the world's largest maker of NAND in terms of bits shipped.

"It is really creating a boon in consumer applications," he said.

As with many other technologies before it, costs are coming down as capacities are heading up.

The NAND evolution fits the pattern established in Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on a given chip will double every two years. Doubling the number of transistors on a memory chip allows manufacturers to put more memory cells on it.

Actually, the technology is moving a little faster than Moore's Law. A few years ago, NAND got produced on trailing-edge manufacturing lines. Now manufacturers are putting it on their cutting-edge processes. The shift has thus accelerated product development.

Currently, NAND chips double in memory density every year. The cutting-edge 4-gigabit chips of 2005, for example, will soon be dethroned by 8-gigabit chips. (Memory chips are measured in gigabits, or Gb, but consumer electronics manufacturers talk about how many gigabytes, or GB, are in their products. Eight gigabits make a gigabyte, so one 8Gb chip is the equivalent of 1GB.)

Another driving factor in the uptake of the technology is cost: NAND drops in price about 35 to 45 percent a year, due in part--again--to Moore's Law and in part to the fact that many companies are bringing on new factories. 1GB of flash costs a consumer electronics manufacturer about US$45, said Handy. That will drop to US$30 in next year, US$20 in 2008 and US$9 by 2009.

At US$45 a gigabyte, flash is nearly 100 times more expensive than hard-drive storage, which can sell to manufacturers for around 65 cents a gigabyte. Even in the most optimal comparisons for flash, the technology invariably costs more, say analysts. On the other hand, flash has advantages in space and energy consumption.

When and how NAND flash gets incorporated into a product category depends upon a host of factors. In mobile phones, the advent of fancy gadgetry is driving adoption. Historically, mobile phones only required 64Mb or so of memory, mostly to store basic system instructions. The chip of choice has been NOR flash, a different type that in some ways is more reliable. More than 90 percent of the phones made today store their software code in NOR flash, according to research firm iSuppli.

Adding photo, video and MP3 capabilities, however, has forced phone makers to add NAND to store files. Similarly, smart phones that handle e-mail and Web surfing require far more memory. NAND is more dense than its counterpart: NOR chips for mobile phones generally top out at 512Mb. By 2007, Samsung will produce 16Gb NAND chips and 32Gb ones a year later, said Kang. The growth rate for NOR isn't nearly that fast, so the density gap shows signs of widening.

As a result, the use of NAND chips--with some help from additional, inexpensive DRAM memory--is growing in phones. Some manufacturers are even contemplating displacing NOR with NAND for code storage, although that requires rewriting code.

"I don't see many (mobile phone makers) sticking with NOR when they go to 512Mb densities. NOR is going to be designed out," said Samsung's Kang. "It is a pain in the neck to switch software so people now use NOR, but let's say you have a gigabit of density. There is no reason to use NOR."

NOR manufacturers hotly dispute this and are working on packaging techniques to eliminate opportunities for NAND to intrude.

In MP3 players and notebooks, meanwhile, performance issues will drive adoption. The motor that spins hard-drive platters is one of the more energy-hungry components in a notebook. A hard drive developed by Samsung and Microsoft in which flash memory caches data for an idle hard drive will arrive in late 2006. The hybrid drive will extend battery life by 36 minutes, according to Samsung. A full NAND notebook would even use less power.

"How would you like 15 hours of battery life on a notebook rather than three or four? What if you didn't have to go through that stupid boot-up sequence?" said Appleton of Micron Technology. "Anytime a solution for storage can be US$50 or US$60 or less, the mechanical guys are out and the solid-state guys are in."

NAND would allow PCs to start up instantly because data wouldn't have to be retrieved from the drive platters. Intel, meanwhile, has developed a technology called Robson that cuts boot-up time by storing the most recently used software and files in flash.

Sam Bhavnani at Current Analysis said most consumers will continue to want big hard drives, but still, he added, "some high-end ultraportables could go that way" -- to flash -- "in a few years."
http://www.cnet.com.au/mobilecomputing/notebooks/ 0,39029089,40059358,00.htm





Nikon To End Film Camera Production

Digital SLRs are the place to be, apparently
Tony Smith

35mm film has come to the end of the roll, Nikon has said. The camera maker this week revealed it is focusing its efforts solely on digital photography products.

Nikon said its traditional film-based cameras now account for less than five per cent of its UK division's sales. It claimed the shift will also better equip the company to operate in an "increasingly competitive market place".

The company will stop producing film camera bodies, along with interchangeable manual focus lenses, lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses, it said. However, it doesn't expect stocks of these products to run down completely until the Summer. It will also continue to offer its F6 flagship pro-oriented film camera and lenses. Sales of the manual FM10 will also continue outside Europe, the company added.

Nikon is clearly looking to the higher end of the market for growth, pointing to rising demand for digital SLR cameras not only driven by users of traditional SLRs going digital, but also other consumers upgrading from compact digital cameras.

