Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 21st, ‘06

[JackSpratts]

"We were hoping that prosecutors would impose some strong measures so that people would see the consequences of getting caught distributing illegal music files, but now they've announced that it's permissible to download music for private listening. People who didn't even think of doing so may start." – Kim Young-ki


"The [police] robots will be empowered by the country's state-of-the-art mobile network." – Oh Sang-rok


"It's not the government's duty to shape our very personal behavior." – Zaman Ahmed


"Mac users demonstrate an indefensible smugness when it comes to the dangers of having their systems compromised by malicious software." – Bill Thompson


"Search engines are at the center of that battle, both here and in other countries. By asserting its power over search engines, using threats of force, the government can directly affect what the Internet experience is." – Tim Wu


"If you have to tell people you're giving a presentation at something called dorkbot, you can't be too serious." – Douglas Repetto


"Chuck Lamb might be the world's chattiest dead guy." – Christopher Maag





































January 21st, ’06





Students Want i2hub Operator to Settle Claims
Alex Veiga

Students sued by the recording industry for using the now-defunct i2hub online file-sharing network are demanding that its operator pay to settle music copyright-infringement claims.

Attorneys with the Student Legal Services Office, a student-funded legal group, claimed i2hub placed ads on the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's campus to deceive students into believing the software was approved by the university.

At least 42 students have been named as defendants. The recording industry trade group has offered to settle each case for $3,750, lawyers for the students said.

"Had the students known that they were exposing themselves to copyright infringement liability by using the i2hub service, they likely would not have used the service," the legal group wrote i2hub's founder, Wayne Chang.

Chang started i2hub in 2003 while he was a student at UMass. The network linked people at hundreds of universities over the super-fast Internet2 network. Chang shut down i2hub in November under pressure from the recording industry.

Chang's attorney, Charles Baker, said his client is not liable.

Chang said his software required computer users to accept an "end user license agreement," or EULA, that included warnings about potential liability from using it to swap copyrighted content. The agreements are standard disclaimers found in most software programs though many users don't bother to read them.
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/f...toryId=1146435





Nearly doubled

Hong Kong Peer-To-Peer File Sharing On Rise: Survey

The Intellectual Property Department's 2005 survey shows the number of people who admitted to illegal file-sharing rose from 3.5% a year ago to 6.8%.

Director of Intellectual Property Stephen Selby said today the survey findings have provided a better understanding on Internet file-sharing behaviour among the public. The department needs to focus on public education, enforcement and legislation in this area.

He said while it is encouraging to see an increase in awareness of intellectual property among Hong Kong people, who claim to be buying fewer pirated and counterfeit goods, there is a need to focus on new trends.

"This year, we shall look more closely at legal downloading of files on the Internet to see whether that is gaining more public acceptance," Mr Selby said.

84.7% understand intellectual property issues
The annual survey, in its seventh year, shows public awareness of intellectual property rights has significantly improved: 84.7% of respondents know the rights include copyright, patents, trademarks and registered designs, compared with just 50.6% who claimed to know this in 1999.

Out of 1,206 respondents, only 0.7% said they would often buy pirated or counterfeit goods, and 14.3% said they would sometimes - markedly less than the 24.7% in 1999.

On Internet usage, 51.3% of respondents said they regularly use the Internet, more than half of them going online for one to three hours daily.

More than 70% of respondents know unauthorised Internet file- sharing is an infringement of intellectual property rights, while only 1.7% have engaged in unauthorised Internet file-sharing activities, markedly lower than last year's 10%.

More TV publicity in the pipeline
The survey shows close to 65% of respondents received information about intellectual property protection through television, higher than last year's 51%.

Mr Selby said the TV announcement featuring California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and movie star Jackie Chan broadcast since November has attracted people's attention, adding another series of TV publicity messages is in the pipeline.

In line with previous years' findings, more than 70% of respondents believed intellectual property protection could help the local creative industries and the overall development of Hong Kong's economy.

More than 85% said more resources should be put into developing creative culture and industries to create wealth.

For the survey report, browse the department's website.
http://www.news.gov.hk/en/category/b...119en03002.htm





IFPI Fallout

Illegal File-Sharing As Popular As Ever
Simon Crerar

Worldwide sales of legally downloaded music tripled to $1 billion last year, according to a report released today by the industry's leading trade body.

But despite 20,000 court actions launched against individuals across the world in 2005, the level of illegal file-sharing remained unchanged.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industry estimates that there are currently 885 million copyrighted music files available on the internet for illegal download.

By comparison, the number of tracks legally available doubled to over two million songs. In total, music fans downloaded 420 million tracks legally last year.

The IFPI warns that the growth in legal sales is powered by new downloaders, not by existing illegal filesharers switching to legal services. It has vowed to lead efforts to contain online piracy.

A wave of court rulings last year gave the recording industry its most significant boost yet in the fight. Judgments against Grokster in the US and Kazaa in Australia made clear that the operators of peer-to-peer networks who encourage the use of their networks for copyright infringement can be held liable for music piracy.

Meanwhile, legal sales were fuelled by the rapid growth of online music stores and the increasing popularity of downloadable mobile phone ringtones.

The Digital Music Report says music is driving digital commerce worldwide. Last year global consumers bought over 60 million portable digital mobile players, worth an estimated $9bn.

The IFPI say shifting pirates to legal services is a long-term challenge. According to the report, 6 per cent of internet users regularly download legally in the UK and Germany, compared to 5 per cent who swap files illegally.

"The challenges we now face are far too big for any complacency," said IFPI chairman John Kennedy. "In particular we need more cooperation from service providers and music distributors, to help protect intellectual property and contain piracy."

The report says that legal downloaders are more likely to be starting from scratch than migrating from illegal websites, and only one in five legal music downloaders is also an illegal file-swapper.

Changing attitudes is a key part of the music industry's strategy. The latest IFPI consumer survey, conducted by Jupiter Research, shows that a combination of education and deterrence can change consumer attitudes. The survey of 4,000 consumers across Europe showed that 35 per cent of illegal file-sharers have cut back or stopped the activity, while only 14 per cent have increased.

Last year was outstanding for digital music in the UK. James Blunt topped the first ever European digital download chart and Sheffield-rockers Arctic Monkeys promoted digital versions of their music online before releasing any tracks offline.

When the Arctic Monkey's released their debut single I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor in November, it went straight to No 1. The band's second single When The Sun Goes Down is predicted to reach the top spot this weekend.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....000289,00.html





Intellectual Property State of the Union
Thomas Mennecke

The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) released its 2006 Digital Music Report, which can only be described as one of the most painful reads since the NPD Group's "Illegal Peer-To-Peer Music File Declines After Supreme Court Grokster Decision."

The report does have several merits, but masks the real issues while ignoring the millions of music fans that participate on P2P and file-sharing networks. Much like RIAA president Cary Sherman's dismissal of the P2P community during his interview with college reporters, the IFPI choose to pretend it's winning the war against piracy.

The report does have several interesting details pertaining to the growth authorized music services forecasted for 2006, but presents little new information. For example, the report details that over 400 million music tracks were sold in 2005 - 20 times more than 2003. In addition, the music industry is hopeful the integration of mobile phones and the MP3 player will yield continued success in 2006. According to the IFPI, mobile music downloads account for 40% of all digital revenue.

While the IFPI's report succeeds in its account of the 2005 digital music market, it completely fails on its account of P2P and file-sharing. The problem with the IFPI's report is that it relies heavily on its own research - not to mention findings by the largely discredited NPD Group’s reports on file-sharing.

Of course the problem with publishing a report based on the IFPI’s research is the question of accuracy. Not that the IFPI is publishing false information, but those who are being questioned may not feel comfortable revealing downloading habits to an organization who supports the prosecution of nearly 20,000 P2P users.

In addition, the IFPI’s report demeans its potential consumer base by referring to them as “obstacles.” These “obstacles” are also spending significantly less on CDs, according to IFPI (which backs up its claim with research from organizations like Forrester and Jupiter.) Yet these reports ignore the reasons why “obstacles” are spending less money on CDs. P2P and file-sharing users represent the frontier of the digital age, where relying on physical CDs is less important than having a digital file. It’s impossible to expect an advanced culture of individuals to lug around circa 1978 technology when MP3 players offer cutting edge portability. These reports also fail to examine the possibility that iTunes users spend less on music by purchasing single tracks rather than full albums.

The IFPI report also places a tremendous amount of credence into several court rulings against P2P networks. Most notably, the United States Supreme Court in June of 2005 ruled unanimously that Grokster, LTD could be sued for encouraging copyright infringement. In addition, several other global decisions – such as the South Korean ruling against Soribada and the Australian ruling on Sharman Networks – have been heavily used as propaganda by the music industry. While these ruling do indeed affect commercial P2P operations, they have only served to encourage open source development.

The most interesting, and perhaps most inaccurate, portion of the IFPI’s report is on page 21. Here the IFPI makes a dizzying attempt convince the reader that file- sharing has been “contained.”

“There is a consensus, however, that illegal file-sharing of music files has been held in check within the last two years in the context of a sharp increase in broadband penetration globally.”

Where they received this “consensus” information is unclear, although the NPD Group’s research tends to agree with them. The IFPI does indicate however, their calculations on the fight against P2P networking is based on “IFPI estimates.”

For example, the IFPI states “the simultaneous availability of copyrighted music tracks for illegal download or distribution – at 885 million, of which 775 million are available on P2P networks and the remainder on websites. This is slightly up on the piracy level of January 2005 (870 million) but down compared to the level in June 2005 (900 million).”

“35% of illegal file-sharers have cut back or stopped the activity, while only 14% have increased it. Half of illegal file-sharers who cut back on illegal file-sharing did so because of concern over the legal consequences. 35% did so out of concerns about viruses. 15% could not find the song they wanted on the P2P network.”

Again, these numbers are based on the IFPI’s undoubtedly highly trained crack research group who calculated file-sharing has been kept in check for the last two years. But how seriously can these numbers be taken without third party verification? Its largely apparent that most people who engage in file-sharing will tell an industry backed survey just about anything out of fear of reprisal.

The reality of the situation dictates a much different story for the IFPI. Empirical evidence, in addition to extensive research by third party P2P tracking firms Cache Logic and Big Champagne contradict virtually all of the IFPI’s findings. Over the last two years, the P2P population has jumped from an approximate 5.6 million simultaneous users in December 2003 to 9.6 million users in December 2005. If this represents containment, what represents proliferation?

It’s apparent the IFPI’s report is largely based on its own research and little else. Propaganda? Sure - and that’s fine. It’s more than entitled to push its agenda and business model. But the great failure of the IFPI and indeed the RIAA’s Cary Sherman is its intolerance of the P2P community. Rather than open a dialog with its consumer base, it refers to them as “obstacles” and “thieves”, which represents the great core of their problems. The IFPI and RIAA are in a struggle to win the hearts and minds of the P2P population, as the IFPI readily admits its is failing to achieve. The answer to this problem boils down to respect. If the IFPI can’t respect the needs and wishes of the P2P community, it can’t possibly expect the P2P community to respect theirs.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1058





IFPI File Sharing Report
p2p news / p2pnet:

To read the latest Big Four record label IFPI release, you'd think there's a booming corporate online music business.

Echoing hollowly would be a more accurate phrase, and that's entirely due to the fact the Big Four - Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI – are sticking to their physical 1970s business model in the digital 21st century.

The cartel is trying desperately to compete with independent music sites and the p2p networks by selling low quality compressed digital music tracks at sky-high $1 and up prices. But music lovers continue to get their fixes for free on the networks, or for pennies and cents on one or other of the indie download sites.

But the Big Four must needs keep up their pretence that sales of their cookie-cutter product through the handful of sites they support and supply are significant, hence the outpourings of their IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industries).

"Music fans downloaded 420 million single tracks from the internet last year," it boasts. Moreover, "legitimate digital music business is steadily pushing back on digital piracy," proudly declares IFPI boss John Kennedy.

However, during one month alone in 2005 - September - the average number of files available on the p2p networks for download at any given moment (average simultaneous files) was close to three billion, p2p research company Big Champagne told p2pnet. The exact figure was 2,789,154,393.

On the claimed diminution of file sharing, in a BBC interview Kennedy roundly contradicts himself, admitting his masters are merely "containing" the situation. And as the IFPI report itself states unequivocally, "Illegal activity on peer-to-peer networks has stayed static in the last year ..." In fact, in the IFPI 'report,' Kennedy admits, "The challenges we now face are far too big for any complacency".

In another bit of nonsense, in Europe's "two biggest digital markets, UK and Germany," new IFPI research, "indicates more music fans are legally downloading music than illegally file-swapping," it says.

"Two years ago, few could have predicted the extraordinary developments we are seeing in the digital music business today," says Kennedy in the report, going on, "Already in the UK and Germany - two of the biggest digital markets worldwide - legal buyers from sites like iTunes, Musicload and MSN actually exceed illegal file-swappers."

This is, of course, sheer, unadultrated blarney. But it'll be reported by the mainstream media as though it's accurate information from a credible source.

Meanwhile, "I would love to be sitting here telling you that it [file sharing] had gone down," says Kennedy in the BBC interview. But the Big Four are, "finding it difficult to persuade existing song-swappers to use legal download services such as iTunes instead".

Meanwhile, "A series of court judgements against unauthorised file-sharing services in late 2005 - in the US, Australia, Taiwan and Korea - has helped transform the market environment for digital music and consumer attitudes to illegal file-sharing," says the IFPI's 'study'.

They have indeed.

The publicity generated by the sue 'em all campaign has turned millions of otherwise uninformed people onto the possibilities offered by p2p and file sharing, as confirmed by the Big Four's own Nofree organization in Korea, since it singles Korea out for special mention.

"We were hoping that prosecutors would impose some strong measures so that people would see the consequences of getting caught distributing illegal music files, but now they've announced that it's permissible to download music for private listening," said Nofree's Kim Young-ki .

Instead, "People who didn't even think of doing so may start."

All the signs are, however, that the Big Four will continue their relentless and fruitless attempts to sue their own customers into buying product, and to again attempt to impose the same kinds of Consumer Control that's generating such terrible fallout for Sony BMG and its rootkit spyware DRM.

"Specifically, the music business needs support for Digital Rights Management, which is the key enabler of digital music services allowing new and flexible uses by consumers; it also needs more cooperation from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in protecting music from piracy on their networks," says the IFPI."
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/7661





IFPI Switzerland Files Suit Against Users Of Peer-To- Peer Networks
Craig Morris

Switzerland's music industry has terminated its "grace period" for file sharers. According to media reports, the Swiss International Federation of Producers of Phonograms and Videograms (IFPI) is now filing suit to stop the illegal propagation of music files. The industry is thus making good on its promise of March 2004, which was repeated in November of 2005 in the "Game over" campaign, to take legal action.

Anzeige

Originally, the music industry wanted to use its "Game Over" campaign as a way to offer all private "pirates" a way to settle the matter out of court. The people affected would have had to agree to delete all illegal music files and pay costs and damages ranging from 3000-9000 Swiss francs (5800 euros). But this approach proved pointless when Internet providers refused to pass on the cease-and-desist demands to users of peer-to-peer networks. IFPI therefore filed suit against users of peer-to-peer networks with the state prosecutor's office in the Swiss Canton of Zurich. According to reports, the providers are only obligated to provide the authorities with such information by court order.

The Swiss music industry had been sending out "final warnings" since the beginning of November of 2005 as instant messages in the peer-to- peer networks. Just before Christmas, the providers received mail from IFPI Switzerland calling on them to hand over the personal data of any suspicious users of peer-to-peer networks and to send cease-and-desist requests to file sharers who were breaking the law.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/68547





Court Bars Tirade On Malaysian Web Site

A court told a disgruntled car owner he cannot chronicle the alleged defects of his Malaysian-made Perodua and his tirade against the car maker on a personal Web site.

In the first case of its kind in Malaysia, the Appeals Court on Tuesday upheld a High Court order against Richard Fong Khee Choong.

The High Court had ordered Fong on Sept. 17, 2003 to dismantle a personal Web site he had set up in October 2002 after purchasing an allegedly defective Kelisa car from Perodua.

The Appeals Court judges said they agreed with the High Court that the allegations in Fong's Web site, which contained one article about his grievances, "attacked the reputation and integrity of the company."

Fong had purchased a Perodua Kelisa car in August 2002 and contacted the company by email with several allegations about defects in the vehicle. He subsequently set up the Web site, alleging corruption in the company.

In response, Perodua sued him for defamation, and obtained an interim order from the High Court to have the Web site shut pending a resolution of the defamation suit.

The company, the second national car company after Proton, said Fong's allegations implied that Perodua practiced deception and fraud for its own interest instead of the customer's needs.

It also claimed that Fong's allegations meant that the car maker was betraying the public trust and was involved in a conspiracy to cheat the people.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Taiwanese Parliament Votes Against Microsoft
Dan Nystedt

Taiwan's parliament has voted to end its dependence on Microsoft software, demanding that the government reduce purchases from the software giant by 25 percent this year.

The resolution, passed on Friday, is an attempt by the island's law-making body to end the near monopoly Microsoft has with local government offices, a legislative aide said.

Local newspaper Commercial Times said however that the resolution may not be binding because it runs against fair trade regulations in Taiwan. Officials at Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission declined to comment.

The case highlights the battle Microsoft is facing in Asia, mostly thanks to the availability of open-source equivalents. Most recently, South Korean anti-trust regulators fined the company 33 billion won (£58m) in December for violating fair trade laws, and ordered it to offer two versions of Windows in the country.

Japan's Fair Trade Commission has also investigated Microsoft, and the Chinese government has expressed its support for wider adoption of Linux, both as an alternative to Windows and as a way to support the development of local software companies.
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/...ID=5162&inkc=0





NYT Editorial

Beijing's New Enforcer: Microsoft

Microsoft has silenced a well-known blogger in China for committing journalism. At the Chinese government's request, the company closed the blog of Zhao Jing on Dec. 30 after he criticized the government's firing of editors at a progressive newspaper. Microsoft, which also acknowledges that its MSN Internet portal in China censors searches and blogs, is far from alone. Recently Yahoo admitted that it had helped China sentence a dissident to 10 years in prison by identifying him as the sender of a banned e-mail message.

Even as Internet use explodes in China, Beijing is cracking down on free expression, and Western technology firms are leaping to help. The companies block access to political Web sites, censor content, provide filtering equipment to the government and snitch on users. Companies argue that they must follow local laws, but they are also eager to ingratiate themselves with a government that controls access to the Chinese market.

Such obvious disregard for users' privacy and ethical standards may make it easier to do business in China, but it also aids a repressive regime. Some in the American Congress are talking about holding hearings. Microsoft has responded to criticism by saying, "We think it's better to be there with our services than not be there." This is a false choice. China needs Internet companies as much as they need China.

A decade ago, consumers began to rebel against the sweatshop practices of Western manufacturers that made clothes and toys in China and elsewhere. The smart businesses cleaned up. They formed associations to adopt codes of good labor practices and set up independent monitoring.

Reporters Without Borders, a group advocating press freedom, recommends that Internet companies also adopt a good conduct code, pledging not to filter out words like "democracy" and "human rights" from search engines and maintaining their e-mail and Internet servers outside China.

Western businesses have always overestimated the price of defending human rights in China. Some have done it effectively - privately and respectfully - and paid no cost. But the beauty of such an industrywide code of conduct for Internet companies is that it would put no company at a disadvantage.

Western technology companies could have a powerful case if they acted as a group in telling China that they are under tremendous consumer and political pressure to stick up for free expression.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/op...rssnyt&emc=rss





In Tiny Arab State, Web Takes On Ruling Elite
Neil MacFarquhar

MANAMA, Bahrain--Ali Abdulemam, this country's most notorious blogger, sat in the boxlike reception room of his father's house in a cramped Shiite village dotted with raw cinder-block houses, trying to log onto the widely popular Web site that he founded.

The government on this flyspeck of an island nation, home to an American Navy base, recently renewed its effort to block dozens of opposition Web sites. So Abdulemam, 28, a computer engineer, had to spend about 10 minutes whipping through various computer servers around the world before finally pulling up his Web site, BahrainOnline.org.

It was National Day, Dec. 16, and some five miles away, the beautifully landscaped boulevards of Manama, the capital, were packed with revelers enjoying bands and fireworks. Pictures of the ruling princes blanketed the city, which was also awash in the national colors, red and white. Red and white lights were even wrapped around the palm trees lining the main thoroughfares.

But most of the couple of hundred people posting messages in the "National Forum" section of BahrainOnline mocked the idea of celebrating the day in 1971 when a Sunni Muslim king ascended the throne to rule over a Shiite Muslim majority.

"In Bahrain, glorifying the king means glorifying the nation, and opposing the king means betraying the homeland and working for foreign countries," wrote one online participant, noting that the formula is the mark of a dictatorship. "Should we be loyal to the king or to Bahrain?"

Bahrain, long a regional financial hub and a prime example of the power of the Internet to foment discontent, bills itself as a leader of political change in the Arab world. It is a claim echoed in praise from the United States, which considers Bahrain crucial for its many regional military ventures because the American Navy's Fifth Fleet is based here.

But in Bahrain, as across the Arab world, those pushing for democratic change want to end minority rule by a family, sect or a military clique.

The royal family here dominates, holding half the cabinet positions and the major posts in the security services and the University of Bahrain.

Sheik Muhammad al-Khalifa, the prince who runs the Economic Development Board, argues that Bahrain should not become a democracy in the Western sense. "As traditional Arabs, I don't think democracy is part of our nature," he said.

"I think all people want is accountability," he added, noting that some form of democracy was needed to achieve that.

So political change in the Middle East rests partly on whether and how the many minority governments will yield power and allow others to participate. So far, the results are anemic.

The al-Saud tribe slapped its name on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where local elections a year ago have not produced active municipal councils, and crucial issues like how much oil wealth the ruling family absorbs are not discussed.

In Syria, the ruling Assad family and its confederates from the Alawite minority sect are in crisis, accused of assassinating Rafik Hariri, a former Sunni prime minister of Lebanon and an important figure who might have been able to rally majority support against the Alawites' monopoly on power.

Of course, Iraq remains the biggest experiment of all in changing the practice of minority rule. The American occupation has yet to answer whether it is possible to forge a democratic government in the Arab world, or if the attempt will drown in a cauldron of sectarian bloodshed. But the results are being closely watched, perhaps nowhere more than in Bahrain, where up to 70 percent of its native population of 450,000 are Shiites, similar to Iraq's Shiite-Sunni split. Shiites here also increasingly look to moderate religious leaders in Iraq for guidance.

Some political change has occurred. Debate is growing through the Internet, satellite television and other forces, and elections this year will replace the Parliament and municipal councils first chosen in 2002 under a new Constitution. Members of the ruling Khalifa family describe this as a vibrant process that will ultimately establish a local strain of democracy. Yet some of its most senior members and their Sunni allies hint that the process is threatened because Bahrain's Shiites disloyally serve outside interests like the Shiites in Iran and Iraq.

Members of the opposition call this nonsense and accuse the ruling dynasty of questioning their loyalty to avoid having to share power. They say King Hamad and his Khalifa clan, descendants of Bedouins from the Arabian mainland who conquered this island, taking it from its Persian masters in the 18th century, will only make cosmetic changes, noting that almost nothing has been done to alleviate the entrenched discrimination faced by the poorest segments of the Shiite population.

"The problem with the royal family is that when they give us any democracy they think that it is a gift and we have to thank them for it," Abdulemam said. "The time when they were the lords and we were the slaves is gone. The new generation is well educated. They won't live like our fathers did in the past, when they said O.K. to whatever the royal family did."

A 'golden time' cut short
Bahrain's first Parliament, elected in 1973, proved too boisterous for King Hamad's father, who dissolved it after 18 months. Opposition demands to restore it increased through the 1990's, marked by bombings and other sporadic violence. The authoritarian government subjected the mostly Shiite opposition political activists to arrest, torture and forced exile.

When King Hamad, now 55, inherited power in 1999, he promised a democracy that he described as "areeqa" or "well rooted."

He announced changes that included amnesty for exiles and the disbanding of the dreaded State Security Courts. Bahrainis enthusiastically approved the new plan in a public referendum.

It was then that Abdulemam established his groundbreaking Web site, determined to give Bahrainis a place to share ideas and develop plans to deepen political change. "It seemed like a golden time, when the country was moving from one period in its history to another," he said. "Everybody needed a place to talk so I provided it."

But King Hamad soon hit the brakes. In 2002 he announced a new Constitution, formulated without public consultation.

The cabinet, led by his uncle, a hard-liner opposing democratic change, would report to him, not the Parliament. Instead of a single 40-member Parliament, he added an appointed upper house. Amending the Constitution now required a two- thirds majority of both houses, giving the monarch full control. Parliament now could only propose laws, not write them. An audit bureau that had previously reported to Parliament was replaced with one that would not subject the spending of the royal court or the 2,500 royal family members to any public scrutiny.

"I had been full of hope that a new era was coming to Bahrain," Abdulemam said. "But what happened next threw us all in the dirt. When the king brought in the new Constitution, everyone was crushed."

In the old days, with its monopoly over television and radio and the ability to shut down newspapers, the Khalifa dynasty would have had less trouble controlling the debate. Now, with the Internet and satellite television outside its reach, the government resorts to tactics like tossing Abdulemam and two of his fellow Web masters into jail for a couple of weeks, as it did last year.

At the time, the opposition orchestrated repeated demonstrations and international intervention to help win his release, but legal charges of insulting the king, incitement and disseminating false news remain pending and can be dredged up at any time.

One reason the Internet is so popular--scores of villages have their own Web sites and chat rooms--is that far more can be said about the ruling family online than through any other means.

"Freedom of expression is something you have to take, not something that will be granted to you," Abdulemam said, but he doubts that free speech alone will accomplish much. "Their policy basically comes down to, 'Say what you want and we will do what we want.'"

BahrainOnline is the go-to political site, with princes, Parliament members, opposition leaders and others with an interest in politics saying they consult it daily to find out what the opposition is thinking.

The easiest way to ensure a large turnout for any demonstration, the leader of the main Shiite opposition group said, is to post the announcement for it on BahrainOnline.

"If something happens anywhere in Bahrain, usually within five minutes maximum something about it is happening on my site," Abdulemam said.

Still, the site's Web masters are often criticized for creating a "tabloid" that spreads rumors and demeans those considered enemies. Ghada Jamsheer, a women's rights advocate who criticized the Shiite clergy for opposing a proposed law that would give more defined divorce rights to women, said her face was pasted onto a naked body.

Abdulemam said his site was blamed for trash posted on any site in Bahrain, and his Web masters, monitoring as many as 1,000 posts a day, remove anything that promotes violence. He laughs when he recalls his arrest and how little his interrogators knew about how the Internet works, blaming him for the content of every posting.

Mansour Jamri, editor of a daily newspaper, Wasat, and the son of a famous Shiite opposition cleric, notes that many of those writing on the Web sites are very young.