That mirrors Olympus' recently announced shift to focus on higher-end digital SLRs as the compact market becomes more competitive not only between camera makers but also with mobile phone vendors who are already driving up the resolution of camera phones
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01...s_all_digital/





P2P Wins Enthusiasts Among Bloggers And Broadcasters

Peer-to-peer technology enables immediate access to footage otherwise impossible to find
Sam Graham

In the days following the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the number of casualties soared along with the volume of images and videos that captured the terrifying power of the waves. With thousands of tourists on hand, there were plenty of video cameras ready to capture the destruction.

Soon, these videos were posted on the internet and collected for download on websites and blogs such as Waxy.org.

In a day, demand was too much for Waxy and the videos were moved to Archive.org, a website dedicated to building a library of past and present websites. But even the so-called "largest repository of public- domain audio, video, and text in the world" could no longer handle the surging demand for the videos.

The conditions were tailor-made for peer-to-peer application BitTorrent, which reduces demand and stress on centralised servers by transferring data directly between people who had the videos and those who wanted them.

In Hong Kong, peer-to-peer technology garnered widespread attention on the back of the arrest and criminal conviction of "Big Crook" Chan Nai-ming, who used BitTorrent to illegally distribute copyrighted movies on the internet.

But peer-to-peer technology allows far more than free music and movies. It is increasingly being harnessed for legitimate broadcasting and other uses. Chris Holland, a blogger who collected tsunami videos and distributed them using BitTorrent, distributed 151 gigabytes of video with only 1.26 gigabytes uploaded by the server originally hosting the videos.

With content providers having to pay to upload material, using peer-to-peer passes the cost of distribution on to those who download by taking advantage of the capacity of all users to upload information to other users.

Applications such as BitTorrent break files into small pieces. When downloaders want a file they will obtain the individual pieces from different people across the internet before putting the pieces back together to form the original file.

The result is an effective solution for distributing large files at only a fraction of the cost of the traditional central server distribution model. Not surprisingly, major content producers are beginning to take notice.

The BBC will soon complete a trial of its Integrated Media Player (iMP), which allows people in Britain to download television shows for viewing on demand. Viewers will have seven days after the initial broadcast of a show to watch it before it expires.

Given that a 30-minute TV programme is about 200 megabytes and demand is likely to be high, the stress on the BBC's servers would be huge if videos were sent directly to everyone who requested the shows.

Using a peer-to-peer distribution system for iMP, much of the bandwidth demand is shifted to the users. Instead of directly sending all the video, the BBC will rely on users who have already downloaded the videos to distribute the vast majority of data.

"The media landscape is changing with the advent of new technologies, and audiences are changing the way in which they interact and view content," a BBC spokesman said.

With the advent of personal video recorders (PVRs), there is a growing trend towards watching content on demand rather than according to broadcasters' schedules. Peer-to-peer file-sharing not only allows the BBC to cater to this trend, it helps it to compete with the many illegal file-sharing services available without violating copyright laws.

The broadcaster hopes users will prefer using a legal system that has guaranteed content to an illegal one that does not always deliver.

It is not only the giants that are interested in the cost savings.

Multimedia blogs, often produced by just one or two people, are also seeking to harness the technology for distribution of large files as their popularity increases.

Rocketboom is one of the most popular video-blogs, with up to 100,000 daily viewers. Its presenter, Amanda Congdon, has gained geek stardom by putting a twist on news, technology and the arts in a daily three-minute video.

With server costs at about US$3,000 a month, there is significant money to be saved by using peer-to- peer networks for distribution.

While Rocketboom offers a BitTorrent option for downloading the video, producer Andrew Baron said very few people were using it, and that they would be promoting it in the coming year.

"Costs go up as we get more popular," Mr Baron said. "The costs are low enough that there are plenty of ways for this kind of thing to support itself."

BitTorrent and its peer-to-peer brethren are helping the internet deliver on its promise of converting media consumers into producers and distributors.
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/articl...parentid=36849





New Doubts Are Cast on Einstein's Cosmological Constant
Dennis Overbye

Einstein was wrong.

Einstein was right.

He was wrong about being wrong.

An astronomer from Louisiana State University said yesterday that a new analysis of cosmic history cast doubts on Einstein's cosmological constant, the leading explanation for the mysterious force that appears to be pushing apart the universe.

But other astronomers said that conclusion itself was in doubt.

The astronomer, Bradley E. Schaefer, said his analysis showed that the force, known as dark energy, was not constant, as Einstein would have predicted, but was growing more violent as cosmic time went on.

"The cosmological constant does not look good," said Dr. Schaefer, who used the violent flashes called gamma ray bursts as cosmic mileage markers to describe the history of the expansion of the universe.

In an interview Dr. Schaefer cautioned that it was just a preliminary result with years before a final answer came in. He presented his report at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington.

Several astronomers said it was Dr. Schaefer, not Einstein, who was wrong. His conclusion, they said, was undermined by mathematical and statistical flaws. Moreover, some astronomers questioned whether the properties of gamma ray bursts were known precisely enough to serve as cosmological beacons.