"If you don't shout with them you are a corrupt person, you are basically a dog used by the government," said Jamri, who has been portrayed as just that.

Part of the issue is that the press remains hobbled. When Abd al-Hadi al-Khawaja, a prominent human rights advocate, was arrested in late 2004 after giving a speech attacking the prime minister over corruption, no newspaper printed what he had said. For that people had to turn to BahrainOnline.

"This pocket of anarchy is a byproduct of half-hearted democracy," Jamri said.

Simmering frustrations
In 2002, BahrainOnline led a fight to boycott the elections. As a result, Shiites mostly stayed away from the polls, and the vote exacerbated the sense among Shiites that the Khalifas and their Sunni allies were not interested in treating them as equals.

Election districts were gerrymandered so that sparsely populated Sunni districts in the south got almost as many members as the heavily Shiite villages in the north. Opposition groups amassed evidence that the government gave passports to various Sunni Muslim groups, including members of a tribe in Saudi Arabia that had once lived on Bahrain, to alter voting demographics.

Ultimately, Sunnis captured 27 of the 40 seats in the election. As in many parts of the Muslim world, fundamentalists were the best organized, and a group of Sunni fundamentalists became the largest bloc in Parliament. They muted any opposition to the government out of concern that it might help spread the influence of Shiite Islam.

The new Parliament spent half its time bickering over religious practice. It won a fight to allow fully veiled women to drive. It proposed a ban on scantily clad window mannequins. It tried to separate the sexes in all classrooms. Last year, alcohol sales were banned during a Muslim holiday--a time when tens of thousands of visitors arrive from Saudi Arabia to drink.

What Parliament did not do was really confront the government over a chronic housing shortage and unemployment, particularly among Shiites. The gap between the largely Sunni haves and the Shiite have-nots grows ever more apparent and feeds simmering frustration.

Abdulemam, for example, earns a decent salary as a computer engineer at an American-owned company. With a wife who is expecting their first child any day, he can not afford $130,000 for a plot of land and does not ever expect to be able to.

He is the youngest of 10 siblings, 4 of whom still live with their children in his father's house. Some 15 people live there, with each nuclear family allotted a room. "I know we deserve better," he said.

Exact numbers are hard to pin down in Bahrain, but about 27,000 applications are pending for subsidized government housing, senior officials concede. Unemployment stands officially at 15 percent but runs as high as 28 percent among Shiite young adults ages 20 to 24, diplomats and Bahraini economists said.

Opposition members accuse the royal family of monopolizing all available land, and say an expatriate community of 250,000--from Asia and other Arab countries--blocks Shiites from most decent jobs. Shiites avoid some tough jobs like construction and are generally barred from joining the security services. Royal family members concede that more needs to be done to improve housing but deny hoarding land. A job training program is to begin this month.

Last spring, the committee in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that monitors racial discrimination rebuked Bahrain. The report said that although Bahrain paid lip service in its laws to barring discrimination, actual practice lagged.

When Abdulemam was arrested in February 2005, he found that his interrogator was an Egyptian, one of hundreds of Sunni Muslims from the Arab world and Pakistan recruited into the security services, given houses and usually citizenship.

"He was asking me whether I was loyal to this country," Abdulemam said sourly. "How can an Egyptian ask me about my loyalty? There are many ways to love your country, and what I do is one of them."

The poverty suffered by many Shiites seems particularly galling to them given the real estate boom. The capital's skyline is dominated by gargantuan luxury office blocs under construction, which Bahrainis contend are all owned by the royal family. The capital is also plastered with ads for housing developments like Riffa Heights, an upscale community with sea views and a golf course in a plush neighborhood already dominated by royal palaces where Shiites cannot buy land.

Senior officials call it all essential development to attract investment to Bahrain, long the Persian Gulf's financial hub but one competing increasingly with far richer emirates like Dubai and Qatar.

The young, American-educated crown prince even used a huge tract to build a $150 million Formula 1 racing circuit. Talal al-Zain, the investment banker who is the raceway's chairman, lauded it as a means of putting Bahrain on the international map. The track seems to baffle Bahrainis. For special races on National Day only about 500 people, most of them foreigners, sat in stands built for 30,000. One Web site mocks the crown prince, Sheik Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, as "Salman Schumacher," a reference to Michael Schumacher, a top racer.

Formally, the Bush administration has declared that it supports democratic change across the region, that the United States will no longer laud despots just because they back American policy. "Hopeful reform is already taking hold in an arc from Morocco to Jordan to Bahrain," President Bush said in his 2005 State of the Union address.

Practically, though, the United States has not pushed for sweeping change out of concern for what might happen if states fell into the hands of Islamists.

The Khalifas court the Bush administration particularly well. The foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, noted that a proposed port might provide the deep-water docking space needed for the aircraft carriers that now have to anchor offshore. Such cooperation has earned Bahrain a free-trade deal and praise from Bush.

During a protest march on National Day, some of the participants chanted "Death to Khalifa!" referring to Sheik Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa, 69, who has remained prime minister since independence in 1971. They yelled it in Arabic and Persian, the language of Shiite Iran.

With Iraq holding so much of the people's attention here, much the way Iran did after its revolution, the question is whether developments in Iraq will lead Bahrain to more sectarianism or more democracy. Signs of both exist. Some postings on BahrainOnline include portraits of prominent Iranian ayatollahs past and present, particularly Khomeini and Ali Khamenei. Members of the ruling family generally use such displays to buttress the accusation that the basic goal of the Shiites is to establish an Iranian-style theocracy in Bahrain.

But Shiites here respond that the ayatollahs are strictly spiritual guides and that native Shiites have lived in Bahrain longer than the ruling family and have no intention of living under the thrall of yet another foreign power. To counter the accusation that their loyalties lie outside Bahrain, the Shiite activists stopped hoisting such pictures at rallies.

"The new Iraq is the model," said Sheik Ali Salman, the 40-year-old Shiite cleric elected to lead Al Wifaq Islamic Society, the main Shiite opposition group, and a man who once organized rallies denouncing the American invasion of Iraq. The expectation that Shiites will dominate the Iraqi government has given Shiites across the region new confidence.

Speaking fluent English learned during five years of exile in Britain, the cleric ticks off all the steps Iraqis have taken toward choosing their own leaders in the same period that King Hamad has been busy consolidating power while warning against moving too quickly to carry out change.

Most Shiites follow one senior cleric on matters of religious practice in their daily lives. Abdulemam said he used to look to Khomeini in Iran, but recently switched to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the moderate and powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq.

Sunnis in Bahrain are at times incensed when Shiites fax Ayatollah Sistani questions, like asking him whether they must obey traffic laws, because King Hamad is not, in their view, a legitimate Islamic ruler. (He faxed back to say yes, they do.)

Where many Shiites here used to watch Al Manar, the satellite channel broadcast from Beirut by the militant Shiite group Hezbollah, they have switched to the Iraqi-run Euphrates channel. When a bombing kills Shiites in Iraq, some in Bahrain wear black.

Shiites and Sunnis silently assess all events in Iraq, which are both feeding democratic yearnings and deepening the divisions between them.

"If a Sunni area is bombed, the Sunnis wish it was a Shiite area; they don't say it, but they feel it," said Sheik Khalid al- Khalifa, a prince and an academic who serves on the Shura Council, the appointed upper house of Parliament. "It's the same for the Shiites. It's all reflected here."
http://news.com.com/In+tiny+Arab+sta...3-6027380.html





No talk for you!

Bangladesh Orders End to Free Talk Time
Julhas Alam

No more free talk time after midnight for Bangladeshi youths.

In the name of protecting moral values, the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has ordered the country's mobile phone companies to stop providing free talk time, saying it is spoiling the younger generation, disrupting studies and promoting needless chatting.

Three of Bangladesh's five mobile phone firms offer the free calls between midnight and 6 a.m. to mainly young customers.

GrameenPhone, a subsidiary of Norway's Telenor ASA, has more than 1 million youths who use such free-call packages, according to Syed Yamin Bakht, a spokesman for the company.

"It's really shocking," Bakht said. "We don't find any valid reason for such behavior of the regulatory body."

University student Zaman Ahmed, who uses a free-call package, complained that "it's not the government's duty to shape our very personal behavior."
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/s...toryId=1146414





Tokyo

Prosecutors Raid Offices of Livedoor and Home of Its Founder
Martin Fackler

Japanese prosecutors raided the offices of the popular Internet portal, Livedoor, and the home of its founder on Monday as part of an investigation of possible violations of securities trading laws.

It was not immediately clear whether the investigation was focused on the company's 33-year-old founder and chief executive, Takafumi Horie, who has become widely known for challenging corporate Japan's stuffy ways. Mr. Horie is an outspoken entrepreneur whose casual style and confrontational tactics have repeatedly angered the country's business elite.

In a brief statement, the Tokyo district prosecutor's office said that Livedoor was being investigated on suspicion of spreading false information about a security, but it did not elaborate. Media reports in Japan said the company was accused of issuing a false news release to drive up the share price of a marketing subsidiary. Livedoor executives did not immediately comment.

More than a dozen investigators raided Livedoor's offices and Mr. Horie's condominium, both of which are in a complex of luxury high-rises in central Tokyo. The raids were the lead item on local news broadcasts. Investigators searched both locations for several hours.

Livedoor is one of Japan's most heavily trafficked Internet portals, offering everything from news and travel tips to a popular blog written by Mr. Horie. The company has used money raised through stock sales to acquire other companies and expand its business group.

Mr. Horie rose to prominence two years ago, when he was rebuffed in an effort to buy a professional baseball team in Japan. He grabbed headlines again last year when he started a hostile takeover bid, still rare in confrontation-averse Japan, for one of the country's biggest media conglomerates, Fuji Television Network.

He failed in that bid, and in September he lost in parliamentary elections, running as a reform candidate against a prominent old-guard politician.

Despite the setbacks, Mr. Horie became a frequent figure on television talk shows and the lecture circuit. He also stirred controversy for favoring T-shirts and sometimes short pants, instead of the standard dark tie and gray suit of Japan's business world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/bu...7livedoor.html





After Panic, Tokyo Market Rebounds
James Brooke

Takafumi Horie, an Internet entrepreneur in Japan, has captured attention with his unconventional American-style approach to business.

Zipping around Tokyo in a silver-blue Ferrari with his bikini-model girlfriend, Mr. Horie was often on television quiz and talk shows, and enjoyed thumbing his nose at Japan's business elite.

But this week, the flamboyant Mr. Horie was in the spotlight for a more somber reason: An investigation of his business, the Livedoor Company, on suspicion of securities fraud had helped to kindle a near panic in Japan as investors withdrew billions of dollars from the Tokyo stock market in the last two days.

In an attempt to calm the frightened investors, a parade of government officials, including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, offered reassurances that economic fundamentals were in order. The chief government secretary, Shinzo Abe said, "It is desirable that stock prices firmly reflect economic fundamentals and move in a stable manner."

The tactic appeared to work on Thursday. With the market rebounding, buyers came in, seeking to scoop up stocks they saw as undervalued. The benchmark Nikkei index of 225 stocks was up about 350 points, or about 2.3 percent, by late afternoon.

Trading was extraordinarily heavy and was close to being suspended by late Thursday in order to avoid overloading its computers, which happened Wednesday when the market closed 20 minutes early.

The frantic quality of the last several days took on a grim aspect when an executive of a securities firm suspected of involvement in corporate takeover deals by Livedoor was found dead on the southern island of Okinawa, apparently having committed suicide, the police, quoted by the Kyodo news agency, said.

The executive was identified as Hideaki Noguchi, 38, a vice president of HS Securities, one of the companies raided by prosecutors this week in connection with the investigation.

Analysts watched the market closely Thursday, afraid that the earlier tumult could return and threaten the Nikkei, which soared more than 40 percent last year, and perhaps undercut the nation's fragile economic recovery after years of stagnation.

In a blow to the nation's pride, the Tokyo Stock Exchange closed early on Wednesday because an old computer system failed to keep up with the rush of trading orders. The exchange operated on a shortened schedule on Thursday, and was nearing the trading limit - four million transactions - that would trigger an early close.

On Wednesday, markets around the world fell, ending down 1.2 percent in Frankfurt and 0.6 percent in London. In New York, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index market slipped 0.39 percent.

The development that set off "Livedoor shock," as the Japanese news and entertainment media call it, occurred on Tuesday, after prosecutors marched into the home and the office of Mr. Horie, who has endeared himself to admirers with a boyish pudgy face and spiked hair, but has enraged Japan's financial establishment with his aggressive tactics. The raid was carried live on the evening news.

Senior Japanese officials sought to minimize any potential impact on the recovering economy, as well as embarrassment to a country trying to regain leadership in critical fields of advanced technology.

James Fiorillo, an American who advises the Japan Natural Selection Fund, one of many foreign funds that heavily expanded its investments in this country last year, commented: "This thing has taken on greed, panic and fear. Banks and trading companies are getting hammered, and their businesses are doing well in this economy."

In the meantime, Japanese regulators widened their investigation into Mr. Horie and Livedoor. The company is reportedly being investigated for violating Japan's security laws by spreading false information. According to Japanese newspaper reports Thursday, prosecutors are also investigating whether Livedoor's parent company falsified figures for financial statements in 2004 to make an $8.7 million loss look like a $12.2 million gain.

Livedoor issued a statement just before trading started on Thursday morning, saying its own investigation had found no problems in two areas thought to be under investigation, an affiliate's takeover of a publisher and its stock split.

In the last two years, Mr. Horie has made headline news with a success story that has turned him into the Bill Gates of Japan. He seemed to revel in tweaking the country's clannish business elite, whom he once dismissed as a "club of old men."

He especially raised hackles by attempting a hostile takeover of a radio network and by trying to buy a baseball team. Hostile takeovers are rare in Japan. Though the radio network, the object of a bid last spring, was small, it was an affiliate of the Fuji Television Network, the country's largest private broadcaster. Both attempts failed. But they did not seem to dent his ability to make money from his conglomerate comprising a popular Internet portal and about 40 related ventures.

Mr. Horie has built Livedoor into one of Japan's most heavily trafficked sites, offering everything from free e-mail, travel reservations, consumer financing, lists of used cars for sale and even a blog he wrote. In five years, Livedoor's stock value soared 150 times, to $6.34 billion at the beginning of the week.

Livedoor shares did not trade on Wednesday or Thursday. Still it shares were marked down Wednesday by the daily 100-yen limit, to 496 yen. At that price, more than $1.8 billion of the company's market value was wiped out.

"We need more updated information and better disclosure," Taizo Nishimuro, president of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, said of Livedoor.

On Wednesday, Mr. Nishimuro raised the possibility of delisting Livedoor.

Mr. Horie's casual style and bold business practices have alienated many old hands in this country. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the business daily, said this week, "Since listing his company in 2000, Horie has been accruing a reputation as an eccentric, aloha-shirted president who dodges questions from analysts."

By some accounts a geek version of Donald Trump, Mr. Horie wrote an ode to greed, titled, "Earning Money Is Everything: From Zero to 10 Billion Yen, My Way."

While he ruffled some, he enchanted many small investors, who accounted for half the trades on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last year. That enchantment snapped on Wednesday. Investors put in a vast number of trade orders stretching Tokyo's computer-based market. Part of that high volume was a result of Internet trading, a popular pursuit enabled by one of Mr. Horie's companies.

Compounding investor anxiety, exchange officials announced in advance on Wednesday that the order volume was expected to reach the system's capacity of 4.5 million trades a day, forcing an early close. After normally instantaneous trades started to take five minutes and more, exchange officials closed the market 20 minutes before the normal 3 p.m. closing time.

"The recent spike in orders is extraordinary," Mr. Nishimuro said. As long as these extremely high volumes last, he said, Tokyo's trading day will be cut by 30 minutes.

Last week, the exchange increased the market's order capacity by 20 percent, to nine million orders a day. On Jan. 30, trading capacity is to increase by 11 percent, to five million trades a day. On Wednesday, when the market closed 20 minutes early, the exchange had recorded 4.38 million trades and 7.3 million orders.

Belying Japan's high-tech, clockwork image, the exchange lost almost an entire day of trading in November because of a computer breakdown. In December, computers stymied a brokerage firm's attempt to reverse a botched trade, an error that led to $350 million in losses and brought down the president of the exchange, Takuo Tsurushima, who resigned to take responsibility.

To settle investors before Thursday's trading began, government officials made comments timed for the Wednesday evening television news. "I think it's of a temporary nature as economic conditions are solid over all," Prime Minister Koizumi said.

Kaoru Yosano, the financial services minister, reassured investors at a news conference: "We do not fear a chain reaction."

Hours earlier, the alarm over Livedoor had spread to other Internet stocks. Yahoo Japan fell by almost 10 percent. Softbank fell by 13 percent, both near their maximum allowable price movement.

"Our fund managers think that the next couple of days will be choppy," Alexander M. Prout, president of Invesco in Japan, said after trading ended Wednesday. Mr. Prout, who said he managed $5.3 billion in Japanese equities, blamed "media hysteria" for the turmoil.

"Anytime there is a quick run-up in the marketplace, there is that breathing pause," he said, referring to the Tokyo market's recent surge. "But because there is nothing fundamentally wrong, when the lull settles you will see buying opportunities."

Wall Street traders said Wednesday that there was little noticeable concern in New York over the shutdown of the Japanese market, which came on top of a sell-off over disappointing results from American technology companies. They noted that the Tokyo exchange has a limited capacity to handle orders and that Livedoor has a large number of small individual investors and many of them were trying to sell shares. Some traders saw the two-day drop in Tokyo as a buying opportunity.

But many feared that they might be hearing the popping of a miniature Internet bubble.

"If Livedoor did not disclose correct data for their financial statement, that is big, sort of a similar situation to Enron," Nobuo Sayama, a business professor at Hitotsubashi University, said after the market closed Wednesday.

Referring to the Internet companies that have clustered in a new Tokyo hotel and office tower, he predicted: "This event is a start of big problem that will expand to other Roppongi Hills companies. They will be attacked later on."

But Mr. Sayama, like the Americans interviewed, said he believed that Japan's economic fundamentals were sound.

Some analysts said Tuesday and Wednesday would eventually be seen as a speed bump on the way to the Nikkei breaking 20,000, a level substantially below its high of 38,915 in December 1989.

G. Thomas Sims, in Hong Kong; Martin Fackler in Seoul, South Korea; and Jenny Anderson in New York contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/bu...9livedoor.html





Korea

Anti-Piracy Body Looks In Horror At A Plan Gone Awry
Wohn Dong-hee

A group working to halt the rampant piracy of music on the Internet has gotten some unexpected and unwelcome results from its efforts.

The Seoul Central District Prosecutors Office yesterday announced guidelines for its handling of intellectual property rights complaints, especially those involving pirated music being traded on the Internet. The office said it would press charges against persons who downloaded music for resale, but not against those who copied it for their personal use.

"We would have to investigate more than 10,000 people, and if prosecutors start investigating Internet users nationwide, it may start controversies about infringements of human rights," an official at the office said.

That was not what Nofree, a music industry organization, had in mind when it filed a complaint with the prosecutors against about 13,000 persons and two Internet sites. An official at the agency, Kim Young-ki, said yesterday that the intent was not to put those 13,000 people in jail, but to make the illegal downloading of music a social issue here. He added glumly that those plans had backfired.

"We were hoping that prosecutors would impose some strong measures so that people would see the consequences of getting caught distributing illegal music files, but now they've announced that it's permissible to download music for private listening. People who didn't even think of doing so may start," Mr. Kim continued. "Also, musicians will feel that their own rights are being violated when people download illegal music files - regardless of the intent behind the downloads."
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/20060...090409041.html





France Softens Copyright Bill
Jack Kapica

The government of France is loosening restrictions in its proposed digital copyright protection bill, says a report from Agence France-Presse.

The change was made after politicians and consumer groups raised a dramatic outcry, forcing amendments lightening restrictions on copying CDs and DVDs and handing out milder penalties to small-time downloaders.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin issued the order to change the bill to enshrine the right of consumers to make private copies of music and film disks.

The bill will distinguish between those who download for profit and those who just add to their own music and movie collections using peer-to-peer technologies.

An estimated eight million people in France use the peer-to-peer sites.

The government withdrew a harsher version of the bill after a number of members of the ruling party and opposition benches managed, in a middle-of-the-night vote, to legalize peer-to-peer file sharing in December.

The vote stunned the government, and forced it to rethink the vote, especially after consumer groups argued that private users should continue to enjoy the right to make copies of CDs and DVDs for, say, second homes or family members.

According to Le Journal du Dimanche, the bill would initiate a phased penalty system for small-time downloaders, starting with a warning e-mail, then a formal letter and finally fines ranging from 300 to 1,500 euros ($425 to $2,000 Cdn.).

Thos who download for profit would face fines of 300,000 euros ($425,000) and as much as three years in prison.

The bill could support the notion that individuals who bought their music or movies legally would be allowed to make as many as five copies.

Until an election was called, Canada was also entertaining a harsh new copyright bill, which died on the order paper. But the bill became an election issue as its backer, Liberal MP Sarmite Bulte, scheduled a fund-raiser hosted by a number of copyright stakeholders.

On Monday, South Korea followed the French example by increasing fines for people who share music files for commercial purposes and not prosecuting those who do it for personal use.

A story in the Korea Tomes said the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office has set the guidelines, under which Internet users who swap music files for commercial purposes will be subject to criminal charges.

However, the Korea Times said, individuals who download for personal entertainment law will not be charged.

The changes were made after NoFree Corp., a copyright protection group, sued 13,000 Internet users last year for illegally swapping and distributing music files on the Internet. Under the new guidelines, the 13,000 charged will be free from criminal prosecution.

The French bill would be at odds with many CDs and DVDs sold there that contain copy-protection management software, to digitally block efforts to copy them. If the bill becomes law, the copy-protection measures would have to be removed.

The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act currently outlaws the removal of digital blocks, such as the notorious "rootkit" installed on a number of CDs by Sony BMG, which had a spyware component and could not be easily removed.

French prosecutors would not, under the new bill, pursue someone who broke such protection to put a movie from a disk onto a pocket video player or Apple's iPod. And someone who copies a friend's disk would face only a fine of only 150 euros ($210).

Under the bill, Apple's Music Store in France would also have to change its practices: the Journal du Dimanche says the government is looking at ensuring that all music sold on that site can be played on MP3 players other than Apple's bestselling iPods, which is not currently the case.

"If Apple refuses, the matter could be taken to the Competition Council," an unidentified government official was quoted as saying.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ory/Technology





Fears Raised Over Digital Rights

A UK consumer watchdog has called for new laws to protect users' rights to use digital music and movies.

The National Consumer Council (NCC) said anti-piracy efforts were eroding established rights to digital media.

The NCC had little faith that industry self-regulation would adequately protect consumers' rights.

It made its comments to a parliamentary inquiry into technologies that limit what people can do with CDs, DVDs and downloaded media.

No faith

In its submission to the inquiry, the NCC said many consumers were regularly running up against the restrictions record companies and film makers put on their products.

The consumer group said people were finding that they could not make compilations for their own use or easily move digital copies between different
devices.

In its statement to the inquiry it said the digital locks put on content were "constraining the legitimate consumer use of digital content".

Also being undermined were rights established by consumer protection and data protection laws, it said.

"Consumers face security risks to their equipment, limitations on their use of products, poor information when purchasing products and unfair contract terms," said Jill Johnstone, the NCC's director of policy.

She added that the group had little faith that self-regulation by media makers would protect consumer rights.

Sony woes

As a case in point, the NCC referred to the furore over the methods Sony BMG used to stop some of its CDs being copied.

The music maker suffered a long bout of bad publicity following the discovery that its anti-piracy system used virus-like techniques to hide itself.

The row led to Sony BMG being sued by many consumers and many US states. Eventually Sony recalled the CDs using the most controversial anti- piracy software and offer refunds to consumers who suffered.

It has also stopped using some copy protection systems following the row.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/4617176.stm





New Open-Source License Targets DRM, Hollywood
Martin LaMonica

The new version of the most widely used open-source license takes a "highly aggressive" stance against the digital rights management software that's widely favored in the entertainment industry, said Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation.

At a two-day event here to launch the General Public License version 3, which governs use of countless free and open-source programs, Moglen said the license includes anti-DRM provisions that could put it in conflict with movie studios and even digital video recorder maker TiVo.

On Monday, the Free Software Foundation published a draft of the GPL version 3, which is expected to be completed in about a year. The draft states that GPL software cannot use "digital restrictions" on copyright material unless users can control them.

Moglen said that DRM technology, which places limits on how consumers can play movies, music or other digital content, is "fundamentally incompatible" with the principles of the Free Software Foundation. Moglen and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman are co-authors of the GPL version 3.

"Mr. Stallman made perfectly clear that his point of view is: It's enough. It's enough that the world has to pay attention to that (DRM) problem the way the world needed to pay attention to the patent problem 10 years ago," Moglen said in an interview with CNET News.com.

"I recognize that that's a highly aggressive position, but it's not an aggression which we thought up. It's a defense related to an aggression which was launched against the people whose rights are our primary concern," he added.

Moglen said DRM systems that take control out of people's hands or violate their privacy do not respect free software users' rights and therefore are in conflict with the forthcoming GPL provisions.

The planned anti-DRM changes to the GPL are significant because the entertainment industry regularly uses Linux-powered computers in the production process, notably for special effects and animation. In general, movie studios support DRM technology to prevent piracy.

It's not clear whether the Linux operating system kernel will be governed by version 3 of the GPL when the new license is released; creator Linus Torvalds specifically didn't follow the Free Software Foundation's recommendation to describe a software project as governed by version 2 or "any later version." However, many other components of the operating system, such as the GLIBC library of supporting software and the GCC compiler, are expected to move to GPL 3.

Moglen and Stallman have voiced concern specifically with TiVo, which uses Linux, because the company collects information on consumers' actions. Moglen said TiVo complied with version 2 of the GPL "by the skin of its teeth" and said the company will find more difficulty complying with GPL version 3's anti-DRM provisions.

"Having a personal video recorder which reports every button you push to headquarters when you use the remote control--and which won't run software if you modify the box so it snoops on you a little less--is not user-respecting conduct," he said.

"What TiVo needs to do--what everybody needs to do who makes electronic devices--is to stop injuring users to help movie companies. We don't want our software used in a way which batters the head of the user to please somebody else. Our goal is the protection of users' rights, not movies' rights," Moglen said.

He said Hollywood studios that use free software, namely Linux, to create animated movies yet deny users' freedoms are "flat unfair."

Separately, Moglen sought to allay concerns that the GPL version 3 requires application hosting companies to provide the source code for software delivered as a service over the Internet.

"It is clear that in this draft we have not changed those rules at all," he said.

CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
http://news.com.com/New+open-source+...3-6028284.html





GPLv3 Draft


GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Discussion Draft 1 of Version 3, 16 Jan 2006

THIS IS A DRAFT, NOT A PUBLISHED VERSION OF THE GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Preamble

The licenses for most software are designed to take away your
freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public
License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free
software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. We,
the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for
most of our software; it applies also to any other program whose
authors commit to using it. (Some Free Software Foundation software
is covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License instead.) You
can apply it to your programs, too.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not
price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you
have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for
this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it
if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it
in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to make requirements that forbid
anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.
These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you
distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that
you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the
source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their
rights.

Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1)
assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License which
gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.

For the developers' and author's protection, the GPL clearly explains
that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is
modified by someone else and passed on, the GPL ensures that recipients
are told that what they have is not the original, so that any problems
introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors'
reputations.

Some countries have adopted laws prohibiting software that enables users
to escape from Digital Restrictions Management. DRM is fundamentally
incompatible with the purpose of the GPL, which is to protect users'
freedom; therefore, the GPL ensures that the software it covers will
neither be subject to, nor subject other works to, digital restrictions
from which escape is forbidden.

Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. We
wish to avoid the special danger that redistributors of a free program will
individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program
proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL makes it clear that any patent must
be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and
modification follow.
http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft





U.K. Judge Frowns On Software Patents
Ingrid Marson

A U.K. judge has questioned whether software patents should be granted, and has criticized the U.S. for allowing "anything under the sun" to be patented.

Sir Robin Jacob, a judge at the U.K.'s Court of Appeal who specializes in intellectual-property law, spoke about the potential problems surrounding software patents at a seminar for the Society for Computers and Law on Thursday evening in London.

"Do we need patents for computer programs? Where is the evidence for it?" Jacob asked.

The need for software patents has been questioned by campaigners such as the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, but few studies have investigated this issue. The European Commission has funded a study on the legal, technical and economic effects of software patents on innovation, but the study is not due to be finished until 2007.

Last year, the European Parliament rejected the directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions, which became widely known as the software patent directive. Many claimed that this directive could lead to the widespread patenting of software, as is the case in the U.S.

"The United States takes the view that anything made by man, under the sun, can be patented. And they have granted patents for business methods, mainly computer business methods. But as far as I can see, it would cover a new and improved method of stacking oranges on a barrel," Jacob said.

Jacob said that IP rights are often justified on the "pragmatic grounds" that they encourage research and development, but that people have "got to look at all IP rights critically and say, 'Do we need them?'"

One aspect of the patentability of computer programs that Jacob said gives him "considerable concern" is the searching for prior art.

"It's been said that (searching for prior art) is all going to be sorted out and will be very easy in due course--I don't believe it," he said. "And some of the fuzzy patents that have emerged from the United States tell you that it's going to be very difficult to stop very ordinary things from being patented."

This is a question of policy, rather than a legal question, according to Jacob. However, he admitted that he was glad he hasn't had to consider any software patent cases in the appeal courts yet.

Jacob claims to have also noticed a change in the attitude toward patents and intellectual property in general.

"IP rights themselves may have reached a bit of a swing of opinion. One is detecting public disquiet in a number of areas of intellectual property, asking: Are we going too far? There's a serious worry about patent offices and how you stop them from granting pretty ropey patents," he said.
http://news.com.com/U.K.+judge+frown...3-6027097.html





Big in Saunnas

Firefox 'Passes 20 Percent Market Share' In Europe
Ingrid Marson

Mozilla Firefox has achieved an market share of over 20 percent in Europe, according to the latest figures released by French Web metrics firm XiTi.

XiTi, which based its figures on a sample of 32.5 million Web site visits that took place on Sunday 8 January, said that Finland has the highest proportion of Firefox users, followed by Slovenia and Germany. It found that the open source browser is used by 38, 36 and 30 percent of users in these countries respectively.

The UK has one of the lowest proportions of Firefox users in Europe, accounting for only 11 percent of Web site visits. The figure of 20 percent across Europe was obtained by calculating an average from the figures obtained for each European country, according to XiTi.

But XiTi's figures should probably be taken with a pinch of salt, as Firefox usage tends to be highest over the weekend, according to Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe.

"We should emphasise that these measures have been done on a Sunday, when Firefox' usage peaks. The Firefox browser is less used during the week, as enterprises are more conservative when it comes to using a newer browser," said Nitot, in a blog posting that commented on earlier figures released by the Web metrics company.

Other Web metrics companies produce more conservative estimates of Firefox' market share. In November, OneStat.com reported that Firefox had achieved a global market share of 11.5 percent, although it found that only 4.9 percent of people were using it in the UK.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/app...9247539,00.htm





Music Sales Are Booming On Internet
AP

Sales of music via the Internet and mobile phones continued to boom in 2005, the recording industry reported Thursday, reaching 6 percent of global record company revenues.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, also called on Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, to join the fight against music piracy, which it claims severely erodes the profits of its 1,450 member record companies across the globe.

The London-based IFPI said that record company revenues reached $1.1 billion in 2005, up from $380 million in 2004. Music fans around the globe downloaded 420 million single tracks in 2005, more than double the 156 million downloaded the previous year.

"2005 was the year that the digital music market took shape," said IFPI Chairman John Kennedy.

The IFPI added that the legitimate music business was gradually gaining ground on digital piracy. It said research showed that in Europe's two biggest digital markets - Britain and Germany - more music fans are now legally downloading music than illegally file-swapping.

A series of lawsuits against piracy by the IFPI have so far largely targeted individual song swappers for breach of copyright rather than ISPs which can claim that they have no knowledge of any piracy occurring on their networks.

Kennedy, who said he approached prominent ISPs a year ago about a coordinated response and has received "effectively a zero response," put them on notice Thursday that the IFPI would consider litigation if they did not join the fight against piracy.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=D EFAULT





Store Closings Bring Up Questions
Kari Jordan

The issue of store closings in the Copper Country Mall has been preeminent in the Houghton/Hancock Community for years. Hallmark, Payless and Radio Shack are just a few stores that have closed over the years. Recently Sam Goody and Rex Electronics have closed their businesses as well. Where is everyone buying their music now?

First year Construction Management major Gary Hudgins (Detroit native) buys his CDs from Wal-Mart. “I like music and find that when you buy the CDs you get the lyrics as well and nice album covers,” he said. Isaiah Cunningham, a transfer student in the Mechanical Engineering department likes to purchase his music at Target.

Are more students using the option of downloading their music at 88 cents per song? With the illegal downloading issues apparent on many campuses, how can you stay safe?

According to the Michigan Tech Telecommunications Department, MTU students are now able to “enjoy affordable alternative to illegal peer-to-peer files sharing on and off campus,” through a partnership with the Ruckus Digital Entertainment Network. Through this service students are allowed to legally download music and movies. The cost for this service for students is $14.95 per semester for music and $19.95 per semester for movies, or $29.95 for both music and movies. Other entertainment services available include NetFlix, Columbia House and BMG Music Services.

Are these services or others like them ridding us of the need of Blockbuster, Family Video or the electronics department in Wal-Mart or ShopKo?

According to CNet.com a study by researchers at Harvard University tracked music downloads over 17 weeks. Over this period, 1.75 million downloads took place from two OpenNap servers. The study showed that file sharing has a limited effect on record sales. On the contrary, downloads could possibly have a slight positive effect on the sales of the top albums since people use downloading to “sample” a song and tend to buy the entire album if they like it.

With many options available, there are no certain trends presently. Information on any of the above-mentioned services is available via the Internet.
http://www.mtulode.com/index.php?iss...=12&artid=4986





Advocates of Wi-Fi in Cities Learn Art of Politics
Glenn Fleishman

The idea of building citywide wireless networks from the community level was suspiciously simple back in 2000, although the plans sounded like the work of underground revolutionaries. "All of us were very idealistic, and all quite strongly opinionated," said Adam Shand, founder of Personal Telco, which had visions of such a network in Portland, Ore.

There as elsewhere, it was seen as a three-step process.

First, build home-brew Wi-Fi antennas and develop software to make outdoor wireless networks affordable and practical.

Second, persuade thousands of people in each city to stick Wi-Fi antennas out their windows, on their roofs or in their places of business to serve collectively as the nodes of a network. (Some groups sought to share existing commercial broadband Internet access - often regardless of whether an Internet service provider allowed that kind of sharing - while others wanted to build a separate community network.)

Third, link those thousands of nodes into neighborhood networks that would themselves connect into a cloud of free citywide Wi-Fi coverage. That's free as in free beer as well as free as in freedom: most advocates envisioned no restrictions on content or participation, and no access charges. In contrast, almost all early Wi-Fi hot spots were pinpoints of service, had fees attached and restricted use.

Step 2 was never completed, which is why victory speeches seem, at first glance, out of place. Nonetheless, "community wireless accomplished spectacularly well what it set out to do," said Dana Spiegel, president of NYCwireless, a volunteer wireless advocacy group in Manhattan.

While attendance at some community networking groups has plummeted and some smaller groups have disappeared, their technical and political impact has never been higher. Wireless advocates no longer dangle dangerously from rooftops mounting antennas built inside potato-chip cans, although some still provide technical help to business owners and nonprofit groups in creating free Wi-Fi hot spots.

"The problems that were hard in 2001 were technical ones," Mr. Spiegel said. "Now, they're personal and relationship and political ones. The technology, we almost don't even think about it anymore."

Greg Richardson, president of Civitium, a consulting firm, says that movement was the impetus for government-run citywide wireless Internet plans. Mr. Richardson has been a consultant on municipal wireless policy and technical issues for Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities.

Community wireless gave municipal planners "the validation that a lot of those ideas could work," Mr. Richardson said. Early and continuing municipal efforts to provide small areas of free access in parks and downtown districts were and still are often created in conjunction with these community groups.

The move from building physical networks to building political influence, many advocates say, stems in part from an August 2004 forum organized by the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network in Illinois.

At the event, many community wireless leaders met for the first time. Sessions were conducted with politicians and members of nonprofit groups interested in diversifying media ownership. Sascha D. Meinrath, the network's project coordinator, said he saw a political awakening hit the technically focused participants.

"We could develop all of these technologies, we could come up with the holy grail of wireless technologies, and then it would be illegal to deploy it," he said. After they returned from the conference, several wireless advocates became involved in the political debates over municipal broadband. These debates intensified after Philadelphia announced in late 2004 that it would build a citywide Wi-Fi network.

In quick succession, other cities announced their own plans, including Minneapolis; San Francisco; Anaheim, Calif.; and Tempe, Ariz.

Much of the advocates' involvement has centered on stressing network neutrality, in which a network operator has little say over what devices are used on a network and for what purpose.

The issue became more prominent after recent statements by the chief executive of AT&T (the former SBC) suggesting that content providers like Google might be required to pay fees to reach AT&T's Internet access customers. Scattered reports also indicate that some access providers may be blocking or interrupting Internet phone services.

Michael Oh of NewburyOpen.net, a commercially sponsored free Wi-Fi zone on Newbury Street in Boston, said, "I don't think anyone in the SBC world or the policy-making world would have anticipated that there would have been anyone at the table like us when it came to municipal wireless."

Many wireless advocates said they already had relationships with local politicians, and now were stepping up to the state level; some were contacted by officials trying to make sense of broadband policy. Richard MacKinnon, founder of the Austin Wireless City Project, testified at state hearings in Texas and joined in a successful fight against a bill to restrict municipal broadband service.

Wireless advocates "have done more to bring forward the concerns of network neutrality as well as open access" than anyone else in the political process, Mr. Richardson said. "They have a very loud voice in an advocacy role."

A policy statement by NYCwireless lists several principles that define network neutrality: a city or network builder must resell service to other Internet service providers, avoid restrictions on content or types of service (like Internet phone service) and allow all legal devices to be connected to the network - meaning that Internet telephone adapters and wireless cameras would be as legitimate as laptop Wi-Fi cards.

Because of concerns over neutrality, many community groups have focused on how to create independent networks that require neither government support nor an Internet connection to be useful.

The Champaign-Urbana network is developing software that allows computers and Wi-Fi gateways to organize into a larger network as they find other nodes. The approach is called mesh networking; the software would be open sourced and distributed at no cost. (Mesh networks are to be the basis of all the municipal Wi-Fi networks currently planned, but are to use commercial equipment and proprietary software.)

Seattle Wireless is taking a different approach to creating fixed networks using wireless equipment. Since 2000, its founder, Matt Westervelt, and other members have planned to create a central point that would act as a relay medium for local groups seeking to connect their offices, create temporary networks for events or offer Internet connections to others.

His organization raised $2,500 for a climber to place network equipment on a cellular tower on Capitol Hill, one of the highest spots in Seattle. The cost of upkeep is to be donated by a private company.

Community advocates want to use both these independent networks and municipal broadband to carry new kinds of locally focused services and data.

Mr. Oh and The Boston Globe (a division of The New York Times Company) are experimenting in locations around Boston with what they call Pulse Points: freestanding Wi-Fi nodes with no Internet connections. These nodes carry only local discussion boards and information.

At a Pulse Point in the South Station train terminal, every other board posting in the early days "was a flame about why there was no free Internet access," Mr. Oh said. Now, the spot is routinely used to exchange information and personal stories.

Mr. Spiegel said that the transition from hardware and networks to the higher level of programs and politics was inevitable as networks spread.

"In the end, what all of us were trying to do was to change the way people thought about communications," he said. "The Internet wasn't something that you sat down at the computer to use, but that it was something that permeated our lives - it just didn't have the distribution to permeate our lives."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/te...ts/19wifi.html





Researcher: Sony BMG "Rootkit" Still Widespread
Robert Lemos

WASHINGTON D.C. -- Hundreds of thousands of networks across the globe, including many military and government networks, appear to still contain PCs with the controversial copy-protection software installed by music discs sold by media giant Sony BMG, a security researcher told attendees at the ShmooCon hacking conference this weekend.

Building on previous research that suggested some 570,000 networks had computers affected by the software, infrastructure security expert Dan Kaminsky used a different address used by the copy protection software to estimate that, a month later, 350,000 networks--many belonging to the military and government--contain computers affected by the software.

"It is unquestionable that Sony's code has gotten into military and government networks, and not necessarily just U.S. military and government networks," Kaminsky said in an interview after his presentation at ShmooCon. The researcher would not say how many networks belonged to government or military top-level domains.

The latest research results comes as Sony BMG is attempting to finish up this particular embarrassing chapter in the company's use of digital-rights management software. Earlier this month, a New York district court judge gave the nod to a settlement penned by Sony BMG and the attorneys for six class-action lawsuits in the state. More than 15 other lawsuits are pending against the media giant, according to court filings.

The controversy surrounds several flaws in two types of copy-protection software used on Sony BMG music CDs and the company's previous practices of hiding the software from a computer's user and making removal of the software extremely inconvenient. The two practices--considered unfair by the Attorney General for the State of Texas, whose office sued Sony BMG--resemble "rootkit" techniques used by malicious Internet attackers.

Sony BMG uses two types of digital-rights management (DRM) software: the Extended Copy Protection (XCP) program created by First 4 Internet and the MediaMax program created by SunnComm.

Kaminsky's research uses a feature of domain-name system (DNS) servers: The computers will tell whether an address has recently been looked up by the server. The security researcher worked from a list of 9 million domain-name servers, about 3 million of which are reachable by computers outside their networks. Kaminskly sent DNS requests to the 3 million systems, asking each to look up whether an address used by the XCP software--in this case, xcpimages.sonybmg.com--was in the systems' caches.

During his first survey, carried out over three days in mid-November, he found 568,000 DNS servers had previously been asked to look up three different server addresses used by the XCP software. Another 350,000 servers had to be thrown out from the data set because they did not obey commands to only look in their cache, and instead asked for information from other servers on the Internet.

The most recent survey, which lasted between December 15 and December 23, he found 350,000 servers had the unique address in their caches. While other factors may increase or decrease the number, Kaminsky continues to stress that the experiment is about finding out the magnitude of the impact of Sony BMG's software.

"The data shows that this is most likely a hundreds-of-thousands to millions of victims issue," Kaminsky said.

The data might also show how widespread piracy has become. The 52 music titles released with the XCP software were only released in North America, he said. However, the network apparently affected by the Sony BMG issue covered 135 countries. About 4.7 million discs were manufactured and about 2.1 million had sold, according to Sony statements.

"The global scope is the big mystery here," he said. "It is fairly likely that a lot of the discs were pirated."

In December, Sony BMG changed the banner ad that displays on PCs that play a CD to a graphic that requests them to download the uninstaller. The graphical reminder showed that Sony BMG is taking the threat seriously, Kaminsky said, and could be responsible for much of the decrease in his numbers. Sony BMG could not be reached for comment on Monday.

While the security issues related to the copy-protection software have apparently affected U.S. government and military computers, the Department of Justice will not likely get involved, said Jennifer Granick, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.

"I don't see the federal government suing a big company like Sony," she said. "The fact that military networks have likely been affected by this won't change that."
http://www.securityfocus.com/print/news/11369





Windows Wireless Flaw a Danger to Laptops
Brian Krebs

At the ShmooCon gathering in Washington, D.C., today, old-school hacker and mischief maker Mark "Simple Nomad" Loveless released information on a staggeringly simple but very dangerous wireless security problem with a feature built into most laptop computers running any recent version of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Laptops powered by Windows XP or Windows 2000 with built-in wireless capabilities (these includes most laptops on the market today) are configured so that when the user opens up the machine or turns it on, Windows looks for any available wireless connections. If the laptop cannot link up to a wireless network, it creates what's known as an ad-hoc "link local address," a supposed "private network" that assigns the wireless card a network address of 169.254.x.x (the Xs represent a random number between 1 and 254).

Microsoft designed this portion of Windows so that the address becomes associated with the name or "SSID" of the last wireless network from which the user obtained a real Internet address. The laptop then broadcasts the name of that network out to other computers within a short range of the machine (which may vary depending a number of things, including the quality of the laptop's embedded network card and things that may obstruct the signal, like walls, e.g.).

What Loveless found was that by creating a network connection on his computer that matches the name of the network the target computer is broadcasting, the two computers could be made to associate with one another on the same link local network, effectively allowing the attacker to directly access the victim's machine.

I followed Loveless up to his hotel room to get a first hand example of how this attack would work. I set up an ad hoc wireless network connection on my Windows XP laptop named "hackme." Within a few seconds of hitting "Ok," to create the network, my laptop was assigned a 169.254.x.x address. A few seconds later, Loveless could see my computer sending out a beacon saying it was ready to accept connections from other computers that might also have the "hackme" network pre-configured on their machines. Loveless then created an ad hoc network with the same name, and told his computer to go ahead and connect to "hackme." Voila! His machine was assigned a different 169.254.x.x address and we both verified that we could send data packets back forth to each other's computer.

Here's the really freaky part about all this: No more than five minutes after I had deleted the "hackme" network ID from my laptop, Loveless and I spotted the same network name being broadcast from another computer that didn't belong to either of us. Turns out, someone else at the hacker conference was trying to join the fun.

As Loveless pointed out, this "feature" of Windows actually behaves somewhat like a virus. Think of it this way: If you connect your Windows laptop to the wireless network at the local Starbucks, for instance, your computer will indefinitely store the name of the Starbucks network (invariably these are named "T-Mobile" for the wireless company that provides the service). Should you at a later date happen to open up your laptop in the vicinity of another Windows user who also had recently gotten online at Starbucks, those two machines may connect to each other without any obvious notification to either user.

This is precisely what was happening for a client of Bruce Kyes Hubbert, a systems engineer I met at Shmoocon who works for a company called Airmagnet, which develops wireless security products (companies often use Airmagnet and other such tools to ensure employees aren't setting up unauthorized wireless networks that could compromise the organization's security.) Hubbert said he smacked his forehead while hearing Loveless give his presentation because it explained weird behavior one of his company's clients has been seeing a lot more of lately.

Hubbert said this particular client -- a very large company that he asked me not to name -- was complaining that Airmagnet's products were setting off a bunch of false-positives, detecting rogue wireless networks throughout the client's company. He said the odd thing was that there appeared to be more of these networks being set up every day within the company, at the rate of two or three additional ad-hoc networks each day.

"They kept telling us, 'we've been seeing more ad-hoc networks showing up in our building every day,' and most of them were for local hotel hotspots," Hubbert said. "So we'd see multiple machines all associating with the same network SSID, and meanwhile the user is refreshing their PowerPoint presentation and has no idea this is going on in the background."

As it turns out, the specifications for this Windows feature -- detailed in a technical document entitled "RFC 3927," were actually written in part by a Microsoft employee -- one B. Aboba, according to the document. Strangely enough, the developers of that spec foretold of the dangers of configuring things the way Microsoft ultimately decided to do with their wireless system in Windows. This from section 5, paragraph three of the RFC:

"NOTE: There are certain kinds of local links, such as wireless LANs, that provide no physical security. Because of the existence of these links it would be very unwise for an implementer to assume that when a device is communicating only on the local link it can dispense with normal security precautions. Failure to implement appropriate security measures could expose users to considerable risks."

Whoops. Anyway, you might be wondering now how you can make sure your Windows laptop is protected from this.....er, feature. First of all, if you are running any kind of network firewall -- including the firewall that comes built in to Windows XP -- you won't have to worry about some stranger connecting to your laptop. In fact, I had to shut down my firewall for both of us to successfully conduct our test.

Also, many laptops have a button you can push that disables the built-in wireless feature until you hit that button again. Turning off the wireless connection when you are not using it also prevents this from being a problem.

Another good idea is to change the setting on the computer's wireless card to connect only to "infrastructure networks" -- real wireless access points that actually allow you to surf the Web. To do this, go to "Start," "Control Panel," "Network Connections," and then right click on the entry labeled "wireless network connection" and select "Properties" from the drop down menu. Then click on the "Wireless Networks" tab, and then on the "Advanced" tab at the bottom of that window. A box should pop up that gives you three buttons to choose from: Select the one next to "Access point (infrastructure) networks only."

By the way, Microsoft has acknowledged this vulnerability and says it plans to change the default configuration in the next service packs released for Windows, whenever that will be.

As a sidenote, Loveless described in delicious detail for a rapt audience at ShmooCon how he used the trick on various airline flights to gain access to Windows machines that other passengers were using. Referring to a previous conversation he had with Jennifer Grannick, a lawyer who represents accused hackers (and who also gave this morning's ShmooCon keynote), Loveless said he believes that since the attacks were mostly carried while the plane was over international waters that U.S. law enforcement might have a hard time making the case that he was violating any laws. The real answer to that very interesting question, he said, would probably not be evident until someone gets sued in court for it.
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/secu...s_feature.html





Mac Users 'Too Smug' Over Security

Technology commentator Bill Thompson is worried about the lack of herd immunity among his fellow Apple Mac users.

The first known computer virus, the Elk Cloner, is 25 years old. Since its appearance we have seen hundreds of thousands of malicious programs and their impact on our computer use has been immense.

Millions of people have lost work, had their private information stolen or simply had to waste precious hours cleaning up their computers after infection.

A small number of companies have grown rich on the sales of anti-virus software, while organised crime is believed to commission many of today's viruses as a money-making venture, selling services to spammers or using them to blackmail websites.

That first virus was specific to the Apple II computer and spread by inserting itself into the operating system files that were installed on every boot floppy, since this was in the days before hard drives in personal computers and few of us had network connections.

Slipped disk

Those halcyon days when you only had to remember to scan every floppy disk for infection are long gone, of course.

Now the broadband internet connection that keeps me always online leaves me always vulnerable, and regular virus scans are the order of the day.

And viruses are only one of the ways that malicious software spreads. Worms and Trojans are just as dangerous, and often harder to protect against.

These days Apple users are almost unbearably smug when the subject turns to malware. I was invited to appear on Radio Four's You and Yours this week to talk about viruses and other malware and our focus was on issues with Windows since it is the most commonly used operating system.

After the show we got dozens of e-mails from complacent Mac users pointing out that they were safe and suggesting that people simply abandon Windows if they want to be secure.

Mac users demonstrate an indefensible smugness when it comes to the dangers of having their systems compromised by malicious software and opened up to exploitation by others

It would certainly be wonderful if the Macintosh computer and its operating system were immune to attack but this is just wishful thinking. Mac OS is certainly a lot better than Windows, but being better isn't nearly enough.

Mac OS may not have the gaping holes that let viruses spread, but worms, spyware and even keyloggers are out there.

They can't spread as easily, and most would only be installed by a careless user clicking "Accept" on a dodgy install dialog, but the regular stream of security fixes from Apple's software update service makes it clear that there are real dangers.

After all, Mac OS is built on top of the Unix operating system and it, like its close relative Linux, has many well-known security problems that can allow it to be compromised.

Owner occupier

Sometimes Apple make things worse. For example, widgets, small programs that can do things like search online dictionaries or let you listen to streamed BBC programs, can be installed without your permission when you visit a website using the Safari browser, just like Windows does with ActiveX controls. It took Apple weeks to fix this.

And though Microsoft's tribulations over the recently-discovered vulnerability in the way Windows Meta File images are handled made the papers, accompanied by howls of protest from those who wanted the company to rush out an untested fix, a similar flaw in Apple's own QuickTime received very little publicity.

Any Mac user who believes they are totally safe is being reckless with their files and personal information. What's worse, they are also being reckless with mine.

One reason why there aren't many malicious Mac programs is that there are fewer Mac users out there, but the fact that some have been written shows that they are possible in principle.

If the millions of internet-connected Macs are left open to attack then this increases the chance that an effective Trojan or piece of spyware will reach critical mass and spread rapidly, and it also increases the incentive for a bright programmer to write Mac-specific malware that could affect me.

It's exactly like the spread of infectious diseases, and one of the reasons why we vaccinate our children against many illnesses that are now uncommon. If we maintain what is called "herd immunity", then even if there is an outbreak, it will not spread and become an epidemic.

There may not be any Mac viruses at the moment, and the way the system handles user accounts and security means that they are unlikely, but we need to take steps to safeguard ourselves against other malicious software.

As things stand, the Mac community has no herd immunity because most users seem to assume that they don't need to take preventive action.

Although the risk of a malicious Mac program spreading as quickly as any Windows one is very low, it should not be ruled out. After all, the very first internet worm, back in 1988, affected Unix systems with a security model very similar to Mac OS.

The Mac ships with a good firewall, and it should be used. There are tools to scan your system for known malicious programs or to check whether it has been hacked into, and they should be used too.

Mac users demonstrate an indefensible smugness when it comes to the dangers of having their systems compromised by malicious software and opened up to exploitation by others. It's time they started behaving a bit more responsibly.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4609968.stm





Mac Security Concerns Answered
Bill Thompson

Technology commentator Bill Thompson responds to the feedback he received over his column suggesting that Mac users are too smug about computer security.

The vehemence with which the Mac community greeted my modest suggestion that the security of Mac OS might not be absolute did not surprise me.

I knew when I started to write the column, and please let's be clear that this is a personal, by-lined column and does not claim to be a news report, that I was about to step into dangerous waters.