"I flat out don't believe this result," said Adam Riess, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who was a discoverer of dark energy eight years ago.

Einstein first proposed the constant in 1917, as a way of explaining how the universe could be static despite the force of gravity. It was a sort of universal antigravity embedded in space. He abandoned that theory as a blunder when the universe proved to be expanding.

But in 1998, the cosmological constant gained new life. It was then that competing teams of astronomers, using exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovas as cosmic mileage markers, discovered that the expansion of the universe appeared to be accelerating, as if a dark antigravitational force were indeed at work.

As Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas said, Einstein's biggest blunder was believing the cosmological constant was a blunder.

Since the 1998 discovery, astronomers have been racing to chart the history of the expansion of the universe more precisely to pin down the properties of dark energy. Observations by Dr. Riess and his colleagues with the Hubble Space Telescope two years ago have determined that the universe hit the gas pedal about five billion years ago.

Dr. Schaefer used as his mileage markers 52 gamma ray bursts, which are 100 to 1,000 times as powerful as Type 1a supernovas, and can thus be seen much farther away, or back in time. The bursts, which can be seen only from space, have been studied by satellites like the High Energy Transient Explorer, or HETE.

The most distant burst, at 12.8 billion light-years, occurred when the universe was 6 percent of its present age, Dr. Schaefer said.

His measurements put the dark energy in a controversial category named phantom energy, which if it continued unabated would rip apart the cosmos in a few billion years.

But Donald Lamb, an astronomer at the University of Chicago, and others who were interviewed before Dr. Schaefer's talk but were made familiar with its conclusions, disagreed.

They said Dr. Schaefer had been forced to his finding about the Einstein constant by his use of a mathematical parameter called w-prime, a measure of how fast the violence of the dark energy appears to be changing with distance in the universe.

At large distances, Dr. Lamb said, the parameter becomes mathematically meaningless, and theorists have dropped it.

Moreover, he said, if Dr. Schaefer's analysis is valid, his results agree with Einstein's constant, within the measurements' uncertainties.

"It's not a meaningful discrepancy," Dr. Lamb said, adding that a statement like Dr. Schaefer's required stronger evidence. "The bottom line is the result doesn't show Einstein was right. And it doesn't show he was wrong."

That was echoed by Robert R, Caldwell, a dark-energy theorist at Dartmouth, who added that if dark energy evolved as swiftly as Dr. Schaefer said, it would have interfered with the formation of galaxies.

Another criticism is that most of Dr. Schaefer's data points are from the early universe, more than five billion years ago, before dark energy became a dominant force in the universe. The action, they say, is all at later times, when dark energy's effects are more easily seen, but his data is sparse there.

In his presentation, Dr. Schaefer said it was too early to make claims about the usefulness and ultimate meaning of his proposal.

"The first results are pointing to the cosmological constant not being constant, a point I don't want to push too much," he said. "This is the first demonstration of cosmologically useful results from a new method. We can't be too confident in the results right now."

The dispute shines an awkward light on what some astronomers regard as a promising and powerful tool for cosmology, gamma ray bursts. Dr. Schaefer called his work a "proof of purchase" for the use of the bursts, which can emit as much light in a second as our Sun does in a billion years, to investigate dark energy and other puzzles of the long night.

George Ricker, a gamma ray astronomer at M.I.T., said of Dr. Schaefer's work: "It's great that he's doing this. He's drawing attention to fact that this is possible."

Other astronomers said the use of gamma ray bursts for cosmology was in its infancy at best.

Until recently, astronomers did not even know what they were. Lately, the bursts have been traced to the titanic implosions of very massive stars into black holes, and astronomers have begun to learn how to calibrate the flashes.

Lorenzo Amati of the Institute of Space Astrophysics and Cosmic Physics in Bologna, Italy, and his colleagues discovered a correlation between the total luminosity of a gamma ray burst and the wavelength at which it appears brightest.

Using such techniques, astronomers can estimate the intrinsic luminosity of a gamma ray burst within 25 percent, Dr. Lamb said. That is only two or three times the uncertainty associated with the Type 1a supernova explosions, considered the gold standard for cosmological work.

Dr. Lamb was the lead author of a report last summer outlining how a gamma ray burst mission could be used to investigate dark energy.

Such a mission is unlikely soon, however, because NASA's science budget suffers overruns from the James Webb Space Telescope, and scientists are trying to find money to maintain the HETE satellite, which is scheduled to be turned off.

Optical astronomers point out that it will take many more gamma ray bursts than supernovas to reach the same precision. Lacking a sound theoretical reason to believe that gamma ray bursts should be standard candles, they are reluctant to give them much credence.

Dr. Riess said, "The news is that we are really stumped about this dark energy puzzle and are being forced to be very creative to probe it."

Warren E. Leary contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/science/12cosmos.html
















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