However the piece is not a troll, and I didn't write it just to get slashdotted and have my name traduced all over the comments pages and the blogosphere.

I wrote it because I'm a Mac user, among other things, and I worry that we do not take security seriously enough as a community.

Despite what some people seem to think having read the piece, I don't believe that Mac viruses already exist, and I think it's very unlikely that they ever will.

The security model in Unix-based operating systems like Darwin means that it is very hard to see how an infection could spread, even if an executable could be compromised.

But viruses aren't the end of the problem. There are lots of other malicious programs out there, and the Mac is vulnerable to some of them.

If we ignore this then when an effective piece of Mac malware does emerge, many will be defenceless, and that will damage individual users and the Macintosh ideology.

Issues tackled

Let's deal with the bits that are weak in my article.

First, I mentioned that my broadband connection means I have to scan for viruses, but failed to point out that I scan my Windows desktop and my children's Windows PCs.

I don't have anti-virus software for my Mac, and I don't think I need it.

I hope I achieved that goal, even if I did upset a lot of people who seem to feel that anything but fawning admiration for Apple is an act of betrayal by an apostate

I have never claimed there are Mac viruses out there, and I said in the piece that they are unlikely, but I should have made that clearer.

If a Mac virus emerged then I imagine we would all hear about it pretty quickly, and defensive measures could be taken then.

Second, I pointed out that Safari can install widgets without any user intervention, and didn't make it clear that Apple fixed this issue some time ago.

This was an editing error on my part, and I apologise.

And finally, I didn't give details of where to go for more help. For example, SecureMac.com has details of the Saint vulnerability scanner and Corsaire has a white paper on securing your Mac and I should have pointed to these.

Outstanding concerns

However the wider point, that there are exploitable vulnerabilities and sometimes Apple puts them there, remains.

Even if I'm careful to apply updates when they are made available, some people might not and their systems could be compromised. And there is always a gap between the discovery of an issue and an available fix, a gap which could be exploited.

Several people asked me for examples of worms, spyware, keyloggers and even viruses for the Mac.

As I've said - let me say it again - there aren't any viruses and I don't think there will be.

But spyware and keyloggers are written for Mac OS as for other Unixes, and could be installed on a compromised system by a worm or even by a Trojan that is installed with user permission.

The Sans vulnerabilities listing shows clearly that Darwin, the Mac kernel, has the same sort of security vulnerabilities as any Unix system.

Apple's update policy means that many security fixes are bundled together, but we have to rely on their assessment of what counts as a critical bug.

There isn't much Mac-specific malware apart from Opener, which disables the firewall and can destroy data, but there are many programs which attack Unix installations and these should be taken more seriously than they are by the Mac community.

Obscurity versus security

While the first response to all of this will be that none of these spread in the wild and all require some degree of user intervention to be installed, surely we can all agree that if a way around that protection could be found, then these exercises would become real threats.

The Corsaire white paper, Securing Mac OS X, talks in detail about how to improve the security of a Mac system. It takes work, because there are issues to be dealt with.

I believe that security through obscurity is no security at all, and that unless we have an open debate about the threats facing the Mac using community then we expose ourselves to danger.

We also expose those who know little about computers but chose the Mac because of its ease of use and elegance a disservice by encouraging them to think that they don't need to think about security at all.

When I write for the BBC I'm writing for a general audience with an interest in technology, not for the Slashdot crowd. I try very hard to be accurate and when I explain technical matters I will simplify but endeavour not to misrepresent.

In this article, I was speaking to an audience of Mac users of all skill levels, some of whom know nothing about computers. They need to understand that security matters to them just as much as it matters to Windows users.

I hope I achieved that goal, even if I did upset a lot of people who seem to feel that anything but fawning admiration for Apple is an act of betrayal by an apostate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4620548.stm





Label follows Moore’s law into history

Intel Drops "Pentium" Brand
Wolfgang Gruener

Intel has made a final decision to get rid of one of its oldest and most valuable brands, sources told TG Daily: "Pentium," unveiled in 1993 for its P5 processor generation, will begin to quietly disappear in the current CPU generation such as the single-core 600 series as well as the D 800 and D 900 families.

Sources indicated that Intel will drop the Pentium name without making a major announcement, but simply transition to processor names such as "Intel D 920" or "Intel 672" without introducing a new brand. Apparently, the transition is planned to begin in the immediate future. The company declined to comment on the possibly fading Pentium brand.

The decision to depart from an established brand always is risky, but Kevin Krewell, principal analyst with In-Stat/MDR and editor in chief of the

Microprocessor Report, suggests that the Pentium naming tradition was becoming old, confusing and desperately needed a refreshment. "In my opinion, Intel should have introduced a new name after launching Pentium II. It was getting quite confusing already back then," he said. After having squeezed more than a dozen variations of Pentiums under one roof since the brand's introduction in 1993, a shift in Intel's marketing and product strategy may have been the decisive impact to kick out Pentium.

According to Krewell, the processor is becoming less important in Intel's product line-up: "Intel downplays the processor brand. The spotlight is on platforms such as Centrino," he said. He expects that the loss of Pentium will have a financial, impact, but believes that it will not large enough to hurt Intel: "They can throw an amazing amount of cash at branding as soon as a new product is announced."

Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, told TG Daily that Intel has informed OEM's some time ago that the Pentium brand will be going away. "Those OEM's are very upset about this decision. Pentium kept the product line-up somewhat in order. The complexity of Intel's products creates too many possibilities to put a system together. It's a nightmare," Enderle said.

While companies that command the chain from building and selling a system, such as Dell, may benefit from Intel's decision, traditional system builders are left behind, Enderle believes: "The more choices you have, the more problems arise at the retail level," he explained.

Enderle goes as far as saying that AMD may benefit from the outgoing Pentium brand and attract even more system builder attention. While AMD typically closely watches what OEM's are asking for, Intel on the other side "has a history of not listening to OEM's," he said. "Their approach typically is "it's ok if you disagree, but we are going through with this anyway," according to Enderle.

Still, Enderle found Intel's decision surprising. "Pentium was not a damaged good that would have forced Intel to such a departure. I cannot really remember when GE the last time threw out such a brand. It is like General Motors not selling Chevrolets anymore."

A brief history of the Pentium brand

The Pentium brand was created by Lexicon Branding - a branding firm that is responsible for other tech logos such as Apple's PowerBook, RIM's Blackberry, Palm's Tungsten and Zire, or Adobe's InDesign - in 1992. Intel introduced the brand in March of 1993 with the first Pentium processor, which originally should have been named i586. The fact that numbers are not able to be trademarked, reportedly prompted Intel to switch to a dedicated name for its processors.

The first Pentium CPU debuted as a 60 and 66 MHz chip, integrated 3.1 million transistors and was built in an 800 nm production process. The original Pentium carried a now famous floating point flaw referred to as the "FDIV bug," which ended up costing Intel an estimated $450 million in recall cost and prompting the company to create its "Validation Labs (http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/05/02/pr...ss_production/)," a 3500-employee organization that tests processors before their release into mass production.

The second generation Pentium was the "Pentium Pro," which was based on the P6 architecture and released in November 1995. The chip was built in 350 nm, carried 5.5 million transistors and initially ran at clock speeds of 150 and 200 MHz. Just about a year later, Intel introduced the Pentium MMX, the first chip to receive significant components from Intel's development team in Haifa, Israel. Also produced in 350 nm, the MMX (http:// http://www.tomshardware.com/1997/01/..._expectations/) ran at 166 and 200 MHz.

The Pentium II came in May of 1997 (http://www.tomshardware.com/1997/04/..._strikes_back/) with 7.5 million transistors and initial clock speeds of up to 266 MHz. The successor Pentium III (250 nm to 130 nm) (http://www.tomshardware.com/1999/08/23/performance/) followed 18 months later in February of 1999 with 450 MHz, but eventually took Intel above the 1 GHz mark in 2000. The chip was first to introduce a much criticized serial number and was Intel's processor in the "Gigahertz race" with AMD. Pressured by its competitor, Intel lost the race to launch the first GHz chip by a few days and was not able to ship Pentium III-based GHz chips in large quantities initially. In July of 2000, Intel announced a 1.13 GHz Pentium III chip that was described as "the most unreliable and instable CPU Intel has ever released (http://www.tomshardware.com/2000/07/31/intel/)" in a review of Tom's Hardware Guide, which prompted Intel to recall the processor.

The Pentium 4 introduced the "NetBurst"-architecture in November of 2000 (http://www.tomshardware.com/2000/11/20/intel/). It was the firm's first new design since the P6 generation, and has lead Intel from the 180 nm "Willamette" chip to today's 65 nm Pentium D dual-core CPUs (http:// http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/...ing_out_party/). Willamette debuted with 42 million transistors, 1.4 and 1.5 GHz. Today's 65 nm Pentium D 900 carries 376 million transistors and is expected to reach speeds up to 3.6 GHz, while the single core Pentium 600 series (http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/02/...cott_reworked/) is up to 3.8 GHz.

NetBurst not only took Intel through its greatest phase of clock speed increases, but also to a stage which highlighted excessive power consumption and heat dissipation. More recently Intel announced a shift in design strategy: Instead of accelerating the growth of GHz, Intel said in August of 2005 that it will focus on chip designs that balance power consumption and speed. The first new desktop processor design that will not listen to the Pentium name will be based on the Merom core, which is expected to debut in September of this year (http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/11/ merom_to_be_launched_in_september/).

While it remains to be seen, how Intel will be impacted by the Pentium going away, chairman Craig Barrett may have personal rebranding issues: Barrett reportedly owns a ranch in Darby, Montana, and gave his horses rather unique names: Among these names are Nasdaq, Itanium Ingot - and Pentium Princess.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/15/in...pentium_brand/





Intel Misses Fourth-Quarter Forecast

Intel Corp's fourth-quarter profit and sales missed Wall Street's expectations today as the world's largest chip maker faced lower-than-expected average selling prices and continued difficulties in meeting demand.

For the three months to December 31, Intel's profit was $US2.45 billion ($A3.25 billion)or 40 cents a share compared with a profit of $US2.12 billion, or 33 cents a share, in the same period in 2004.

Sales jumped 6 per cent to $US10.2 billion ($A13.53 billion) from $US9.6 billion ($A12.73 billion) in the last quarter of 2004.

Analysts expected the company to earn 43 cents a share on sales of $US10.56 billion ($A14 billion), a survey by Thomson Financial said.

In December, the company narrowed its forecast to $US10.4 billion to $10.6 billion.

Chief financial officer Andy Bryant said Intel's tight capacity was probably leading to marketshare gains by rival Advanced Micro Devices.

"Although we fell below our expectations for the fourth quarter, we enter 2006 with exciting new product," said Intel CEO Paul Otellini.

Intel shares fell 1 per cent, to close at $US25.52 in trading on the Nasdaq stockmarket.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/breaki...467031579.html





The Low Down on Downloading
Carla Wintersgill

Which of the 14 million iPods sold in the holiday quarter are spinning legitimate tracks?

It's impossible to say how many songs are downloaded, but Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) chairman, Mitch Bainwol, estimates the monthly number exceeds two billion.

Apple's iTunes Music Store has sold 850 million songs since its 2003 introduction. The sales have paralleled a surge in popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading programs such as Limewire, Soulseek, and Kazaa.

Record companies are feeling the squeeze of lost revenue as a result of the popularity of such P2P networks. The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) estimates a loss of $250 million Cdn in sales over the past three years -- a 20 per cent drop for the industry.

In the United States, where file sharing costs record companies an estimated $300 million US per year, the RIAA is cracking down on illegal downloading. It has pursued legal action against anyone found to have downloaded copyrighted material.

The CRIA is having less luck fighting copyright infringement. In March 2004, a court ruled that internet service providers were not required to identify users who post songs on file-sharing databases.

The ruling means Canadians can continue to upload music anonymously without fear of legal action from irate record labels. Even if Canadian parliament passes Bill C-60, strengthening copyright laws, the court has established the precedent that Canadians are free to download songs without being identified.

Many up-and-coming artists, however, don't see downloading as a bad thing. They post songs on the Internet for people to download, hoping to cultivate a fan base through sites such as Myspace.com.

Amy Elderkin, 21, is a Toronto-based aspiring singer/songwriter. She has a page on Myspace where she posts her songs, and credits the site with giving her much-needed exposure.

"People want me to play gigs, people want to buy my stuff, people want to do collaborations with me," she says.

"It's a simple way to get people to listen to your music. You're not pushing them and it's there if they want it."

Although Elderkin puts her own music out there, she has a problem with people downloading albums from artists for free.

"When you burn an entire album, you're not supporting the artist that you're listening to and enjoying," she says. "Go out and support (the artist), otherwise they're not going to be able to keep going because they won't have any money to do it."

Antonello Di Domenico, a consultant at Bumstead Productions Ltd., a management company whose roster includes the Canadian band The Trews, also sees sites such as Myspace as a useful promotional tool.

"People go to Myspace. Why fight it?" he asks.

Di Domenico currently manages a new band, Rocketface, who have a profile on Myspace. He encourages people to add them to their list of friends, and Di Domenico sees those people showing up for gigs. Rocketface has more than 3000 people on its friends list.

"If you're a fan, you'll support the band. Even if you download it, you'll buy it," says Di Domenico.

"It's a tough industry to crack," he says. "There are only one or two Franz Ferdinands a year."

For incessant downloaders, Charles Coleman, a computer technician at Geek Squad, has a word of warning. "People that are tech savvy can take the connections the programs use to attach to your computer," he says.

Coleman describes a computer as a house. The house has different doors: Some are locked, some are opened. Hackers and spyware programs know which doors are easy to get into, giving them free reign over a victim's computer. Downloading sites -- Coleman names Kazaa among the worst -- can leave a user's files vulnerable.

"Kazaa forces you to install adware and spyware tools that track your internet usage, lets the parent company know what websites you visit, and allows them to target you to what products you would be interested in," he says.

For Coleman, the debate between legal downloading and file sharing boils down to practicality.

"You're better off getting it from an official download site. It's worth spending the money for a good quality song rather than getting something else and finding you have a credit card bill for somewhere in Rwanda."

Downloading isn't illegal for Canadians, but fans should be aware of the technical risks -- and moral issues -- streaming out of those pretty, white iPod earbuds.
http://www.theeyeopener.com/storydet...m?storyid=2503





p2pnet talks to mininova

p2p news special / p2pnet: Peer-to-peer, person-to-person, people-to- people, p2p, is here. And it's not going away. Nor will it be scarfed up and regurgitated by vested corporate interests as a wholly commercial technology meant to keep cash-cow consumers mindlessly swallowing whatever the music, movie and software cartels care to dish out.

Rather, p2p is allowing the Net and the people who use it to be truly free, sharing with each other in a way that's never been possible before.

Bram Cohen's BitTorrent is a primary p2p technology that's now been locked up solid by the Hollywood establishment. But that's OK because it continues to thrive as ever was, outside of corporate bottom line constraints, and in original form.

Given that, directories are of obvious, and vital, importance and mininova has become firmly established as a leading torrent site.

It had its first birthday a couple of days ago and we checked in with Niek, Erik, Jos, Matthijs and Rob >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

p2pnet : Running a torrent site might be considered by some to be an occupation fraught with risk. What makes you do it?

mininova : We run mininova because we believe in the future of p2p file sharing technology and we want to provide a extensive and easy to use torrent directory for users.

p2pnet : There's a perception that what you do is illegal - that it's in some way against the law. What's your response to that?

mininova : Hosting torrent files and providing a directory of torrent files is 100% legal. Google is indexing warez and serials sites, so does that make their service illegal? Of course not. The technology is completely legal, although it'll take some time for people to get used to new technologies. Remember the first days of audio casettes? The music industry was afraid this would destroy their market, but the opposite was true.

p2pnet : The major movie and music cartels are trying to nail BT sites. Do you expect mininova to eventually be targeted? Or do you have a survival plan?

mininova : We don't suspect mininova to be ever taken down by legal actions. Unlike most BitTorrent sites, we've got a strict copyright policy. And we've got a quite good relationship with companies like Microsoft regarding copyright issues.

p2pnet : The RIAA, MPAA, BSA and other 'trade' organizations claim sites such as yours in effect feed criminal counterfeiters whom they've labeled 'pirates' Do you think these kinds of people really do use torrent sites to find material they can they sell illegally?

mininova : The commercial-pirate scene is much more hidden. They get their stuff from different places - warez/fxp sites, etc.

p2pnet : What's your perception of mininova users and the users of sites like it?

mininova : Our regular visitor is a home user who visits mininova daily and looks for new content he or she likes, for example tv shows which only air in other countries.

p2pnet : When you were getting started, you had help from ThePirateBay and isoHunt. Did this surprise you?

mininova : Yes, it was a nice surprise to see that the administrators of the (at that time) biggest BT sites were so helpful to starters like us. We still cooperate closely with those sites, of course in a whole other way than one year ago.

p2pnet : What's been your most noticeable high and most noticeable low in your first year?

mininova : In the beginning, our site went down quite often due to technical issues. Mininova simply grew too

fast for our servers to handle the load. So we had quite some down time, sometimes several days. But that moment our site was up again, our forum was flooded by "thank you, you're still alive!" posts, that's something you're not going to forget.

p2pnet : What would you say to someone thinking about starting a torrent site of their own?

mininova : Don't start a torrent site just because it's cool to have such a site. Think about new ideas, listen to the community, try to discover what people actually want on a torrent site. If your site is unique, if it has new, cool features, if it is actually something people really want, then it'll be a guaranteed success.

p2pnet : What are your predictions for the coming year vis-à-vis p2p and the entertainment and software cartels?

mininova : We're sure that p2p is here to stay. Maybe the form will change, maybe an enhanced BitTorrent protocol will be the next big thing, but p2p is not going away. Hopefully, the cartels will realize they can't fight p2p by hiring expensive lawyers, but that they need to work together with the community to find a solution that's satisfactory for everyone.

p2pnet : So you'd like to be able to sit down and discuss ways to work with the entertainment and software cartels?

mininova : Definitely. We're always open for discussion and we'd say, Feel free to contact us.

And there's one final thing we'd like to say: If you, as a BitTorrent user, want to see new features at mininova that you think might be useful, please contact us.

p2pnet : Thanks. And all the best for your second year : )
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/7632





Wilson Pickett Dies of Heart Attack at 64

Wilson Pickett, the soul pioneer best known for the fiery hits "Mustang Sally" and "In The Midnight Hour," died of a heart attack Thursday, according to his management company. He was 64.

Chris Tuthill of the management company Talent Source said Pickett had been suffering from health problems for the past year.

"He did his part. It was a great ride, a great trip, I loved him and I'm sure he was well-loved, and I just hope that he's given his props," Michael Wilson Pickett, the fourth of the singer's six children, told WRC-TV in Washington after his death.

A member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Pickett _ known as the "Wicked Pickett" _ became a star with his soulful hits in the 1960s.

"In the Midnight Hour" made the top 25 on the Billboard pop charts in 1965 and "Mustang Sally" did the same the following year.

Pickett was defined by his raspy voice and passionate delivery. But the Alabama-born picket got his start singing gospel music in church. After moving to Detroit as a teen, he joined the group the Falcons, which scored the hit "I Found a Love" with Pickett on lead vocals in 1962.

He went solo a year later, and would soon find his greatest success. In 1965, he linked with legendary soul producer Jerry Wexler at the equally legendary soul label Stax Records in Memphis, and recorded one of his greatest hits, "In the Midnight Hour," for Atlantic Records. A string of hits followed, including "634- 5789," "Funky Broadway" and "Mustang Sally." His sensuous soul was in sharp contrast to the genteel soul songs of his Detroit counterparts at Motown Records.

As Pickett entered a new decade, he had less success on the charts, but still had hits, including the song "Don't Let The Green Grass Fool You."

In later years, he had legal problems and battled substance abuse; in 1994 he served jail time on an assault charge.

Besides his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, he was also given the Pioneer award by the Rhythm and Blues Foundation two years later.

[JackSpratts]

Warm and Fuzzy TV, Brought to You by Hamas
Craig S. Smith

GAZA, Jan. 13 - Hey kids, it's Uncle Hazim time!

Hazim Sharawi, whose stage name is Uncle Hazim, is a quiet, doe-eyed young man who has an easy way with children and will soon preside over a children's television show here on which he'll cavort with men in larger-than-life, fake-fur animal suits on the Gaza Strip's newest television station, Al Aksa TV.

But Captain Kangaroo this is not. The station, named for Islam's third holiest site, is owned by Hamas, the people who helped make suicide bombing a household term.

"Our television show will have a message, but without getting into the tanks, the guns, the killing and the blood," said Mr. Sharawi, sitting in the broadcast studio where he will produce his show.

"I will show them our rights through the history," he said, "show them, 'This is Nablus, this is Gaza, this is Al Aksa mosque, which is with the Israelis and should be in our hands.' "

The new station is part of the militant Palestinian group's strategy to broaden its role in Palestinian politics and society, much as Hezbollah did in Lebanon. The station began broadcasting terrestrially on Jan. 7, and Hamas is working on a satellite version that would give it an even wider reach, like Hezbollah's Al Manar TV, which is watched throughout the Arab world.

"Their success encouraged us," said Fathi Hammad, Al Aksa TV's director. He said that Hamas had tried to find an existing broadcaster to accept its programming but that no one would take it.

"The Arab satellite broadcasters Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya both turned us down," he said, sitting beneath the seal of Hamas, which depicts the Dome of the Rock (which stands alongside Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem) between crossed swords and an idealized map of Palestine. "Even Iraq and Saudi Arabia refused."

In 2003, after the Palestinian Authority granted Hamas a broadcast license covering both radio and television, the group started the Voice of Al Aksa, which quickly became one of the most popular radio stations in the Gaza Strip. It took more than two years to assemble the expertise and equipment necessary to start the television station.

The current 12 hours of daily television programming, which has the unfinished look of public-access cable television in the United States, consists primarily of readings from the Koran, religious discourse and discussions of women's issues, such as Islamic fashion, child-rearing tips and the right of women to work, which Hamas supports. It will eventually feature a sort of Islamic MTV, with Hamas-produced music videos using footage from the group's fights with Israeli troops. There will even be a talent search show, a distant echo of "American Idol."

But its biggest star will be Mr. Sharawi, whose radio show for children was the Voice of Al Aksa's biggest hit.

Mr. Sharawi, 27, wearing a long black leather coat with a hood over a green suit and tie, fixed with a pin, looks like a straight-and-narrow Sunday school teacher. In fact, he got his start working with children at his mosque while studying geology at Islamic University in Gaza. His hair is parted in the middle, his beard trimmed as neatly as a suburban lawn.

He said the head of Hamas's radio station spotted him leading children's games at his mosque and asked him to do a children's radio show two years ago. The show has become so popular, his appearances at occasional Hamas-sponsored festivals draw as many as 10,000 children at a time.

Mr. Sharawi will not take visitors to see him do his radio broadcast because the studio's location is a heavily guarded secret. In 2004, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired three rockets into the station's previous studio not long after Mr. Sharawi and his colleagues had fled.

Everybody involved in the television station is worried about another attack, but Mr. Sharawi said he is ready to die if it comes. "The messengers don't care if they lose their lives for the sake of revealing the message," he said.

As he describes it, his television show, which begins in a few weeks, will teach children the basics of militant Palestinian politics - the disputed status of Jerusalem, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the Palestinian refugees' demand for a right to return to the lands they lost to Israel in the 1948 war - without showing the violence that Hamas's pursuit of those goals entails.

The show will alternate between Uncle Hazim and his animal characters in the studio taking live phone calls from children and video clips recorded outside. Mr. Sharawi said he would leaven the sober and pedantic material with fun and games, including such standards as egg-and-spoon races, eating apples on a string or "tug of war, which will show children that the more you cooperate with others, the more you win."

Mr. Sharawi said he would dress up in different costumes to suit the show's locale: a sailor suit while taping on the beach, a track suit when in the park, even a Boy Scout uniform while hiking through the small patches of empty land that serve as Gaza's wilderness.

"We will invite real Boy Scouts to come and talk to us about camping," Mr. Sharawi said, warming to his theme (the Palestinian Scout Association is a member of the World Organization of the Scout Movement).

Through it all, Mr. Sharawi will be accompanied by animal-costumed sidekicks to provide comic relief. Hamas will rent the Egyptian-made plush costumes - a fox, a rabbit, a dog, a bear and a chicken, already gray and matted from wear - from a production company run by a Hamas supporter who has just emerged from two years in Israeli jails.

When asked if the animals will have names, Mr. Sharawi looked slightly nonplussed and said: "Bob. Bob the Fox, for example."

He said he was inspired by a children's program on Saudi television in which a young veiled woman and a Mickey Mouse-like character take calls from kids. Fingering a string of bright green plastic prayer beads, a pale blue prayer rug lying on the chair beside him, he tries to reconcile Hamas's bloody attacks that kill innocent children with his role as mentor.

"These are one of the means used by the Palestinians against Israel's F-16's and tanks," he said of the suicide attacks, giving a stock answer. "We're doing our best to avoid involving children in these issues, but I cannot turn the children's lives into a beautiful garden while outside it's the contrary."

He gets up to fiddle with a magnesium light stand in the studio, which is furnished with five beige upholstered chairs and a dusty desk in front of a rattan screen decorated with plastic grape leaves.

The show, which will be broadcast on Friday mornings, the beginning of the Muslim weekend, will be preceded by an hour of cartoons, including a serialized life of the Prophet Muhammad, and that universal send-up of deadly conflict, Tom & Jerry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/in...rtner=homepage





Rating (and Finding) the Movie Raters
David M. Halbfinger

Kirby Dick was steamed. Somebody would have to pay.

It was sometime in 2004, and he had run out of patience. Too many independent filmmakers, people just like him, he said, were being made offers they couldn't refuse: cut cherished scenes from their movies or get smacked with an NC-17 and disappear into commercial oblivion.

Director pals told him what he suspected already: the secretive, too-powerful Motion Picture Association of America was hammering independent filmmakers with tough ratings while letting the major studios off easy. You couldn't reason with the ratings board, the indies bleated; it wouldn't even let you argue, on appeal, that your new movie was tamer than a film that got an R or a PG-13 rating the year before.

The ratings board's anonymous members had few clear standards for evaluating movies, his indie friends whispered. Small wonder, they griped, that movies with gay sex scenes, or even lingering female orgasms - like scenes cut from Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry" and "The Cooler" by Wayne Kramer - were verboten, while gore fests and straight-sex scenes seldom got as much of a reaction out of the board.

Mr. Dick had heard enough. The board was asking for a beat-down. And he was the man for the job.

So Mr. Dick (whose earlier films include "Twist of Faith," about sexual abuse by a priest, and "Derrida," about the philosopher Jacques Derrida) got the Independent Film Channel to stake him a modest bankroll, somewhere south of $1 million. He hired a private eye - a kind-hearted lesbian named Becky Altringer, who was as eager as shamuses come and expounds on her sexuality in the film. And he locked and loaded his video camera.

Their hit job - complete with secret video and car chases - took months to pull off, but he and Ms. Altringer had staying power. And Mr. Dick is planning to wrap it all up in a celluloid bow next week, at the Sundance Film Festival, where his documentary - "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" - will have its premiere. IFC is hoping to find a theatrical distributor before showing the film on the channel later this year.

A spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association's Classification and Ratings Administration, Kori Bernards, said she was "anxious to see the final cut" of Mr. Dick's movie. "We don't agree with his assessment of the ratings board, but obviously we respect his creative rights," she said, after taking issue with some of his methods and disputing most of his assertions, as relayed by a reporter. But when asked if the board was considering litigation, she first said she doubted so, but called back to clarify: "I don't know," she said.

Indeed, Mr. Dick's one-sided smackdown of a movie wallops the ratings board - the brainchild of Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association - every which way but evenhandedly.

Officials never responded to his requests for on-camera interviews, he says. But Mr. Dick got directors like Ms. Peirce, Mr. Kramer and others with ratings beefs - Atom Egoyan ("Where the Truth Lies"), Jamie Babbit ("But I'm a Cheerleader"), Mary Harron ("American Psycho"), Kevin Smith ("Jersey Girl") and John Waters ("A Dirty Shame") - to air their many grievances. He included snippets from their movies, including some that had been cut to get less restrictive ratings.

Matt Stone, a co-creator of "South Park," tells of getting radically different treatment for the independently made sex comedy "Orgazmo," which was rated NC-17 in 1997, than for "Team America: World Police," which Paramount distributed with an R rating in 2004.

The Newsweek reviewer David Ansen calls the board a joke: "Though it's supposed to protect children, it's turning us all into children."

Richard Heffner, a former head of the ratings board, argues that the board at least ought to include experts on the effects of sex and violence on children, rather than making parenthood the only qualification for participation.

And to bolster his point about a bias against gay sex, Mr. Dick and his producing partner, Eddie Schmidt, put together a wicked split-screen montage showing nearly identical scenes of gay sex in movies that got NC-17 ratings side by side with straight-sex scenes in R-rated ones.

But the heart of Mr. Dick's movie - which beats to the funk rhythm of a soundtrack that could be straight out of "Shaft" - is his attempt to penetrate the shroud of secrecy surrounding the ratings board and its members.

Ms. Bernards, the ratings board spokeswoman, said the board's members are not identified publicly to protect them from undue outside influence. But in an interview, Mr. Dick argued that transparency would be a better policy, particularly since representatives from the film studios, who are most likely to want to influence ratings decisions, are able to work closely with the ratings board's top officials anyway.

So he and the private eye - and her lover's teenage daughter, Lindsey, who proved as adept with a hidden camera as she was at taking down license-plate numbers - cased the Encino, Calif., citadel of the Motion Picture Association for months. They staked out its guarded, gated entrance, tailed employees to lunch, sifted through their trash.

Their big break came when Ms. Altringer, peering through binoculars at the association's guard shack, spotted a list of phone extensions inside. A few phony phone calls later, she had pieced together a list of all eight members of the ratings board.

That wasn't enough for Mr. Dick: he and Ms. Altringer then tailed each member of the board. They caught one at a yoga studio, another eating lunch, a third speeding on the freeway - all on camera. They named all names.

(In the view of the prey, the hunt was not quite as innocent as Mr. Dick's movie makes it seem. Ms. Bernards said that members of the ratings board and other motion picture association employees, unaware of Mr. Dick's project, believed they were being stalked, and that the association had asked the police to step in at one point. She also said that one ratings-board member had received an ominous-sounding e-mail message from someone involved in Mr. Dick's investigation, referring to the person's child and school.)

At last, on Nov. 29, Mr. Dick gave in to the impulse that he said had been irresistible right from the outset: he submitted his unfinished movie for a rating.

It didn't take long for word to come back: "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" was rated NC-17, for "some graphic sexual content."

Mr. Dick's movie did not stop there. He appealed the board's ruling to another supersecret body, the Classification and Rating Appeals Board, whose members are mainly theater-chain and studio executives. They were not sympathetic. On Dec. 21 they rejected his appeal, 10-0.

But Mr. Dick was not through. His movie shows - albeit using an animated stand-in - a ratings-board lawyer sternly telling him that he was not permitted to know the names of the members of the appeals board.

"Absolutely not," the lawyer, identified as Greg Goeckner, a deputy general counsel of the Motion Picture Association, tells Mr. Dick. "You don't need to know those names."

"That doesn't seem right," Mr. Dick replies. "That seems like a star chamber or something."

"I'm not going to tell you those names," Mr. Goeckner says flatly.

Mr. Dick again lands the last punch. He and Ms. Altringer have already identified the 10 members of the appeals board, by staking out a hearing. Again, he names all names.

(In the interview, Mr. Dick said that he wanted to identify the ratings and appeals board members and "put them in a bind," hopefully to persuade the ratings board to abandon its secretive policy. But Ms. Bernards said that the ratings board would not be "subjected to blackmail by a movie." She added that the film remained unrated, because Mr. Dick has changed it, by adding the appeals sequence, since it was first assigned its NC-17.)

Finally, Mr. Dick, whose last documentary, "Twist of Faith," was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, also reveals, somewhat ominously, that representatives from the Roman Catholic Church and from the National Council of Churches sit in on the appeals process.

Again, Ms. Bernards, the ratings board spokeswoman, said there was a simple explanation. Years ago, she said, Catholics and Protestants questioned the appeals process's integrity. "So we invited them to observe, and ever since then they have," she said. "No one else has asked."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/mo...es/16unra.html





Filmmaker Is Snarled in Legal Web
David M. Halbfinger

Nick Cassavetes is loath to label his new movie - "Alpha Dog," about a group of suburban, teenage gangster wannabes who corner themselves into committing cold-blooded murder - a mere cautionary tale about wayward youth and missing-in-action parents.

At the very least, though, it's a cautionary tale for writer-directors thinking of tackling a breaking news story as their next subject.

When he set out to chronicle the life and alleged crimes of Jesse James Hollywood, a San Fernando Valley man who prosecutors say kidnapped and ordered the execution of Nicholas Markowitz, 15, in 2000, Mr. Cassavetes had reason to think he was on stable ground. Four of the five men indicted were behind bars. Mr. Hollywood, on the lam, had eluded the best efforts of the F.B.I. and the television show "America's Most Wanted" and seemed gone for good.

But with half of his movie filmed and already millions of dollars over his starting budget of $9 million, it was with a little chagrin, much shock and mixed feelings for the many people he had interviewed along the way - perpetrators, witnesses and victims - that Mr. Cassavetes turned on the news last March to see that Mr. Hollywood, then 25, had been arrested in Brazil and would be coming home to stand trial in Santa Barbara.

The easy, if costly, part of what came next was revising his movie, which stars Bruce Willis, Justin Timberlake and Sharon Stone: Mr. Cassavetes tossed several days' and about $500,000 worth of film, and added some more, to tailor his thinly veiled story - about a tough-talking marijuana dealer named Johnny Truelove, played by Emile Hirsch - to the newly changing facts.

But what has given new meaning to post-production snags has been Mr. Cassavetes's continued entanglement in the legal battle being fought by Mr. Hollywood's very real-life prosecutor, Ron Zonen, and defense lawyer, James Blatt. Last summer, he was subpoenaed when Mr. Blatt accused Mr. Zonen of misconduct and sought unsuccessfully to have him removed from the case for cooperating with Mr. Cassavetes and giving him access to nonpublic records. In November, a judge ordered Mr. Cassavetes's researcher, Michael Mehas, who is writing a book on the case, to turn over notes and tapes from his interviews to the defense. And Mr. Blatt is now threatening to seek an injunction against the release of Mr. Cassavetes's movie - which is to have its premiere on Jan. 27 at the Sundance Film Festival and is set for release by New Line - lest every potential jury member go see it and be tainted.

Mr. Cassavetes said he was not worried. "I don't believe he has the power to enjoin a movie, if he wanted to," he said of Mr. Blatt. He also said he had been subpoenaed again recently, and "I'll cooperate as much as my memory allows."

Mr. Cassavetes's recall may waver, but his command of the facts of the Hollywood case, as evidenced in "Alpha Dog," was prodigious. While the names and places have been changed - to satisfy the providers of errors and omissions insurance, he said - the movie amounts to Mr. Cassavetes's voluminously documented and carefully weighed best guess of what happened when Mr. Hollywood and his pals grabbed Mr. Markowitz, the younger brother of a rival drug dealer who owed him $1,200. His body was found six days later in a shallow grave.

"It's almost hard to believe this story, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it, which I'm not sure I ever did," he said in an interview.

Mr. Cassavetes, 46, said his eldest daughter, then a student at a high school that Mr. Hollywood had once attended, turned him on to the story of the young fugitive, a cult hero to teenagers in the valley. Mr. Cassevetes, the son of the late director John Cassavetes, said he saw reminders of his own youth: he had been kicked out of three high schools - "for fighting, every day" - and he recalled "thinking I was a tough guy just because I decided to be one."

"I saw that these kids had done the same thing, and I saw where it led," he said. "This kid who was the triggerman, Ryan Hoyt, never had so much as a ticket before. He went right from a clean record - though he wasn't a model citizen - to death row at San Quentin." Mr. Cassavetes said he was struck by, and reminded of, the "affectation" of toughness, and how that kind of posturing can seem to box someone into behaving that way. "We watch violent images on TV, we revere violence, but we're not raised violently," he said. "And when we're put in a situation, we act how we think we should act, as opposed to how we've been trained to or how we have a history of acting."

In the course of his research, Mr. Cassavetes gained the trust of Mr. Hollywood's father, Jack Hollywood, a convicted drug dealer in his own right who is now serving a prison sentence in Arizona. "I found out from Jack lots of stuff that no one on the planet knows except for me," he said, though he said the fugitive son's whereabouts was not something he was told or asked about. "I did not want to know that, because I didn't want to be part of a criminal investigation," he said.

So what secrets had he learned? "Hypothetically, if this were true, and I'm not saying that it is, I might've talked about how he got his kid out of the country, the processes of doing that. Hypothetically, I might have talked about what happened when he got out of the country and how he got to the different place than he was before. How drug operations might have gone, what the situation was with Jesse, how things worked."

Mr. Cassavetes also said he learned from Jack Hollywood the inside story of how Jesse was captured - a version that until now has not been published, and that did not make it into his film. "I know what happened," he said coyly. "I just don't know if I can tell you."

Then he decided to share. "This is what I believe happened," he said. "There was a family member that, by coincidence, was going to Brazil for a vacation. Jack heard about it and went, 'What?' He doesn't want anybody in the family going down to Brazil, because - this would assume that he knows, and I'm not sure that he knew where his son was, so disclaimer-disclaimer-disclaimer - tough position to be in, because nobody knows, and you can't stop the relative, and he can't tell the relative. But apparently that conversation might have happened.

"The person went down; soon as she stepped off the plane she got grabbed by Interpol; she got sweated till she gave up the phone number," Mr. Cassavetes said. "Clearly a dumb move. I believe it went like, 'If you're down there for a few months and everything looks good, check on him.' Interpol impersonates her voice, and it's done. Imagine the amount of guilt if you'd made a dumb move like that."

While he juggles promoting his movie and responding to subpoenas, Mr. Cassavetes is working on a new screenplay, adapting the novel "God Is a Bullet" by Boston Teran. It's the story, set in Southern California, of a father who descends into a murderous, raping, drug-dealing cult to rescue his kidnapped teenage daughter.

It is no great leap of logic to suggest that Mr. Cassavetes may be drawing from the same well as he did with "Alpha Dog."

"I'm guilty of it - of being too busy with your everyday life to properly spend enough time with your children to figure out what's going on with them," he said. "You can check in, and you say, 'Are you all right?' But it's not like being on a farm or spending a lot of time in the house. We all live really global, Internetty lives. Kids have more power than they did before. They have cars, they can get around, they have dough, and there's always some person that's got something going on that can get everybody killed."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/mo...lph.html?8hpib





Sundance, for Indies, Soft Kiss Before Dying
Manohla Dargis

Starting today and for the next 10 days, thousands of movie industry types, media purveyors and lookie-Lous will descend on the resort town of Park City, Utah, to partake in that collective fiction known as the American independent film movement. In other words, they will brave that annual combustion of hype, creative endeavor and wind chill called the Sundance Film Festival. They will elbow through overcrowded parties, gossip about and perhaps even broker backroom deals and gawk as starlets the size of swizzle sticks haul off bags of free jeans and other goodies. They may see Paris Hilton try to stop traffic. They will pretend not to care.

And, oh yeah, some of these festivalgoers will watch movies, lots of movies. This year's roundup includes 120 features, both fiction and nonfiction, along with 73 shorts. Some of this work will have been shot on old-fashioned celluloid; much, if not most, will be shot in digital video and look it. As always, some of this work will be good, most will be adequate and the outright stinkers will be as modest in number as the gems. Some of the better entries will, as Noah Baumbach's "Squid and the Whale" did last year, secure sizable deals and enter the cultural slipstream. Other films, like Craig Brewer's "Hustle & Flow," which made the loudest noise last year, will leave with big money and find an audience without ever finding a place in the zeitgeist.

Because each Sundance is the same, only different, this year's selection hits familiar notes. The documentary selection includes a tearjerker about a wrongly convicted prisoner, "The Trials of Darryl Hunt"; last year's entry on the same subject was the similarly affecting "After Innocence." Well-intended and formally bland, these are the kind of feel-good-about-feeling-bad movies that solicit the audience's righteous indignation, something always in supply at Sundance. As in years past there are also docs about dysfunction ("Thin"), Sudan's lost boys ("God Grew Tired of Us") and America at war ("Iraq in Fragments"). There is the obligatory look at the black (bad) experience, this time courtesy of "American Blackout," and a film about The New York Times crossword puzzle editor, Will Shortz, "Wordplay," which occupies the fun-with-letters slot that should have been occupied by the former Sundance-reject "Spellbound."

It's déjà vu all over again with the fiction films as well. This year's opening-night film, Nicole Holofcener's "Friends With Money," is a touching ensemble piece about a group of entwined Angelenos, just like last year's opening-night film, Don Roos's "Happy Endings." Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the loner with love woes in Mr. Roos's film; Jennifer Aniston plays that same part in Ms. Holofcener's film. This year's closing-night film, Nick Cassavetes's "Alpha Dog," centers on a group of young, morally vacant Southern Californians, most underage or barely legal, whose promiscuous drug use leads to a kidnapping. The same story line, idiot kids and wasteland milieu were in one of last year's premieres, Arie Posin's "Chumscrubber," a strained social satire made in the key of "American Beauty."

Many Sundance entries come to the festival looking for distribution (and leave still looking), while others are in attendance as part of their release campaigns. "Alpha Dog" will be released this spring by New Line, a division of Time Warner, so you will get a chance to watch this fitfully entertaining story based on the exploits of the F.B.I. poster boy Jesse James Hollywood, who was wanted on drug-dealing charges. "Friends With Money," which was paid for by Sony Pictures Classics, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, will be released on April 7. The engaging British comedy "Kinky Boots," which will be released by the Weinstein-free Miramax, comes via the division of Buena Vista that distributes films in the United Kingdom for Walt Disney, Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures, and will hit theaters April 14.

Times have changed. When the independent film movement of the 1980's emerged with the likes of Spike Lee, among others, it suggested that the movie business had made real room for filmmakers who could bridge the gap between art and industry. These were filmmakers who were more commercially accessible than avant-garde artists like Stan Brakhage and independent visionaries like Charles Burnett, who could, or so it was hoped, attract the same sort of niche audience that bought into Sub Pop before Warner Brothers did. Disney threw a wrench into the works when it snapped up Miramax Films in 1994, causing endless debate about what constituted an independent film and why. Could a division of a media conglomerate remain independent? You bet! Well, at least if that division kept calling itself independent.

These days, the lines between the studios and their specialty divisions are more blurred than ever, as evidenced by a lot of stories pegged to the current Oscar front-runners. The persistence of the myth that these specialty divisions are independent is a fascinating if understandable phenomenon. After all, some of those divisions, like Miramax, were independent once upon a time, while others, like Sony Pictures Classics, maintain a highly polished veneer of independence. But there is a reason why that division is called Sony Pictures Classics - why it's Warner Independent Pictures and Fox Searchlight. Like their big studio siblings, these divisions have access to the kind of infrastructural muscle that real independents do not. For them, independence is principally a matter of branding, and of course, good taste, integrity and all the rest.

The special divisions have been good for American mainstream cinema, but they seem to have been murder on the little guys. The current landscape is a mass of confusion, with too many small films fighting for the same specialty audience. Good movies open only to close before they can find an audience and many never make it out of the major markets. At festivals like Sundance, the specialty divisions often scoop up the choice offerings, leaving the nominal crumbs (some rather tasty) to smaller distributors. Sometimes these crumbs turn into modest theatrical successes, but without advertising money and the support of the major media outlets they may not last in theaters long enough for you to ignore them. You may catch up with these films later on DVD, but where is the fun - the collective experience, the images bigger than life - in that?

All of which is a roundabout and admittedly grudging way of saying that despite the hype and the frigid climes Sundance remains invaluable - wildly annoying, but invaluable. The American independent film movement may be a fiction, but it is the fiction we now live by. And the truth is that every year Sundance programmers unearth work that is aesthetically and sometimes even politically venturesome - work that is truly independent in the best, most unburdened sense of that oft-abused word. Last year, some of the most thought-provoking, soul-stirring films at the festival remained lamentably under the radar, including Robinson Devor's "Police Beat," Travis Wilkerson's "Who Killed Cock Robin?," Kyle Henry's "Room," William Greaves's "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½" and Andrew Wagner's "Talent Given Us." Sundance had them even if not everyone noticed. Mr. Wagner went on to distribute his film himself; the rest remain without distribution.

Here is hoping that one day you get the chance to see them too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/movies/19sund.html





DIY

This Is Not Spinal Tap: A Concert Film by Fans
Lorne Manly

In the decades since Woodstock, many a concert film has gotten mired in its own clichés. Cameras on booms swoop high over the crowd. Handheld cameras off to the side lovingly capture guitarists teasing out notes or windmilling riffs. Obligatory shots of ululating fans follow - all, increasingly, on pristine high-definition video.

But as the Beastie Boys set out to commemorate a concert at Madison Square Garden, the hip-hop group had a different idea. Why not smash the model?

They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory.

The result of this brainstorm is "Awesome ... ," which will be shown Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, before being released by ThinkFilm in late March. The movie is more than a new twist on an old form. "Awesome" - its full title praising the fans' involvement in the final film cannot be printed in this newspaper - plugs into some of the currents surging through the media and entertainment worlds.

Technology has unmoored some the constructs that have girded those businesses for decades, giving the consumers of pop culture a growing ability to watch or listen to their entertainment on their own terms and on their own time, and re-evaluating the role of traditional distribution companies. "Awesome" pushes that tension further, giving the ultimate user a chance to actually create the content. "It's the democratization of filmmaking," said Jon Doran, a producer of the movie.

As with most films, of course, there is a benevolent despot - read, a director - involved. And that would be Adam Yauch, who is known as MCA in the band, but who prefers the archly pretentious nom de plume Nathanial Hörnblowér for his directorial and photographic endeavors.

New York punk rockers turned rappers turned caring hip-hop artists and family men, members of the Beastie Boys have more than most musicians used technology to involve fans in the creative process. They have been posting a capella songs on www.beastieboys.com, for instance, and inviting fans to use those building blocks for remixes of their own.

While perusing the message boards on the site one day in mid-2004, Mr. Yauch came across a concert photo snapped by a fan with his cellphone and found himself taken with the shakiness and rawness of the image. "The energy of it looked cool, and I thought it would look interesting to document a whole concert," Mr. Yauch said.

Three days before the October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden, the Beastie Boys decided to go ahead. The band posted a notice on its Web site seeking volunteers. The instructions were simple: " 'Start it when the Beastie Boys hit the stage and don't stop till it's over,' " recalled one cameraman, Fred Zilliox, a 35-year-old cook from Keansburg, N.J. "Other than that, it was up to us to do whatever we wanted."

The camera-toting fans took those instructions to heart. They shot the band, they shot the fans, they shot their fellow camera operators. Four even took their cameras along on their bathroom breaks.

"I wasn't very jumpy," said Sharon Gruber, a 26-year-old fan from Bayside, Queens, who was sitting in the top-most row of the Garden. "I basically shot a lot of close-ups of the stage."

Then Mr. Yauch, Mr. Doran, assorted editors and others took over. The postproduction phase stretched more than a year as they waded through nearly 60 angles and about 100 hours of material. (The band supplemented the 50 camera-wielding fans with five friends who had digital video cameras and several high-quality cameras fixed on stage.)

Though one of Mr. Yauch's favorite concert films is "Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii," "it's basically the antithesis of this movie," Mr. Yauch said with a laugh.

"Live at Pompeii," filmed in 1971 in a 2,000-year-old amphitheater devoid of fans, is filled with languid shots without a cut, some shots lasting five minutes. The longest cut in "Awesome" barely breaks a minute. Many shots clock in at less than a second. All told, the hour-and-a-half "Awesome" contains 6,732 edits.

ThinkFilm, the independent distributor behind films like "Murderball," picked up the movie last fall for a fee in the low seven figures. (The film will cost the Beastie Boys about $1.2 million when the sampling fees are added in; the band returned all the Hi-8 Sony cameras (a step above a typical camcorder) to the stores where they were bought, in some cases for a full refund.

"I loved the notion that this was a film for the fans, by the fans," said Mark Urman, head of ThinkFilm's theatrical division.

The film will open on March 31 in 10 to 15 markets, including New York and Los Angeles; a DVD will be released about three months later. But to attract people who may not be hard-core Beastie Boys fans - the band's latest album, "Solid Gold Hits," has sold fewer than 140,000 copies since its release in November - ThinkFilm and the band are lining up other promotions.

At Sundance the Beastie Boys will be the headliners at a party next week being given by MySpace, the social-networking Web site, to celebrate the debut of its filmmaker-community site. And MySpace will hold a contest urging its members to create a video of one of two Beastie Boys songs, "Sabotage" and "Shake Your Rump."

MySpace, in its two years of existence, has allowed more than 660,000 aspiring bands and solo artists to upload their music to the site, where it can then be discovered by the site's nearly 50 million members and perhaps even by music labels. "We're trying the same thing for filmmakers - a platform for our users to express themselves creatively," said Chris DeWolfe, the company's chief executive.

Independent filmmakers will be able to put their films on the site, allowing users to stream and watch selected work at no charge and making it possible to network with other filmmakers. But while music label representatives regularly troll MySpace, it remains to be seen whether studio executives will follow suit and deviate from the typical way talent is discovered.

Still, movie executives understand the business is changing, and they may end up combing through what promises to be a virtual slush pile of submissions. "I don't rule it out," Mr. Urman of ThinkFilm said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/movies/19awes.html





A Name in the Credits? Over His Dead Body
Christopher Maag

Chuck Lamb might be the world's chattiest dead guy.

His favorite topic is how he is fast becoming the most famous dead body alive. "Isn't it incredible?" said Mr. Lamb, 47, who speaks at a volume that most people reserve for rock concerts. "I had no idea it would blow up like this."

Mr. Lamb became Dead Body Guy on Dec. 5, when he put up his Web site, deadbodyguy.com. The site features photos of Mr. Lamb playing dead in various scenes around his house. Crushed by his garage door. Electrocuted in the bathtub. One series shows Mr. Lamb lying face-down in a bowl of chicken soup, above a caption that reads "Dying from bird flu."

His wife, Tonya, took the photos. She also prepared jars of fake blood, which she keeps in the pantry for future use.

By staging his own death, Mr. Lamb hopes to attain a modest form of immortality. He says he always wanted to become a famous actor. Instead, at age 47 he finds himself with six children, working as a computer programmer for Nationwide Insurance. Mr. Lamb has deep creases under his eyes, skin as pale as copy paper, precious little hair and no acting experience. Any notions he once held of becoming the next Sean Connery died long ago.

But Mr. Lamb's dream of fame lingered. "Just once," he said, "I want to have my name in the credits of a movie or a TV show."

His dream was stalled until last month, when he realized that anybody could play dead. By posing as a corpse on the Internet, he thought, perhaps he could win a role as a lifeless extra on "CSI: Miami." He took two days to build the Web site, then waited for someone to notice.

It was a short wait. Deadbodyguy.com received 300,000 hits in its first three weeks. There were 530 hits from Uruguay, 6 from Iran. In two hours, the site received 2,000 hits from Spain. "I'm huge in Spain," he said.

CNN labeled deadbodyguy.com one of its Web sites of the week. USA Today ran a small story. That was all the prodding needed by representatives of the infotainment industry, who spend their days trawling for weird news. They deluged Mr. Lamb with interview requests. Dead Body Guy soon appeared on more than 100 local TV stations, in places like Nacogdoches, Tex., and Honolulu.

He has also been mentioned on over 300 radio shows.

"That some regular guy in Columbus would play dead just to get famous is fascinating to me," said Van Patrick, a radio host for KCMO-AM in Kansas City who featured Mr. Lamb earlier this month. "I'm both repulsed and attracted to it," Mr. Patrick said.

All this attention places Mr. Lamb in the outermost orbit of fame: the Internet hotlink star. Every week, it seems, e-mail accounts across the country fill with messages titled, "Check this out," and text that begins, "I usually never pass on Web sites like this, but ... " Once it was dancing hamsters. This week it is Dead Body Guy's turn.

Even with over a quarter-million hits, Mr. Lamb has not received any movie offers. But he has been invited to the Los Angeles Film Festival in June, where he will be presented with the Special Achievement Award for Self-Promotion. He also will play dead on the red carpet as film actors step over his body. "Do you know how many thousands of actors in L.A. would kill for the publicity he's getting right now?" said Al Bowman, a festival organizer.

Not to mention start-up movie festivals. "He gets to say he's an award-winning act," Mr. Bowman said. "And we can promote ourselves by presenting Dead Body Guy, as seen on CNN."

And Dead Body Guy has coattails. Mr. Lamb paid Anne Howard, a publicist based in Montreal, $35 to write his first press release. Now she is trying to represent him as he sends demo tapes to Jay Leno and "Saturday Night Live." "If this works out, I just hope he remembers me," Ms. Howard said.

Part of Dead Body Guy's appeal is that he is a regular guy with a modest dream. But playing dead is turning Mr. Lamb's life upside down. His boss grew angry at the number of news media calls he was taking at work. Now, whenever he does an interview, Mr. Lamb must sneak out of his cubicle, run to another floor, find an empty conference room and lock himself inside.

One night he became so engrossed returning e-mail messages to the Web site that he forgot his wife's request to take a basket of laundry to the basement. "That's when I said, 'Whoa, I need to get a grip,' " Mr. Lamb said.

Officially, Mr. Lamb is sticking to Dead Body Guy's original goal. "Just one movie credit and I'm done," he said.

Meanwhile, he is waiting to hear back from a producer at the Conan O'Brien show. He has booking a flight to New York to meet with an agent. "I want to leave a little legacy," Mr. Lamb said. "I'd like to have a bridge named after me."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/national/17dead.html





Advertising

A February in Overdrive: Super Bowl and Olympics
Stuart Elliott

BRACE yourselves, a billion-dollar advertising blitz is coming to a TV set near you.

Arriving first, on Feb. 5, are the commercials on ABC during the Super Bowl, traditionally the biggest day of the year for Madison Avenue. Then, five days later, come the commercials during the NBC coverage of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, which is to run through Feb. 26. Marketers in competitive categories like automobiles, credit cards, fast food and telecommunications will spend an estimated $1.1 billion on thousands of commercials during those two sports events.

The concentrated ad onslaught is emblematic of a growing trend. As technology like digital video recorders makes it easier for consumers to avoid TV commercials, marketers seek to make spots more memorable by running them during programs that large audiences still perceive as must-see big events, which they go out of their way to watch. Such big-event TV includes awards shows like the Oscars and premieres of popular series like "24," along with live sports events including the Olympics and the Super Bowl.

The prices for commercials during big-event TV are invariably higher. For instance, ABC, part of the Walt Disney Company, is charging an estimated average of $2.5 million for each 30-second spot during Super Bowl XL on Feb. 5. That is almost five times the cost of the highest-priced commercial during a regular program. Prices vary during the 416 hours of Olympic coverage on NBC and its sibling NBC Universal networks; the most expensive commercials are $700,000 to $750,000 for each 30 seconds.

But as TV viewership increasingly splinters, and commercials are increasingly zipped past or zapped, the rates for such special events may not be too high to pay, particularly for purveyors of mass-market products.

The Super Bowl, for example, is usually the most-watched show in a given year, with an audience of 90 million. And more than 120 million people tuned in for the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding showdown during the 1994 Winter Games.

"Fragmentation means more and more shows get lower and lower ratings," said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. "Events like the Super Bowl are arguably the only places advertisers can reach everyone in the U.S. at one time."

That means the pressure is on to come up with stand-out spots, Mr. Calkins said, because expectations are very high.

"Some succeed at it," he added. "Some fail."

Indeed, advertisers acknowledge the daunting task that confronts sponsors of big-event TV.

"Certainly, when you're dropping in excess of two million for a commercial you've got to pinch yourself to make sure it's the right thing to do," said Richard Castellini, vice president for consumer marketing at CareerBuilder.com in Chicago, an online job search service that is owned by Gannett, Knight Ridder and the Tribune Company.

CareerBuilder made its first Super Bowl appearance last year with three commercials by the Chicago agency Cramer-Krasselt, all featuring a man annoyed at work by boisterous chimpanzees. The pitch in all three was the same: Isn't it time to visit Careerbuilder.com and find a better job? It was a huge gamble, but the spots and a related online promotion proved tremendously popular among viewers of the game.

"I recouped the money I spent on the ads in three weeks' time," Mr. Castellini said, "so it's almost a no-brainer to come back." CareerBuilder is buying two 30-second spots, with the monkeys again in starring roles, during Super Bowl XL.

Another first-time Super Bowl sponsor returning for 2006 is Emerald of California nuts, sold by Diamond Foods, with a brain-teasing 30-second spot by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group.

"We are a new brand in a very, very tough category, and being on the Super Bowl was a great way to tell consumers and retailers that we are here to stay," said Tim Cannon, marketing director at Diamond Foods in Stockton, Calif.

The humorous Emerald spot that ran last February, also by Goodby, Silverstein, contributed to a sales increase of "about 56 percent in the four weeks after the Super Bowl," Mr. Cannon said, compared with the previous month. The commercial during this year's Super Bowl will be part of a broad campaign that will also include online and print ads.

Another brand that was a Super Bowl rookie in 2005, the Degree for Men antiperspirant sold by Unilever, has also signed up for a second appearance in the game. The spot for Super Bowl XL is adapted from a successful European commercial, set in a make-believe city whose only residents are stuntmen. The humorous spot was created by the London office of Lowe Worldwide, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

The challenge for sponsors was summarized by Jay Kolpon, vice president for marketing and new business at the Bayer Consumer Care division in Morristown, N.J.

"We want to get people to hear our message, but the Super Bowl is not like typical advertising," said Mr. Kolpon, whose company will run a 30-second spot for Aleve pain reliever in the game. It is certainly not a brand known for the humorous or extravagant spots that typically finish high on the Super Bowl hit parade.

So, Bayer Consumer Care asked its agency, Energy BBDO in Chicago, to produce "a Super Bowl-worthy commercial," Mr. Kolpon said, "with a bit of a twinkle in it as it says in an entertaining way that Aleve allows you to be your best self." Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock on "Star Trek," will appear in the Aleve spot by Energy BBDO, part of the BBDO Worldwide unit of Omnicom.

The fact that the Olympics starts so soon after the Super Bowl ends has led some Super Bowl ad mainstays to pass this time, particularly those that spend huge sums to be official sponsors of the United States or International Olympic Committees. Among them are McDonald's and Visa USA.

With McDonald's missing from the Super Bowl, Burger King is coming in, for the first time in 11 years. Credit card companies like MasterCard International may turn up to compensate for Visa's absence.

The Kleenex brand of tissues prefers to sponsor the Olympics, said Steve Erb, assistant marketing director for Kleenex at Kimberly-Clark in Neenah, Wis., because "Kleenex is a global brand with a presence in 175 countries and the Olympics is a global stage."

Also, the consumers who buy Kleenex - primarily women with children - identify more closely with the individuals who compete in the Olympics "and the moms, dads and coaches who get them there," Mr. Erb said, than with professional football players.

Kleenex will for the first time run commercials during the Olympics with a sports theme; spots by JWT in New York, part of the WPP Group, show a young hockey player facing off against a surprising goalie.

The spots are part of a broader campaign that also includes a partnership with an NBC Web site (nbcolympics.com) centered on three Olympic athletes and their mothers, whom consumers can follow through a dedicated Web site (kleenexmoments.com); a sweepstakes with a dedicated Web site (usgoldgame.com); and store displays.

Other major sponsors of the Winter Games include Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak, John Hancock, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson and Nike.

Advertisers that will run spots during both the Olympics and Super Bowl include Anheuser-Busch, General Motors and Procter & Gamble.

Super Bowl XL advertisers also include Ameriquest Mortgage, Disney, FedEx and the New Line and Warner Brothers units of Time Warner. The Sprint unit of Sprint Nextel will sponsor the halftime show, featuring the Rolling Stones, and also run two commercials during the game.

"The stakes are high and that does raise the anxiety level," said Mike Goff, vice president for national advertising at Sprint Nextel in Overland Park, Kan. "We've entered this with our eyes wide open."

To help create commercials that viewers will like and remember, the company and its agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day in New York, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of Omnicom, "looked at a reel of recent Super Bowl spots," Mr. Goff said, "put 13 potential commercials in test and are doing additional research on 4 of them."

"You can assume there is one that features an animal," he added, laughing, referring to the popularity of the CareerBuilder chimps and a menagerie's worth of other beasts that have been stars of Super Bowl spots.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/bu...dco.html?8hpib





Google to Buy Radio Advertising Company
Eric Auchard

Web search company Google Inc. said on Tuesday it agreed to pay $102 million for radio advertising firm dMarc Broadcasting Inc., in a deal that could eventually be worth up to $1.24 billion.

Privately held dMarc of Newport Beach, California connects advertisers to radio stations through an automated advertising system, simplifying the process of selling, scheduling and delivering ads, said Google, of Mountain View, California.

"This is the first major 'public' statement that Google intends to be a kind of one-stop shop for its advertisers," analyst Greg Sterling of Kelsey Group wrote on his Web log.

The move into radio ad-buying could be followed by expansion into the television ad-buying market by the world's leading provider of Web search-based online advertising, he said.

Google said it agreed to an up-front cash payment of $102 million and additional payments totaling up to $1.14 billion over the next three years. The additional payments would depend on revenue and ad inventory goals being met, it said.

It said dMarc technology would be integrated into the Google AdWords business to create a new radio ad distribution channel for Google advertisers.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter.

Google has sought to enter new industries almost as quickly as its market value has appreciated. Most recently, Google has launched an Internet video service offering CBS Corp. <CBS.N> television shows and basketball games.

Sterling said that similar deals could follow that thrust Google more deeply into the television advertising market.

He pointed to Spot Runner, a local cable television buying service, that he said "is a similar example of a kind of company that we would expect Google to also want to acquire -- or at least a similar capability -- to extend into TV."

Martin Pyykkonen, a financial analyst with Hoefer & Arnett in Boulder, Colorado, said the acquisition is another sign of Google's desire to move beyond online advertising.

"As you move upstream and start to talk to Fortune 1000 accounts, those companies want to deal with multiple channels -- radio, TV (and) print," Pyykkonen said, referring to various advertising distribution routes.

As Google expands into these other media, the danger is that the company will be seen as more of a competitor with advertising agencies -- potentially putting it in competition with some of its biggest buyers, Pyykkonen cautioned.

Google's stock price has more than quadrupled since its initial public offering in 2004.

Shares of Google fell $1.70, or less than 1 percent, to $464.55 on the Nasdaq after trading as high as $469.90 earlier.

(Additional reporting by Kenneth Li in New York)
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...RS&srch=google





Size matters?

Marketers Interested in Small Screen
Matt Richtel

Forget the 30-second spot on a 50-inch high-definition TV. How about a three-second message on the tiniest of screens?

Television-style advertising is coming to a mobile phone near you. It is part of a broader push by marketers to create a new generation of "up close and personal" ads by delivering video, audio, banner displays and text clips over a device carried by most American adults.

Marketers said they were particularly excited about the prospect of eventually using cellphones, many of which are equipped with global positioning systems, to send ads to consumers based on their location. With that information, marketers could, in theory, send pitches from retailers to cellphone users who might be in the vicinity of a store.

Cellphone-based marketing could be "the silver bullet we've been looking for in advertising for a long time," said Laura Marriott, executive director of the Mobile Marketing Association, a consortium of wireless carriers, ad agencies, technology companies and advertisers.

But ads on cellphones pose serious concerns, say consumer advocacy groups. Critics argue that Madison Avenue, having plastered ads on all kinds of empty spaces - like billboards, building facades and the sides of buses - may soon be intruding on a gadget that has become as common as a wallet.

"This is part of the creep of advertising into every nook and cranny of our lives," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit consumer group. "This is advertising right in your face."

The wireless carriers say the risk of losing customers is a strong incentive to keep down the marketing noise. It is illegal for carriers to sell phone numbers to telemarketers. And in their contracts with content providers, like CBS Sports and other channels, the carriers can keep out advertisers who send unsolicited messages.

By law, carriers are not allowed to divulge information on a subscriber's location unless that individual gives permission. One idea being floated by carriers and advertisers is to offer consumers incentives, like reduced monthly phone fees, if they agree to receive ads.

For now, mobile marketing is still rudimentary. But that is expected to change quickly, with phone-based ads incorporating more sophisticated graphics and videos this year.

Some marketers have already started to send simple text ads to cellphone screens when consumers use Web browsers on their phones to visit certain Internet sites. Other marketing campaigns urge consumers to use their phones to send text messages to advertisers to receive special offers.

In March, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel plan to test how consumers react to short video ads on their phones. But the carriers, fearful of upsetting customers, said they were not planning to deploy this broadly.

ESPN, the sports network, which offers a service that sends scores, text stories and video highlights to cellphones, plans to start running short video clips later this year from advertisers like Visa USA, Nike and Hilton Hotels. Other companies starting tests or full-blown campaigns - with video, banner ads or full-screen images - include American Express, Microsoft, and Pepsi, among other major brands.The size of the mobile phone advertising market was only $45 million in 2005, but is expected to grow to $1.26 billion by 2009, Roger Entner, a telecommunications industry analyst with Ovum, a market research firm, said.

Jon Raj, vice president of advertising and emerging media with Visa USA, said he expected to see many new ad formats that could combine the text, video and the location-based nature of the phone.

"Unlike the computer, or a magazine or television," he said, "the phone is a piece of you."

That quality, which makes mobile marketing so powerful, could also make phone ads widely disliked and force carriers to use them very cautiously, said Edward Snyder, a financial analyst and co-founder of Charter Equity Research, where he covers the cellular phone industry.

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said the company had "no immediate plans" to send video ads to cellphone screens widely.

Another limiting factor is phone technology; only a small fraction of phones can play video, though many can use browsers to surf the Web and display some content.

The wireless industry and some advertisers say they have spent several years figuring out how to deliver unobtrusive messages. The carriers have adopted a voluntary code of conduct developed with the Mobile Marketing Association, which permits sending commercial messages only to consumers who agree to receive ads. For instance, a consumer must send a text note asking for information or click on a banner ad for the full pitch.

"This has to be approached delicately because there's a fine line between adding value to a customer and intruding," said Pragnesh Shah, vice president of product innovation at Sprint Nextel. Still, Mr. Shah said he saw enormous potential in delivering advertising on a device that is always on and carried everywhere.

One example of mobile advertising is a brand campaign for Visa USA, begun in September, in which consumers send a five-letter text code to receive weather reports. The reports come back with a banner: sponsored by Visa. The credit card company has also signed a contract with ESPN to have three-second animated images run before phone users receive ESPN sports updates.

Also in September, Microsoft started sending mobile ads to its business customers, showing the Microsoft Office logo when customers viewed certain Web pages from their handsets. Other companies are sending banner ads that direct consumers to call, say, a hotel, in one click.

And last summer, MasterCard International sent text messages to consumers who searched for restaurants on their handsets, offering them the chance to win free lunches at restaurants in their neighborhoods.

In theory, ads could be made even more personal. A message might say: "Use this card in the store coming up on your left and you'll get x-percent off," said Michael Lao, MasterCard's vice president for global media and new channels. But this futuristic feature would be possible only if carriers developed a system in which subscribers could choose to be tracked.

Web publishers are also getting into mobile marketing by selling advertising space next to the content they deliver to cellphones. In December, for instance, the Weather Channel started its first mobile advertising campaign, coupling weather reports with small banner ads for American Express.

The Weather Channel is one of more than 40 content producers working with Third Screen Media, a company with offices in Boston and New York that helps Web sites, advertisers and carriers integrate marketing for cellphones.

Thomas J. Burgess, the chief executive of Third Screen, said his customers' mobile ad budgets had risen from an average of $20,000 for a campaign a year ago to $150,000 to $250,000 today. He said the company had just signed its largest deal ever, a $1.6 million contract for a one-year campaign with an entertainment industry advertiser that he declined to name.

One reason for growing interest in cellphone ads, Mr. Burgess said, is the relatively high rate at which customers click on banner ads on mobile screens. The click- through rate is around 4 percent on phones, compared with 1 percent on the Internet, he said.

Mr. Burgess attributes the higher response rate to a greater ability to aim ads at particular consumers based on factors like time of day and the kind of handset they are using.

Ujjal Kohli, chief executive of Rhythm NewMedia, a start-up in Mountain View, Calif., which is developing video advertising technology, said he had hopes that mobile marketing, by being very personal and intimate, could solve some of the frustrations advertisers have with consumers ignoring television commercials - no matter how big the monitor.

"The tiny screen may be the answer," Mr. Kohli said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/te...16mobile.html?





A Producer of Hip-Hop Gets Behind an Heiress
Lola Ogunnaike

The year 2005 was a very good one for the hitmaking producer Scott Storch. For dozens of weeks, singles like Mario's "Let Me Love You," 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" and "Just a Lil Bit" and Lil' Kim's "Lighters Up" - all of which he helped create - topped the Billboard charts and blasted from radio stations around the country. And he is the man behind "Run It," the ubiquitous ditty that single-handedly kick-started the career of the R&B singer Chris Brown.

But as Mr. Storch, 32, strolled about a Louis Vuitton store in Miami one recent December afternoon, buying everything his well-paid heart desired, he looked anything but happy when talk shifted from $300 sneakers to awards. He, it turns out, was outraged and "shocked" that he did not receive a Grammy nomination for producer of the year alongside the likes of Danger Mouse, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and the Neptunes.

"It's all political," he groused as sales assistants with dollar signs in their eyes zipped about. "It has to do with your visibility. It has to do with who got passed over for it before. You have to play the political game, and I was too busy making hit music to play the political game."

While producers like Kanye West, Dr. Dre and Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes enjoy superstar status moonlighting as rappers, easily switching between the microphone and the mixing board, Mr. Storch, who does not perform, has preferred to toil in relative obscurity, producing hits for the likes of Beyoncé ("Baby Boy," "Naughty Girl," "Me, Myself and I"), Fat Joe ("Lean Back") and a host of others. "I'm not the guy trying to be all up in the videos and be a celebrity," he said. "I feel like I'm going to lose a certain amount of my privacy if I do that."

As a result, Mr. Storch may be the most important hip-hop producer that you've never heard of. And the fact that he is white and Jewish still comes as a surprise to many. (He has called himself the Meyer Lansky of hip-hop.)

"That definitely threw me off at first," Mr. Brown said. "I mean, I was really surprised by that. I just assumed he was African-American."

His color has in no way hindered his success, Mr. Storch said. A compact man who is rarely seen without sunglasses (even at night), he said he produced 80 tracks last year, charging anywhere from $80,000 to $90,000 a song, the going rate for A-list producers. Unlike that of a number of his peers, his sound is not readily identifiable. He is as comfortable working with pop stars like Christina Aguilera as he is with fledgling rappers like Chamillionaire. Because much of today's successful hip-hop and pop music is driven by melody and beat rather than lyrical content, the importance of the producer has increased exponentially.

In the coming months Mr. Storch's hitmaking ability will be put to the ultimate test. He spent a significant portion of last year working with the celebutante Paris Hilton on her debut album, which is scheduled for release this summer. Ms. Hilton has already proven adept at selling books, perfume, racy videotapes and hamburgers, but will she be able to push albums? Yes, the producer is betting. "I think Paris's album is going to take everyone by surprise," he said confidently. Still, walking into the project, Mr. Storch admitted, he had felt some trepidation. "I remember having a conversation with Dr. Dre, and he said: 'Scott, this is a risk. You can either have incredible success or big failure. But risk is good.' " He decided to gamble.

Later in the evening, at a Miami studio, he played a handful of tracks from Ms. Hilton's album. "Jealousy" was clearly aimed at her ever-shrinking, ex-best-friend Nicole Ritchie. And on "It's Like That," destined for the clubs, Ms. Hilton, in a breathy, digitally enhanced register, can be heard cooing, "Gonna lose my clothes/You like that don't you/Let's get exposed/You know you want to."

While Mr. Storch compared Ms. Hilton's sound to Cyndi Lauper's and Blondie's, he tap-danced when asked if Ms. Hilton could actually hold a note. "If people are given the right circumstances and the right track and the right melody, it's about the conviction," he said. "It's not necessarily about being a God-given virtuoso."

Sure.

Mr. Storch and Ms. Hilton became an item during their time together. The two showed up hand in hand at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards, and he did buy her a Bentley. (He also purchased one for his ex-girlfriend Lil' Kim when they were an item.) Did the two mix business and pleasure? "It's always a pleasure working with Paris," Mr. Storch said with a sly chuckle. "We were good friends. Let the world figure that out. I take the high road."

Shortly before his whirlwind shopping spree that afternoon, Mr. Storch and his entourage, which included his manager; his silent but leggy Brazilian girlfriend; a reggaetón artist, Nox; and several other hangers-on, were listening to old-school classics at his four-bedroom home in Indian Creek Village, a tony community. His yacht, named Storchavelli, was docked in the back. A fleet of luxury cars was parked in the driveway and in the garage. He owns 13 vehicles, including a racing-green 1974 Jaguar, a white Lamborghini, a black Mercedes Maybach, a butterscotch-colored Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes McClaren SLR, a sleek $600,000 limited-edition ride that has been known to reduce grown men to tears. "I drive something different every day," he said nonchalantly, as he strolled past a 1960 Bentley. "It's just my hobby."

In addition to the flashy automobiles, he enjoys even flashier baubles. A diamond-encrusted Piaget watch twinkled on his wrist, while a 32-carat canary-yellow rock dwarfed his pinkie. "I feel like this is a badge of honor," he said, rubbing the ridiculously massive ring. "It's a symbol of hard work, the music that I've made and all the hours that I've spent in the studio." Throughout the day, Mr. Storch, a pack-a-day-type, chain-smoked Marlboros and inhaled prodigious amounts of marijuana. "I'm getting you totally baked right now, aren't I?" he asked this reporter at one point as she sat engulfed in a pungent cloud of secondhand smoke.

He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Philadelphia and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the son of a court reporter and a singer. He began playing piano at 9, and by 13 he was convinced that a life in music was for him. "I would see musicians performing at weddings and bar mitzvahs, and I knew that at the very worst I could do that," Mr. Storch said. He dropped out of high school in ninth grade to pursue his dream full time. In the early 1990's he was a keyboardist for the Roots, a neo-soul band, but eventually began to feel stifled creatively. "I wanted to work with all kinds of music, and they had a very specific sound," he said.

The rapper Eve, a Philadelphia native, introduced him to Dr. Dre, and life would never be the same. "Dre opened the door for me, and just having my name mentioned next to his raised my stock," said Mr. Storch, who played keyboards on Dre tracks like "Still D.R.E." "Doors that were once closed to me were swinging wide open."

With the song "Lean Back," the summer anthem of 2004, his career shot into the stratosphere, he said. "People don't even come to me for a single anymore," he said. "Now they want their first single," the initial release that will instantly put an album on the radio. And, according to Mr. Brown, "it's money well spent."

He is currently in the studio with Ice Cube, Method Man and Jessica Simpson, and he wants to start his own record label. But Mr. Storch has no plans to significantly raise his profile in 2006.

"For the past 13 years people have thought that I was the new guy because they don't know who I am," he said. "If I can be the new guy for another 10 years, then I'll be all right."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/ar...tor.html?8hpib





Tuning Tech Catches On With Guitarists
Richard Defendorf

No matter how accomplished they are, musicians who play fretted instruments spend a lot of time playing out of tune.

Strings stretch and bind. Fluctuations in humidity and string tension cause instrument necks to bow, arch and twist. Something--it is not always clear what--throws string pitch out of whack. Professional players on stage and in recording sessions find themselves twisting tuner knobs between every song and sometimes in the middle of songs.

"It is maddening that we play instruments that do not stay in tune for very long," Mike Marshall, one of the top mandolin and guitar players on the acoustic-music scene, wrote during a recent online discussion on the topic. "This seems a bit insane, considering the fact that we are surrounded by so much incredible technology."

Technology, it turns out, does offer a remedy for tuning problems--at least for those who play electric guitars. Backers and users of an electronic system called the Performer say it offers a big leap beyond the ubiquitous electronic pitch readers that, while reasonably accurate, still require the player to tune manually. It's also seen as a way to let players use the same instrument for a variety of musical purposes.

Those attributes have helped sell the system to rock icons Graham Nash, Jimmy Page and Joe Perry, along with other concert- stage veterans.

With the touch of a button, The Performer is designed to automatically tune open, unfretted strings to whatever notes the player programs into the system's computer. The retuning can happen any time the player has a moment to strum on open strings, even in the middle of a song.

It works via a system of sensors, computer electronics and miniature motors and mechanics designed for installation in the bodies of Fender's Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars, and Gibson USA's Les Paul.

In their quest for new and distinctive sounds, guitar players can easily load up on pre-amplifiers, digital sound processors and other effects gear designed to change the sound of the instrument with the touch of a foot pedal. Using alternate tunings is another way to change the sound and enhance the playability of a guitar, but it often is handled in a very low-tech way--manually. Onstage or in the studio, when it is impractical to spend several minutes retuning, professionals typically pretune several guitars and switch from one to another between songs.

Onstage or in the studio, when it is impractical to spend several minutes retuning, professionals typically pretune several guitars and switch from one to another between songs.
As it is currently offered, The Performer is designed to readjust the tension on all six strings simultaneously in about five seconds, with the push of a button. A small LCD screen cut into the guitar body displays the note, octave and "cent value" of each string. (A cent is a unit of relative pitch; there are 1,200 cents in one octave). Neil Skinn, the man who developed the system, says the gadget's tuning is accurate to within 2 cents.

Skinn says he began exploring automatic-tuning concepts as a hobby in 1983. His design for The Performer's tension-correcting mechanical devices, which help pull and release the string ends, was inspired by the rocker arms on oil derrick jack pumps. Coming up with an electronic sensor system and writing a software program that could control the system, though, proved much harder.

By the end of 1985, Skinn had decided that the cost of producing an automatic tuner--which at the time would have worked only for standard tuning--made further development unfeasible. But two years later, while enrolled in an electrical-engineering program and working for a scientific-instruments company, Skinn discovered that the vibration analysis at the heart of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy--a tool commonly used to analyze organic compounds--also could be paired with magnetic pickups to accurately determine pitch.

A colleague, meanwhile, developed software that could calibrate the pickup and mechanical systems so that string pitch could be changed while the strings vibrated. By 1988, Skinn had quit school and had begun raising funds that would enable him to work on the project full time.

It took more than a decade, however, to get The Performer to operate the way it does today, with a sound sensor system and software that tunes to a wide range of note combinations but also "touches up" the pitch on each string as tensions change and the guitar neck bends and twists.

"Everyone who got a (Performer installation) up to '98 has a prototype of some sort," said Skinn, who formed a company called TransPerformance to develop the system and retrofit guitars, which he does in his Fort Collins, Colo., home workshop. "It was a really slow process, and each guitar was different from the one before."

So far, he estimated, he has installed 200 Performer systems.

The pros sign up
TransPerformance's first client was Jimmy Page. Skinn said he managed to get a videotape to the Led Zeppelin guitarist that showed how the system worked. Page invited him to a recording studio in Reno, Nev., for a closer look and commissioned a Performer installation in a Les Paul model guitar. Skinn said he delivered the retrofitted instrument in late 1990. It went back and forth between Page and Fort Collins three or four times for re-engineering.

"Sometime in '91, he said, 'This is it.' He started playing it onstage," Skinn said.

The next customer was Aerosmith's Perry. Over the years, mostly through word of mouth, TransPerformance attracted avid amateur players and a fair number of other well-known professionals, including Tom Keifer (Cinderella), Mark Slaughter, Pat Metheny, Mick Fleetwood, Robert Hunter, Kenny Loggins, Eddie Van Halen, Peter Frampton, Sonny Landreth and young guitar phenom Matt Curran. Page now owns three guitars equipped with the system.

The justification for spending a lot of money on an automatic tuning device such as this is, in the end, as much about expanding musical options as it is about convenience.
A Performer costs $3,400, including installation, which takes about a month. The electronics and motors are off-the- shelf, though most of the mechanical parts are custom-made. The system weighs about 3.5 pounds, adding about 8 ounces to the overall weight of the instrument, once the guitar body (typically solid mahogany or ash with a maple top) is routed out to accommodate the electronics and machinery.

Accustomed to assuaging concerns that retrofitting a guitar will change its sound, Skinn pointed out that the electronics, hardware and setup for the instrument's pickups, volume and tone adjustments remain unaltered and separate from the automatic tuning system, which is powered by a 12-volt cable that plugs into the guitar body. Optional battery packs are available for those who want to play on a wireless system.

The justification for spending a lot of money on an automatic tuning device such as this is, in the end, as much about expanding musical options as it is about convenience. The Performer is designed to tune to any of eight notes (seven half steps) on the first string and any of nine notes (eight half steps) on each of the other five strings. In other words, it is capable of 229,376 tunings, of which there are at least 60,000 nameable tunings.

Word of the tuner's versatility caught the attention of William Eaton, a guitarist who also is director of the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, in Phoenix. Eaton said he heard about the system a few years ago and visited Skinn's shop.

"I played Jimmy Page's guitar before it got shipped and it sold me right there," Eaton said.

A composer of world and new-age music, Eaton performs three or four times a week, often with small ensembles. He is building a harp guitar with two necks and a poplar-frame body that will accommodate a Performer, soon to be installed. He says he'll store about 30 tunings in the system, allowing him to write songs for a wider range of chords and work with pitch intervals that would be difficult or impossible to play on standard tuning.

"Rather than change guitars during a performance," he said, "this would allow me to make dramatic changes (to the same instrument) in a few seconds."

The need to carry only one instrument, Eaton added, will make air travel to and from performance dates easier.

Skinn, 50, said moral support from his family and investors, and feedback from clients, particularly those who play for a living, helped him persevere through countless hours of re-engineering.

An ongoing source of frustration, Skinn noted, is that most requests for automatic tuners come from acoustic-instrument players. But unless they're interested in retrofitting one of the solid-body acoustics for which Skinn has adapted The Performer, or they have luthiery skills like Eaton's, he has to turn them away. The weight, bulkiness and design of the system make it unsuitable for acoustic guitars, whose sound is derived not only from the vibrations of strings but from vibrations of the thin tone woods that comprise acoustic instruments' hollow bodies.

Which means that players like Mike Marshall will--for the time being, at least--continue to tune manually, one note at a time.
http://news.com.com/Tuning+tech+catc...3-6014002.html





Vaporware no longer – it’s available now

New Technology Boosts Hard Drive Capacity
Matthew Fordahl

Seagate Technology LLC has started shipping a notebook PC hard drive that overcomes an obstacle many feared would be a major roadblock to the further expansion of disk capacity - and the overall growth of the storage industry.

The new approach that aligns bits of data vertically rather than horizontally enables Seagate - and other drive vendors - to further boost the density of drives without increasing the risk of scrambling data.

Since the first hard drive was introduced 1956, bits have been arranged in a flat, horizontal fashion on the spinning platters. To boost capacity, engineers reduced the size of the particles whose magnetic state is what actually remembers data.

But with some drives now topping out at 500 gigabytes, the miniaturization is nearly at its limit. Made any smaller, the particles can begin to interfere with the magnetism of their neighbors. The result is disastrous for data.

By storing bits in a vertical, or perpendicular, arrangement, engineers are able to boost capacity by taking advantage of the real estate that is freed up.

It's a major change that all drive makers are in the process of undertaking, said John Donovan, vice president at the research firm TrendFocus.

"It a whole new way of doing things," he said. "Not only do you have to change the thinking, but the tooling, the way the heads and disks interact with each other."

Seagate's new drive, the Momentus 5400.3, was being shipped as of Monday, the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company said. The shift to perpendicular recording allows it to bump up the maximum capacity of its notebook drive to 160 gigabytes from 120 gigabytes.

The 2.5-inch drive costs $325, compared to about $240 for the 120 gig model. Seagate plans to extend the new recording technology to other notebook drives, as well its 1-inch drives used in handheld gadgets and 3.5-inch drives for desktop PCs.

"Our transition to perpendicular technology increases our ability to meet the needs of our growing customer base," said Karl Chicca, general manager of Seagate's Personal Storage unit.

Other drive makers also have either announced products or plans that include perpendicular recording. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, Toshiba unveiled its second 1.8-inch drive that relies on the new technology.

Perpendicular recording has benefits beyond boosting storage density by reducing the need for additional components, said Mike Hall, a Seagate spokesman.

"If you can reduce the component count, you reduce the power drawn, you reduce the heat and you reduce the wear and tear," he said.

In the next three to five years, the new technology is expected to increase maximum drive capacities five fold, Hall said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Foldable Solar Battery Charger: A Radiant Solution
[Via Treehugger]

If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then where does the unlimited power of the sun fit into the picture? Sundance Solar's PowerFilm 10-Watt Foldable Solar Battery Charger F15-600 weighs only 9 ounces, but it kicks out 10 watts of power to charge your notebook, cell phone, PDA, iPod, or just about anything else you've got handy. And when you're not using it, you can roll it up and throw it in your glove box. At $299, it ain't cheap. But if you're planning on being off the grid for a while, it'll keep you juiced and ready to work.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/





Mesh ups

Sharing Broadband to Increase Speed
John Markoff

Two West Coast start-up companies have built new wireless technologies that take to heart Benjamin Franklin's exhortation to hang together rather than hang separately.

Both Mushroom Networks, which was started at the University of California, San Diego, and WiBoost Inc., based in Seattle, have built prototypes of simple wireless systems that make it possible for groups of neighbors to share their D.S.L. or cable Internet connections.

Both companies said that sharing high-speed lines might enable users in small neighborhood clusters to download files and Web pages up to 10 times faster.

The two companies, which developed their technologies separately, are taking slightly different approaches. But in both cases, neighbors would be able to connect relatively standard wireless routers that would permit their computers to receive data in parallel from multiple D.S.L. or cable network connections. The idea is similar to adding lanes to a freeway to improve traffic flow.

WiBoost, which is also the name of the company's technology system, now requires an antenna mounted outside the home. The company is exploring ways to license its technology to manufacturers and hopes to make WiBoost devices available for $200 to $300. In flat areas with minimal obstructions, the system might be able to link homes separated by several miles, with do-it-yourself installation.

Mushroom Networks is conducting trials using a device called an access point aggregator that is similar to a conventional home Wi-Fi router. It is intended to be used to connect homes or businesses that are closer together.

In principle, these technologies could work for a large group of neighbors, even with just a few Internet access points. That capacity - which could reduce the cost of Internet access considerably for its users - could, however, create substantial opposition from Internet service providers. Many of them are vigilant about restricting the sharing of individual network access points.

Both companies said they were going to great lengths to assure service providers that they did not plan to become bandwidth Napsters, a reference to the music file- sharing company that raised havoc with the audio recording industry.

The idea of linking several Internet data channels for greater speed is not a new one, but exploring a consumer application for the technology is a fresh notion, said Rene L. Cruz, a University of California computer scientist and founder of Mushroom Networks.

"We're pretty excited about the concept," he said. "We're looking for validation and we're looking for market demand."

The technology has merits, said George Henny, the president of Whidbey Telecom, an independent telecommunications firm based on Whidbey Island, Wash.

"There is an interesting potential for this technology," he said, "and it would be fun to put it in place."

The concept is related to the concept of wireless mesh networking, a technique that is used to extend Wi-Fi and related wireless networking standards over large areas by relaying Internet data among wireless receivers.

In this use, the two firms are exploiting the fact that most computer networks are used in an irregular or "bursty" fashion. Even though large numbers of users download e- mail, Web pages or music and video files, most of the time the networks sit idle, waiting for a computer user to strike a key or issue a command.

The capacity utilization rates of modern data networks have long been known to be remarkably low.

"Our studies show that, averaged across all users, the utilization is less than 1 percent of the total capacity," said James Baker, president of WiBoost.

Telephone companies may oversubscribe the capacity of their D.S.L. lines by an average of 14 to 20 times, said Mr. Cruz, and some researchers estimate that rate to be as high as 200 to 1. But because the networks are so underutilized, they can be used efficiently despite substantial oversubscription.

Neither Mr. Cruz nor Mr. Baker is certain of receiving the blessing of Internet service providers, which often go to great lengths to prohibit their customers from sharing service with others.

"We don't want freeloaders," said Mr. Baker. "We don't want the perception that it might be something that the I.S.P. might not like."

Both companies have approached Internet providers to discuss their ideas, and they said they had received some indications of interest.

One selling point stressed by both companies is that the technology is a simple way for D.S.L. providers to match the higher bandwidth offered by cable companies.

Moreover, the technology could be used as a "viral" marketing technique by Internet service providers if existing customers persuaded neighbors to sign up for service to take advantage of the wireless accelerator.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/te...mushroom.html?





Mark Cuban Asks For Tiered Internet Service Model
Anders Bylund

Broadcast.com cofounder, Dallas Mavericks owner, and budding entertainment mogul Mark Cuban's latest blog entry makes the case for a multitiered Internet, with priority given to the applications that really matter. The essence of Cuban's argument is that some applications are more important than others, so the 'Net should be divided into various priority levels. In the words of the entrepreneur himself:

The internet is a great enabler and equalizer ... because it can help people in ways that can change and save their lives.

Medical and home diagnostic applications require bandwidth. They also require a quality of service that cant be interrupted because little Johnny down the road is trying to download the entire NBC schedule for his freshman highschool class. To enable mission critical applications, you have to have mission critical reliability. And that mission critical reliability has to be able to reach any home that a broadband connection can reach. To do that you need multiple tiers of service.

While that certainly sounds noble on the surface, there are a few holes in his argument when it comes to network technology, because many of the arguments he makes can be easily opposed. He envisions a future where Grandma Olga gets her medical checkups done online, and only little Johnny stands between the remote MD getting biometrics and hi-res images of her lesions at 60 FPS, and complete medical disaster. I fail to see the criticality of this sort of application getting network priority, unless there's remote-controlled surgery involved. Even then, chances are that no doctor would take on any remotely critical tasks via online delivery with anything less than an absolute guarantee that bandwith and latency problems would not interfere with the medical outcome. That level of service assurance goes beyond a simple tiered network model.

A look back at our previous coverage will give you a fuller appreciation of the concept of Network Neutrality, and why the Orbiting HQ would be full of rather disappointed writers if the tiered model became a reality. We've covered self- interested arguments in favor of a tiered Internet lately, but this time the argument is being made with an altruistic- sounding precept. Cuban does say that other applications would take advantage of the same high-level service, and that the availability of guaranteed high speed throughput would enable a new age of killer apps, but he fails to name any examples besides the rather unrealistic medical vision.

So why is there all of a sudden a need to impose traffic shaping measures on the whole of the Internet? Cuban claims that Internet traffic growth is outstripping the growth of the underlying infrastructure, and that there's nothing we can do about that:

We can try all the tricks we want. Edge servers, peer to peer, it won't matter. Just like a 20 lane highway is still going to have gridlock if enough cars use it, so will the 'Net.

Traffic overload does not cause any of the slowdowns users currently see, though. When there is a slowdown, it's either because your local network is slow—cable modem users might sympathize here—or because the server is having network issues. In the first case, Cuban seems to have a point, but the simpler solution then is to run a T3 line into your basement if you really need your speed. Fiber To The Premises is coming, and powerline delivery, and WiMax... I'm just saying, you have some options besides cable and DSL. Don't worry about rural areas, because Cuban doesn't. The second scenario, slow server-side delivery, is where the business you're trying to reach needs to upgrade their network or their servers, and perhaps both. Akamai is doing brisk business with high-traffic customers such as Yahoo! or the iTunes Music Store, and online video delivery is growing without bringing the backbone to a gridlocked standstill. And with the stated lack of network growth, some other network infrastructure companies should be in the red, too: Cisco, Juniper Networks, JDS Uniphase, Alcatel, Nortel... But wait, these are all multibillion- dollar outfits, and all are profitable again after a few lean post-bubble years. Somebody is buying and presumably installing new equipment, and lots of it. Add in the dark fiber left over from the bubble days, and there seems to be quite a bit of extra bandwidth to tap into if need arises.

Besides a perceived lack of network capacity, how would Cuban propose that we identify and authenticate "important" content? It's pretty much a given that any such scheme would bring out a hacker or two, bent on making ther next-gen file sharing or music streaming app run over the highest-level service channels. OK, so charge more for access to the better levels, right? Okay, but how is that different from what we have today? If your ISP is too slow, sign up for faster service. If traffic is too slow at your favorite sites, well, sometimes there's a subscription site that will outperform the free alternatives, and sometimes your content provider will just have to bite the bullet and upgrade something. There are ways around every problem.

The identity of the writer makes me question the motives behind the writing. Cuban is trying to run an entertainment business in 2929 Productions, and online delivery is already part of the agenda of that business. And you don't invest in a major league sports team unless you think that entertainment is worth something. Yet he outlines a plan to devalue his own line of business, without much benefit to the more important apps that don't exist yet. What does Cuban stand to gain from limiting his own business potential? I'm not sure how the tiered Internet as envisioned by Cuban would benefit his business.

Mark Cuban's business record and the wealth it brought him have ensured that his words will carry considerable weight; stack that on top of AT&T's recent actions and Verizon's favorable attitude to a tiered Internet, and it seems possible that Google's protests might have been in vain.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060117-5996.html





Internet Freeloaders

Should Google have to pay for the bandwidth it consumes?
Adam L. Penenberg

The Internet has always been about democracy—what the geeks who designed it call "network neutrality." Data, whether e-mail, a Web page, or video, get sent as packets that are reassembled at the end of their journeys. All packets are created equal, and Internet service providers deliver them without prejudice, based on their network's speed and capacity.

Telecommunications and cable companies—let's call them telco-cable— want to change that. Verizon, Comcast, and their ilk have been lobbying Congress to transform the Internet into a two-tiered system. By tagging content, broadband providers would ensure that their own packets (or those from companies paying them protection money) get preferential treatment and reach subscribers faster than second-tier content. This would give companies like Verizon a tremendous advantage as they roll out their own television and VoIP telephone services.

Telco-cable companies have spent billions to lay down broadband pipe and want a return on their investment. They are tired of bandwidth hogs like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft getting a free ride. This was fine when the Internet consisted mostly of e-mail and static Web pages. With the advent of online video, Internet telephony, and IPTV, Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth want content providers to share the cost. Their reasoning: If Google is going to introduce a video service, shouldn't it have to pay for some of the bandwidth it scarfs down?

But it isn't just the Googles of the Web that are soaking up bandwidth. According to the U.K.-based technology firm Cachelogic, peer-to-peer traffic accounts for 80 percent of the traffic of so-called last-mile providers, companies like Verizon and Time Warner Cable that take broadband that final mile into your home. All of this demand for video, music, and file-sharing could create bottlenecks for Verizon and Time Warner—the ones who hook up your home to the data grid.

As a result, telco-cable has been lobbying Congress to rewrite the Telecommunications Act of 1996. A draft of the new bill would codify "network neutrality" (which to this point has been voluntary) and forbid network service providers from blocking or otherwise sabotaging content. Usually fierce competitors, these gatekeepers can agree on one thing: They want to strike the network neutrality clause. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and eBay want to keep it. If telco-cable wins, it will be able to set up separate tiers, forcing Google to pay up or ride in the slow lane.

At this month's Consumer Electronics Show, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg explained, "We have to make sure that they [application providers] don't sit on our network and chew up bandwidth. We need to pay for the pipe." Perhaps, but what Verizon proposes is to charge twice for broadband: first to subscribers, then to content providers. In essence, telcos and cable companies want to privatize the Internet—a model we've pretty much left behind since the days of CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL.

If the telcos and cable companies get their way, we'll have a Balkanized Web. Content providers who can afford to pay for premium service will market superior products to consumers with fast connections. Everyone else will make do with second-class companies at second-class speeds.

The business model that this most resembles is cable television. There's one key difference, though. In the cable world, the service providers pay channels for the rights to broadcast their shows. In the system that telco-cable is proposing for the Internet, the content providers—who provide the services that make customers clamor for broadband in the first place—would have to pay for the privilege of being included.

Not all content providers are taking this lying down. Business 2.0's Om Malik reports that Google has been buying up miles of "dark" fiber— unused fiber-optic cable—at severely depressed prices. Malik believes that Google plans to "blanket major cities with Wi-Fi," including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York. Given Google's ethos, its Wi-Fi would probably be free, with revenue derived from targeted advertising. Obviously, the telcos and cable companies would have trouble competing with that. Even if telco-cable is successful in implementing a two-tiered Internet plan, another workaround could be municipal wireless networks, like those being built in Philadelphia. (No wonder Verizon has been fighting them tooth and nail.)

There's a far better solution than Verizon charging Google to use its bandwidth or Google becoming a service provider itself. What about having subscribers pay for the bandwidth they consume? Just like you buy variable rate cell-phone plans and pay for electricity based on how much you use, your broadband bills should be calculated the same way. That way, heavy Net users could subsidize the Internet for those who don't use it as often, and access would be available for anybody who wants it. Then content would remain free, and everyone would benefit.





And no Skype for you either

ipoque Releases Skype(TM) Filter and Extends Product Line
Press Release

ipoque releases new VoIP filter module for its line of PRX traffic managers which support detecting and blocking of Voice over IP traffic including SkypeTM. The new entry-level Gigabit Ethernet appliance PRX-250 is added to the PRX line. Prices for all Fast Ethernet models have been reduced.

Leipzig, Germany (PRWEB) January 16, 2006 -- The new Traffic Manager PRX-250 closes the gap between ipoque's enterprise and entry-level models. It features three Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and—similar to the Fast Ethernet models—passive cooling for maximum reliability. It achieves a packet rate of 60,000 packets/s and a throughput of 250 Mbit/s. Packet latency is below one millisecond.

The PRX traffic managers classify network traffic based on application layer signatures (currently peer-to-peer-based file sharing, Voice over IP, instant messenger). Classified traffic can be logged, shaped or blocked. The traffic manager operates as a transparent bridge for easy integration into existing network infrastructures without configuration changes necessary. Administration is done via a simple and self-explanatory Web interface making expensive staff training dispensable.

With the introduction of the PRX-250, ipoque reduces the prices for all Fast Ethernet models.

Skype(TM) Detection with the VoIP Module

Modular extensions for various application classes can be installed optionally. ipoque releases the new Voice over IP module for detecting and blocking of Skype(TM) and SIP connections.

The high proliferation of Skype(TM) clients, their strong encryption for Internet voice calls and their ability to circumvent firewall systems cause various problems. Among them are a significantly increased traffic volume, potential interference with other applications and the violation of national legislation for traffic monitoring and interception. Furthermore, Skype(TM) clients in company networks pose a security threat. This makes the VoIP module an interesting option for company network operators, Internet service providers and national carriers.

Also available for the PRX traffic managers are modules for filtering, shaping and blocking of peer-to-peer-based file sharing and for blocking of instant messengers. File sharing causes significantly more than 50% of the Internet traffic, and most files contain copyright-protected material. The usage of instant messengers cause problems mostly in company networks. They pose severe security risks and degrade staff productivity.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/1/prweb332240.htm





RevConnect 0.674k

Added by: A^C^E
Date: 17.01.06
Time: 16:52:55
Platform: Windows
Category: File Sharing
Downloaded 762 time(s)

RevConnect is a file sharing program based on DC++. It is fully compatible with the Direct Connect network.

Features:

· Multiple Source Downloading: Download one file from multiple users at the same time without corruption! This can vastly improve your download speeds.
· Automatically Recycle Excessive Sources: Prevent users from exhausting precious free slots in the network.
· Credit System: The credit system is used to reward users contributing to the network, i.e. uploading to other clients.
· Secure User Identification: Clients in the network are identified by a unique 384 bit RSA public key, it's used to grant earned credits with other users.
· Kademlia: A hub independent en more effective search engine.
· Magnet Link and Bitzi Lookup: Find and recommend quality files with ease. Take a look at the Share Masters for magnet links (and to post your own).
· Enhanced Auto Search: Once you decide your downloads, you never need find sources by yourself.

http://addict3d.org/index.php?page=downloadfile&ID=3695





Small Start-Up Releases Free File Sharing Service
Press Release

ByteRocket, a small start-up firm located in Dayton, Ohio, has just released a new file sharing service, call MyOtherDrive. This permits users to share any media type, pictures, movies, music. Anyone can create a new account an immediately have 2GB of storage space available.

Dayton, Ohio (PRWEB) Jan 14, 2006 -- ByteRocket, a small start-up firm located in Dayton, Ohio, has released a new file sharing Internet service, call MyOtherDrive. The website name is myotherdrive.com. The site is currently in beta.

Anyone with Internet access can create an account on the site and get 2GB of free storage space. The site handles photographs especially well, making it a real competitor with Snapfish, OFoto, AOL, and the others.

In addition to competing with the photo sharing sites, it indirectly competes with file sharing sites such as Kazaa and eDonkey. There is one important difference between myotherdrive and these "public" file sharing sites - myotherdrive.com users can share their files only with others they identify.

This site is great for sharing photos and movies from your digital camera with family and friends. It is also useful for sharing work files with fellow business associates. Because it is available on the Internet, and protected by username/password, business users can use the service to "park" large files so that they can move them from one computer to another when there is no direct connection between the computers.

The site runs as a Java applet that looks similar to the Microsoft Windows(r) Explorer(r) or ACDSee, permitting the user to create a folder "hierarchy" on the left side of the screen, and files on the right. File types that are recognized such as images, display as thumbnails. Any file type can be stored on myotherdrive.

The site includes a user manager utility that allows you to permit users to access subsets of your directories. Useful for limiting family to family related photos, and friends to friend related content.

In a nutshell, the site is essentially a free 2GB harddrive with a Explorer(r)-style interface, making the storage available anywhere Internet access is available.

This is ByteRocket's first public site. The company has plans to release other useful "personal" sites similar to myotherdrive.com over the coming year. Check it out - myotherdrive.com.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/1/prweb332234.htm





Surveillance

U.S. Is Pressing Google for Data on Searches
Katie Hafner and Matt Richtel

The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to compel Google, the Internet search giant, to turn over records on millions of its users' search queries as part of the government's effort to uphold an online pornography law.

Google has been refusing the request since a subpoena was first issued last August, even as three of its competitors agreed to provide information, according to court documents made public this week. Google asserts that the request is unnecessary, overly broad, would be onerous to comply with, would jeopardize its trade secrets and could expose identifying information about its users.

The dispute with Google comes as the government is moving aggressively on several fronts to obtain data on Internet activity to achieve its law enforcement goals, from domestic security to the prosecution of online crime. Under the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, for example, the Justice Department has demanded records on library patrons' Internet use.

Those efforts have encountered resistance on privacy grounds.

The government's move in the Google case, however, is different in its aims. Rather than seeking data on individuals, it says it is trying to establish a profile of Internet use that will help it defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law that would impose tough criminal penalties on individuals whose Web sites carried material deemed harmful to minors.

The law has faced repeated legal challenges. Two years ago, the Supreme Court upheld an injunction blocking its enforcement, returning the case to a district court for further examination of Internet-filtering technology that might be an alternative in achieving the law's aims.

The government's motion to compel Google's compliance was filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., near Google's headquarters in Mountain View. The subpoena and the government's motion were reported on Thursday by The San Jose Mercury News.

In addition to records of a week's worth of search queries, which could amount to billions of search terms, the Google subpoena seeks a random list of a million Web addresses in its index.

Charles Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said on Thursday that three Google competitors in Internet search technology - America Online, Yahoo and MSN, Microsoft's online service - had complied with subpoenas in the case.

Mr. Miller declined to say exactly how the data would be used, but according to the government's legal filings, it would help estimate the prevalence of online material that could be deemed harmful to minors and the effectiveness of filtering software in blocking it. Opponents of the pornography law contend that filtering software could protect minors effectively enough to make the law unnecessary.

The government's motion calls for Google to surrender the information within 21 days of court approval.

Although the government has modified its demands in talks with Google since last year, Google made it clear on Thursday that it would continue to fight. "Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and their demand for information overreaches," said Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel, referring to government lawyers. "We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to, and we intend to resist their motion vigorously."

Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was hired by the Justice Department to analyze search engine data in the case, said in legal documents that search engine data provided crucial insight into information on the Internet.

"Google is one of the most popular search engines," he wrote in a court document related to the case. Thus, he said, Google's databases of Web addresses and user searches "are directly relevant."

But Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online industry newsletter, questioned the need for such a subpoena. "Is this really something the government needs Google to help them with?" he said. "They could go create their own searches."

MSN declined to speak directly to the case but released a statement saying it generally "works closely with law enforcement officials."

Mary Osako, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said the company complied with the subpoena "on a limited basis." And Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for AOL, said that company gave the Justice Department a generic list of anonymous search terms from a one-day period.

Susan P. Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York, said she could understand why the companies complied. "There's this real perception that if you're not with us you're against us," she said. "So the major companies will cooperate with enormously burdensome requests just to avoid future vengeance being wreaked on them" by the Justice Department.

In its brief history, Google has made "Don't be evil" an operating principle, even as it has come to endure scrutiny and criticism over its increasing inroads into a variety of businesses beyond Web searches, from advertising to mapping.

And Google and its rivals have been criticized for their business practices in China, where Google and MSN have filtered keywords like "human rights" and "democracy" out of their search-engine results.

While its court filings against the Justice Department subpoena have emphasized the burden of compliance and threat to its trade secrets, Google also pointed to a chilling effect on its customers.

"Google's acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services," it said in an October letter to the Justice Department. "This is not a perception Google can accept. And one can envision scenarios where queries alone could reveal identifying information about a specific Google user, which is another outcome that Google cannot accept."

For its part, the Justice Department said the data received from Google's rivals showed that the search query information did not contain "any additional personal identifying information" and that trade secrets would be protected under procedures at the trial court.

"Google thus should have no difficulty in complying in the same way as its competitors have," the government's motion said.

Critics of the effort to subpoena Google say the immediate issue is not pornography or privacy, but whether the government has established its need for the information.

"The government's attitude, apparently, is that it's entitled to information without justification," said Aden Fine, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has led the fight against the 1998 pornography law. "Like everyone else in litigation, they need to justify their request for information."

Even as the government has yet to put the 1998 law into effect, the pornography industry has faced a legal offensive on other fronts. Congress in recent years has increased the resources and sharpened the laws available to the Justice Department to go after makers of hard-core videos and other content.

At the same time, though, the industry is booming, recording $12.6 billion in revenue in 2005 from distribution of sexually explicit content, and from other forms of entertainment, like strip clubs. A big reason for the growth is technology, with sales from Internet distribution hitting $2.5 billion in 2005, according to testimony given to the Senate on Thursday.

American Web sites that show explicit content get as many as 60 million visitors a day, according to testimony given to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation by Paul Cambria, general counsel for the Adult Freedom Foundation, an organization that represents the interests of the pornography industry.

In fighting the 1998 law, the civil liberties union has argued that whether or not pornography is available on the Internet, the law is unconstitutional because it will limit the distribution of acceptable forms of free speech. Under the law, Web site operators face criminal charges for publishing sexually explicit material unless they have a way of verifying that viewers are over 17.

Whatever the courts ultimately decide on the pornography law at issue, however, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the Google case pointed to a larger struggle for the identity of the Internet.

"Search engines are at the center of that battle, both here and in other countries," said Professor Wu. "By asserting its power over search engines, using threats of force, the government can directly affect what the Internet experience is. For while Google is fighting the subpoena, it's clear that if they lose, they will comply."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/te...rtner=homepage





Report Questions Legality of Briefings on Surveillance
Scott Shane

A legal analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concludes that the Bush administration's limited briefings for Congress on the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping without warrants are "inconsistent with the law."

The analysis was requested by Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who said in a Jan. 4 letter to President Bush that she believed the briefings should be open to all the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Instead, the briefings have been limited to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate and of the Intelligence Committees, the so-called Gang of Eight.

Since 2002, the security agency has intercepted the international phone calls and e-mail messages of some Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes are linked to Al Qaeda. The eavesdropping was authorized by an executive order signed by President Bush but without the court warrants usually required.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday scheduled an open hearing on the eavesdropping program for Feb. 6. The hearing, titled "Wartime executive power and the N.S.A.'s surveillance authority," is expected to include testimony from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

In an interview on Wednesday, Ms. Harman, of California, said she had been invited to another briefing on the program at the White House on Friday and had urged senior administration officials to open the session to the full committees.

She declined to name the officials, but a Congressional staff member said they were Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; and David S. Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Mr. Cheney's office oversees the briefings on the surveillance program.

Of the Congressional Research Service analysis, Ms. Harman said, "It's a solid piece of work, and it confirms a view I've held for a long time."

A White House spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity because the program was classified, said, "We continue to brief the appropriate members of Congress as we have been for the last several years."

A spokesman for Representative Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Mr. Hoekstra was traveling and had not seen the report.

The spokesman, Jamal D. Ware, said that Mr. Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, believed the briefings had been adequate for Congressional oversight but that he was open to expanding them.

"The chairman is taking it under consideration and does support some expansion of the number of Intelligence Committee members who are briefed," Mr. Ware said.

The Congressional Research Service memorandum, sent to the Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, explores the requirement in the National Security Act of 1947 that the committees be kept "fully and currently informed" of intelligence activities. It notes that the law specifically allows notification of "covert actions" to the Gang of Eight, but says the security agency's program does not appear to be a covert action program.

As a result, the memorandum says, limiting the briefings to just eight members of Congress "would appear to be inconsistent with the law."

The memorandum, written by Alfred Cumming, a national security specialist at the research service, does lay out several possible defenses for the administration's position. "The executive branch may assert that the mere discussion of the N.S.A. program generally could expose certain intelligence sources and methods to disclosure," it says.

In a related action, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington, said it would file suit against the Justice Department for failing to release documents on the eavesdropping program that it had requested under the Freedom of Information Act. A department spokesman said the department gave an initial response to the center's request within three days of its receipt on Dec. 16, saying it had approved expedited handling for the request.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/politics/19nsa.html





Two Groups Planning to Sue Over Federal Eavesdropping
Eric Lichtblau

Two leading civil rights groups plan to file lawsuits Tuesday against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program to determine whether the operation was used to monitor 10 defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists and other Americans with ties to the Middle East.

The two lawsuits, which are being filed separately by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in Federal District Court in Manhattan, are the first major court challenges to the eavesdropping program.

Both groups are seeking to have the courts order an immediate end to the program, which the groups say is illegal and unconstitutional. The Bush administration has strongly defended the legality and necessity of the surveillance program, and officials said the Justice Department would probably oppose the lawsuits on national security grounds.

Justice Department officials would not comment on any specific individuals who might have been singled out under the National Security Agency program, and they said the department would review the lawsuits once they were filed.

Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Justice Department, added Monday that "the N.S.A. surveillance activities described by the president were conducted lawfully and provide valuable tools in the war on terrorism to keep America safe and protect civil liberties."

The lawsuits seek to answer one of the major questions surrounding the eavesdropping program: has it been used solely to single out the international phone calls and e- mail messages of people with known links to Al Qaeda, as President Bush and his most senior advisers have maintained, or has it been abused in ways that civil rights advocates say could hark back to the political spying abuses of the 1960's and 70's?

"There's almost a feeling of déjà vu with this program," said James Bamford, an author and journalist who is one of five individual plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit who say they suspect that the program may have been used to monitor their international communications.

"It's a return to the bad old days of the N.S.A.," said Mr. Bamford, who has written two widely cited books on the intelligence agency.

Although the program's public disclosure last month has generated speculation that it may have been used to monitor journalists or politicians, no evidence has emerged to support that idea. Bush administration officials point to a secret audit by the Justice Department last year that reviewed a sampling of security agency interceptions involving Americans and that they said found no documented abuses.

The Center for Constitutional Rights plans to sue on behalf of four lawyers at the center and a legal assistant there who work on terrorism-related cases at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and overseas, which often involves international e-mail messages and phone calls. Similarly, the plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit include five Americans who work in international policy and terrorism, along with the A.C.L.U. and three other groups.

"We don't have any direct evidence" that the plaintiffs were monitored by the security agency, said Ann Beeson, associate legal director for the A.C.L.U. "But the plaintiffs have a well-founded belief that they may have been monitored, and there's a real chilling effect in the fear that they can no longer have confidential discussions with clients or sources without the possibility that the N.S.A. is listening."

One of the A.C.L.U. plaintiffs, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, said that a Stanford student studying in Egypt conducted research for him on political opposition groups, and that he worried that communications between them on sensitive political topics could be monitored. "How can we communicate effectively if you risk being intercepted by the National Security Agency?" Mr. Diamond said.

Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has written in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; Barnett R. Rubin, a scholar at New York University who works in international relations; Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect; the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group; and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Islamic advocacy group.

The lawsuits over the eavesdropping program come as several defense lawyers in terrorism cases have begun challenges, arguing that the government may have improperly hidden the use of the surveillance program from the courts in investigating terrorism leads.

Bill Goodman, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that in suing in federal court to block the surveillance program, his group believed "without question" that Mr. Bush violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs wiretaps, by authorizing the security agency operation.

But Mr. Goodman acknowledged that in persuading a federal judge to intervene, "politically, it's a difficult case to make."

He added: "We recognize that it's extremely difficult for a court to stand up to a president, particularly a president who is determined to extend his power beyond anything envisioned by the founding fathers. That takes courage."

The debate over the legality of Mr. Bush's eavesdropping program will be at the center of Congressional hearings expected to begin next month. Former Vice President Al Gore entered the fray on Monday with a speech in Washington that accused Mr. Bush of running roughshod over the Constitution.

American liberties, Mr. Gore said, "have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power."

"As we begin this new year," he continued, "the executive branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17nsa.html





Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends
Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane and Don Van Natta Jr.

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."

But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."

Intelligence officials disagree with any characterization of the program's results as modest, said Judith A. Emmel, a spokeswoman for the office of the director of national intelligence. Ms. Emmel cited a statement at a briefing last month by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the country's second-ranking intelligence official and the director of the N.S.A. when the program was started.

"I can say unequivocally that we have gotten information through this program that would not otherwise have been available," General Hayden said. The White House and the F.B.I. declined to comment on the program or its results.

The differing views of the value of the N.S.A.'s foray into intelligence-gathering in the United States may reflect both bureaucratic rivalry and a culture clash. The N.S.A., an intelligence agency, routinely collects huge amounts of data from across the globe that may yield only tiny nuggets of useful information; the F.B.I., while charged with fighting terrorism, retains the traditions of a law enforcement agency more focused on solving crimes.

"It isn't at all surprising to me that people not accustomed to doing this would say, 'Boy, this is an awful lot of work to get a tiny bit of information,' " said Adm. Bobby R. Inman, a former N.S.A. director. "But the rejoinder to that is, Have you got anything better?"

Several of the law enforcement officials acknowledged that they might not know of arrests or intelligence activities overseas that grew out of the domestic spying program. And because the program was a closely guarded secret, its role in specific cases may have been disguised or hidden even from key investigators.

Still, the comments on the N.S.A. program from the law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, many of them high level, are the first indication that the program was viewed with skepticism by key figures at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency responsible for disrupting plots and investigating terrorism on American soil.

All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. It is coming under scrutiny next month in hearings on Capitol Hill, which were planned after members of Congress raised questions about the legality of the eavesdropping. The program was disclosed in December by The New York Times.

The law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the program had uncovered no active Qaeda networks inside the United States planning attacks. "There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," the former F.B.I. official said.

Some of the officials said the eavesdropping program might have helped uncover people with ties to Al Qaeda in Albany; Portland, Ore.; and Minneapolis. Some of the activities involved recruitment, training or fund-raising.

But, along with several British counterterrorism officials, some of the officials questioned assertions by the Bush administration that the program was the key to uncovering a plot to detonate fertilizer bombs in London in 2004. The F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials also expressed doubts about the importance of the program's role in another case named by administration officials as a success in the fight against terrorism, an aborted scheme to topple the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch.

Some officials said that in both cases, they had already learned of the plans through interrogation of prisoners or other means.

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration pressed the nation's intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. to move urgently to thwart any more plots. The N.S.A., whose mission is to spy overseas, began monitoring the international e-mail messages and phone calls of people inside the United States who were linked, even indirectly, to suspected Qaeda figures.

Under a presidential order, the agency conducted the domestic eavesdropping without seeking the warrants ordinarily required from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handles national security matters. The administration has defended the legality of the program, pointing to what it says is the president's inherent constitutional power to defend the country and to legislation passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Administration officials told Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, of the eavesdropping program, and his agency was enlisted to run down leads from it, several current and former officials said.

While he and some bureau officials discussed the fact that the program bypassed the intelligence surveillance court, Mr. Mueller expressed no concerns about that to them, those officials said. But another government official said Mr. Mueller had questioned the administration about the legal authority for the program.

Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. In other cases, lists of phone numbers appeared to result from the agency's computerized scanning of communications coming into and going out of the country for names and keywords that might be of interest. The deliberate blurring of the source of the tips caused some frustration among those who had to follow up.

F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips "would always say that we had information whose source we can't share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Qaeda operative." He said, "I would always wonder, what does 'suspected' mean?"

"The information was so thin," he said, "and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up."

In response to the F.B.I. complaints, the N.S.A. eventually began ranking its tips on a three-point scale, with 3 being the highest priority and 1 the lowest, the officials said. Some tips were considered so hot that they were carried by hand to top F.B.I. officials. But in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised field agents, said.

The views of some bureau officials about the value of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance offers a revealing glimpse of the difficulties law enforcement and intelligence agencies have had cooperating since Sept. 11.

The N.S.A., criticized by the national Sept. 11 commission for its "avoidance of anything domestic" before the attacks, moved aggressively into the domestic realm after them. But the legal debate over its warrantless eavesdropping has embroiled the agency in just the kind of controversy its secretive managers abhor. The F.B.I., meanwhile, has struggled over the last four years to expand its traditional mission of criminal investigation to meet the larger menace of terrorism.

Admiral Inman, the former N.S.A. director and deputy director of C.I.A., said the F.B.I. complaints about thousands of dead-end leads revealed a chasm between very different disciplines. Signals intelligence, the technical term for N.S.A.'s communications intercepts, rarely produces "the complete information you're going to get from a document or a witness" in a traditional F.B.I. investigation, he said.

Some F.B.I. officials said they were uncomfortable with the expanded domestic role played by the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies, saying most intelligence officers lacked the training needed to safeguard Americans' privacy and civil rights. They said some protections had to be waived temporarily in the months after Sept. 11 to detect a feared second wave of attacks, but they questioned whether emergency procedures like the eavesdropping should become permanent.

That discomfort may explain why some F.B.I. officials may seek to minimize the benefits of the N.S.A. program or distance themselves from the agency. "This wasn't our program," an F.B.I. official said. "It's not our mess, and we're not going to clean it up."

The N.S.A.'s legal authority for collecting the information it passed to the F.B.I. is uncertain. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a warrant for the use of so-called pen register equipment that records American phone numbers, even if the contents of the calls are not intercepted. But officials with knowledge of the program said no warrants were sought to collect the numbers, and it is unclear whether the secret executive order signed by Mr. President Bush in 2002 to authorize eavesdropping without warrants also covered the collection of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

Aside from the director, F.B.I. officials did not question the legal status of the tips, assuming that N.S.A. lawyers had approved. They were more concerned about the quality and quantity of the material, which produced "mountains of paperwork" often more like raw data than conventional investigative leads.

"It affected the F.B.I. in the sense that they had to devote so many resources to tracking every single one of these leads, and, in my experience, they were all dry leads," the former senior prosecutor said. "A trained investigator never would have devoted the resources to take those leads to the next level, but after 9/11, you had to."

By the administration's account, the N.S.A. eavesdropping helped lead investigators to Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver and friend of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Faris spoke of toppling the Brooklyn Bridge by taking a torch to its suspension cables, but concluded that it would not work. He is now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison.

But as in the London fertilizer bomb case, some officials with direct knowledge of the Faris case dispute that the N.S.A. information played a significant role.

By contrast, different officials agree that the N.S.A.'s domestic operations played a role in the arrest of an imam and another man in Albany in August 2004 as part of an F.B.I. counterterrorism sting investigation. The men, Yassin Aref, 35, and Mohammed Hossain, 49, are awaiting trial on charges that they attempted to engineer the sale of missile launchers to an F.B.I. undercover informant.

In addition, government officials said the N.S.A. eavesdropping program might have assisted in the investigations of people with suspected Qaeda ties in Portland and Minneapolis. In the Minneapolis case, charges of supporting terrorism were filed in 2004 against Mohammed Abdullah Warsame, a Canadian citizen. Six people in the Portland case were convicted of crimes that included money laundering and conspiracy to wage war against the United States.

Even senior administration officials with access to classified operations suggest that drawing a clear link between a particular source and the unmasking of a potential terrorist is not always possible.

When Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was asked last week on "The Charlie Rose Show" whether the N.S.A. wiretapping program was important in deterring terrorism, he said, "I don't know that it's ever possible to attribute one strand of intelligence from a particular program."

But Mr. Chertoff added, "I can tell you in general the process of doing whatever you can do technologically to find out what is being said by a known terrorist to other people, and who that person is communicating with, that is without a doubt one of the critical tools we've used time and again."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/po... ner=homepage





High-Tech Prison to Open in Netherlands
Toby Sterling

A high-tech prison opening this week where inmates wear electronic wristbands that track their every movement and guards monitor cells using emotion-recognition software.

Authorities are convinced the jail in Lelystad _ quickly dubbed "the Big Brother Prison" by the local press _ represents the future of correctional facilities: cheap and efficient, without coddling criminals or violating their fundamental rights.

Detainees will be kept in six-man dormitory cells. They will do their own cooking, washing and organize their own daytime schedules via a touch-screen monitor at the foot of their beds.

"We hesitate to compare it to a youth hostel because the biggest part of being punished is that you've lost your freedom," Justice Ministry spokesman Hans Janssens said.

Prisoners have limited choices for their activities _ electives include drug education classes and exercise _ and they are locked in their cells at night.

Unlike the "Big Brother" television program, camera surveillance is limited to public spaces _ not on bunk beds or in bathrooms.

Cells are equipped with microphones that relay information to the prison's control center, where software analyzes sound volume and rhythm to alert guards when a violent confrontation between inmates may be taking place.

Prison officials expect to save money: The estimated cost per prisoner is $125 per night, compared with $170 at other Dutch prisons. Because monitoring is easier, the Lelystad facility requires far fewer guards.

Pieter Vleeming of the European Organization for the Protection of Prisoner's Rights said prisoners should be given more opportunity for self-improvement and job training, though he generally gave the prison positive marks.

"From a punishment point of view there are no objections," he said. "You could call it progress."
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/s...toryId=1146412





Korea To Use Robocops
Kim Tae-gyu

By the 2010s, Korea is expecting to see robots assisting police and the military, patrolling the neighborhoods and going on recon missions on the battlefield.

The Center for Intelligent Robots on Monday said the state-backed agency plans to check the feasibility of security robots by convening a 40-member planning committee late this week.

``If the robots prove to be viable technically and commercially, we will be able to begin developing them late next year,'' said Lee Ho-gil, head of the center.

When completed, the outdoor security robots will be able to make their night watch rounds and even chase criminals, according to Lee.

The government also seeks to build combat robots. They will take the shape of a dog or a horse, with six or eight legs or wheels.

Toward that end, the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) and the Defense Ministry will combine to channel a total of 33.4 billion won ($33.9 million) through 2011.

``The robots will be directed by a remote control system or move autonomously via their own artificial intelligence systems,'' MIC project manager Oh Sang-rok said.

``The two sophisticated robots will be empowered by the country's state-of-the-art mobile network, thus enabling mass production at an affordable price,'' Oh noted.

Smart robots need three basic functions of sensing, processing and action. Thus far, robotics researchers have tried to cram the three into a single dummy, causing expenses to soar.

Instead, the planned robots will be receiving most sensing and processing capabilities via a Web connection. Only the ability of movement will be located in the robot.

``In a nutshell, the mobile robot offers a hardware platform for the smart functions provided by the country's advanced network connected to the super computers,'' Oh said.

Korea boasts the world's highest penetration of high-speed Internet with roughly 12 million out of total 15.5 million households hooked up to the always-on connection.

On top of their use in national defense and social security, the MIC hopes to use the network robots for the private sector late this year.

``Three kinds of households machines will commercially debut this October. They will sell for 1-2 million won, a price that will not scare off customers. The low price is possible since they are empowered by outside networks instead of incorporated software,'' Oh said.

The three sorts of wheeled robots will be used for various applications: cleaning rooms, health-care programs, Internet connection, home monitoring or reading books to kids.

The mechanical servants, some of which have the ability to re-charge automatically, can also order Chinese food and pizza by connecting to the local network.

The MIC already finished a test run of the household robots late last year by installing them in 64 households and two post offices in Seoul and its vicinity.

Hyung Tae-gun, director general at the MIC, expected the robots will sell up to 3,000 units for this year alone and the sales will surge in the near future.

``Recently Japan unveiled household service robots priced at up to 10 million won, almost 10 times as expensive as ours. So you can guess the competitiveness of our network robots,'' Hyung said.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/2006...7112710160.htm





Anonymity on a Disk
Quinn Norton

To many privacy geeks, it's the holy grail -- a totally anonymous and secure computer so easy to use you can hand it to your grandmother and send her off on her own to the local Starbucks.

That was the guiding principle for the members of kaos.theory security research when they set out to put a secure crypto-heavy operating systems on a bootable CD: a disk that would offer the masses the same level of privacy available to security professionals, but with an easy user interface.

"If Granny's into trannies, and doesn't want her grandkids to know, she should be able to download without fear," says Taylor Banks, project leader.

It's a difficult problem, entailing a great deal of attention to both security details and usability issues. The group finally unveiled their finished product at the Shmoo Con hacker conference here Saturday, with mixed results.

Titled Anonym.OS, the system is a type of disk called a "live CD" -- meaning it's a complete solution for using a computer without touching the hard drive. Developers say Anonym.OS is likely the first live CD based on the security-heavy OpenBSD operating system.

OpenBSD running in secure mode is relatively rare among desktop users. So to keep from standing out, Anonym.OS leaves a deceptive network fingerprint. In everything from the way it actively reports itself to other computers, to matters of technical minutia such as TCP packet length, the system is designed to look like Windows XP SP1. "We considered part of what makes a system anonymous is looking like what is most popular, so you blend in with the crowd," explains project developer Adam Bregenzer of Super Light Industry.

Booting the CD, you are presented with a text based wizard-style list of questions to answer, one at a time, with defaults that will work for most users. Within a few moments, a fairly naive user can be up and running and connected to an open Wi-Fi point, if one is available.

Once you're running, you have a broad range of anonymity-protecting applications at your disposal.

But actually using the system can be a slow experience. Anonym.OS makes extensive use of Tor, the onion routing network that relies on an array of servers passing encrypted traffic to permit untraceable surfing. Sadly, Tor has recently suffered from user-base growth far outpacing the number of servers available to those users -- at last count there were only 419 servers worldwide. So Tor lags badly at times of heavy use.

Between Tor's problems, and some nagging performance issues on the disk itself, Banks concedes that the CD is not yet ready for the wide audience he hopes to someday serve. "Is Grandma really going to be able to use it today? I don't know. If she already uses the internet, yes."

Experts also say Anonym.OS may not solve the internet's most pressing issues, such as the notorious China problem: repressive governments that monitor their population's net access, and censor or jail citizens who speak out against the government.

Ethan Zuckerman, fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, works extensively with international bloggers and journalists, many of whom live under constant threat from their own governments. He see Anonym.OS as a blessing for some -- but not for those at the greatest risk.

"I think it's going to be tremendously useful for fairly sophisticated users when they are traveling, but where it may not be as effective as people would hope is in counties where the government is really seriously about locking down the net, constraining internet access," Zuckerman says.

Because most people in the developing world use the internet from shared desktop environments, services for them have to consider office place and cyber cafe-based computer situations. "Rebooting isn't often an option," explains Zuckerman, who would like to see anonymity solutions move toward minimally invasive strategies like the TorPark, a USB key that allows access to a Tor enabled browser without rebooting, and private proxies matched up one by one with dissidents.

But kaos.theory members say Anonym.OS is just the first step in making anonymity widely available. Future versions, they say, may run on a USB keychain. Additionally, they plan to implement Enigmail to allow encrypted e-mail for Thunderbird and Gaim Off The Record, which allows users to use instant messaging without their logs being tied to them.

David Del Torto, chief security officer of the non-profit CryptoRights group, says projects like Anonym.OS are heading in the right direction, but thinks the project overreaches by trying to be useful to everyone. "Grandmas are not the ones that need this right now.... My instincts tell me that it's a very small number of people (that can use Anonym.OS). You can't really solve this problem by simplifying the interface. It's almost impossible to anticipate everything a user can do to hurt themselves."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...w=wn_tophead_1





One Of My Favorite Sayings Is "All A Lock Does Is Keep An Honest Man Honest"
Jared Bouck

Back in my schooling days I had the opportunity to take the bane of most geek life's, a course on communications and public speaking. With an attitude of rebellion I chose the topic for the final, I was going to teach the entire class how to pick locks in 5 short minutes. With a couple overhead slides, some hair pins, and about 15 master locks I was successful in demonstrating to the class the extreme ease of picking locks. As the other students passed the locks around the class most of them were eventually met with the new reality they had to live in, for there ignorance was no longer the bliss they lived in.

While there is a decade or more of heated debates on the topic of humanity and honesty, it is with the fore mentioned biases that we are doing this project. I have been actively interested in locksmithing and more over lock picking for several years. Any time a new gadget comes out that speeds up the ability to pick a lock it is often extremely overpriced. One of these types of tools is the vibrating lockpick. 60-120 bucks for a vibrating lockpick was a bit ridiculous in my opinion, so I decided to come up with a cheep way of making a good vibrating lock pick. For about 9.00 and a half hour we have produced a comparable lockpick to the most expensive commercial ones.

Now I feel it important to state that this project in no ways will attempt to teach one how to pick locks. There are so many comprehensive articles out there on that topic that it would be a complete waste of time. But, here is a link to one of the more famous articles on the web for your learning interests. The MIT guide to lock picking.

The Oral-B Humming Bird

I am sure that not once in the product testing, and focus groups and marketing meetings did Oral-B ever think that there was a possibility that there vibrating flossier would be the central component of such a potentially questionable project. A very well build and engineered unit, the Oral-B flossier is compact and powerful. Using a standard AAA battery at 1.5 volt battery and a micro vibrating motor. At about 6.00 not to shabby for what you get.

Lockpicks

Lockpicks are nothing new as we know, and there are a lot of different type available depending on the type of lock your interested in picking. For our project we are going to be building the vibrating pick just for pin and tumbler style locks. The easiest lock pick for new comers to picking is the Rake. With that in mind we chose to use a manufactured lock pick. New picks can be purchased for about 2.00 and tension wrenches for about 1.50. But for those that are interested in making there own there are several materials and methods to make your own. All you need is some strong spring steel and a file. Hair pins work well as does the metal strips in some windshield wiper blades.

9V plug and battery

After a quick trip to radio shaq and about 50 cents for a nine volt battery connector and a buck or two for a nine volt battery we have our new power source. Now obviously it won't fit inside of the space for the triple "A" battery, so a longer cord on the nine volt plug is preferred.


Tools that we used ( I.E. you may want to use as well )

One note on power tools: use them at your own risk. Be sure to read and understand any and all documentation on the tools you use. No amount of documentation can make up for experience, but there are many people with serious eye injuries at the school of hard knocks. If you don't know what you are doing, don't do it and find some one that can help.


Screwdrivers
Pliers
Soldering iron
Super Glue or Epoxy
Wire cutters


materials overview - what parts will you need


disassembly - preparing for the real work


preparing for the real work


final assembly - so, was it worth it.


http://www.inventgeek.com/Projects/lockpick/Page1.aspx





Why PC Gamer Kicked Out Gold Farmers
Greg Vederman

In its February 2006 issue, PC Gamer announced that it would no longer accept advertising from Gold Farming agencies. Editor-in-chief Greg Vederman (pictured) shares his editorial from that issue, explains the thinking behind the decision, and talks about industry and reader reaction…
PCG’s Letter From the Editor, February, 2006:

Secret wars. We all fight them occasionally. And just like when Dr. Doom fought the Beyonder and temporarily stole his powers, or when Chuck Norris continued to roundhouse kick his way through Vietnam well into the ’80s, recently, the editors of PC Gamer have been embroiled in a secret battle of our very own. The enemy? MMO Gold Farmers.

Lately, 'gold farming' companies such as IGE and Power Leveling — companies whose business is the accumulation and (potentially illicit) real-world sale of virtual MMO property, including gold, in-game items, and characters — have begun running ads in magazines like ours. For the record, PC Gamer’s official stance on these types of companies is that they are despicable: not only do they brazenly break many MMOs’ End-User License Agreements, but they all-too-often ruin legitimate players’ fun.

To put it mildly, we here at PCG are furious that these types of ads ever made it into the magazine. We know that their presence has upset you, too, because we’ve received, read, and sympathized with all of your emails saying so. Take this recent heartfelt letter from a reader who goes by the name 'Rushlight' as a perfect example:

"Lately, in my beloved World of Warcraft, I’ve had to put up with an influx of farmers. They’ve driven me out of the end-game areas, stolen my crafting nodes, undercut me at auction houses, and tricked in-game monsters into attacking me so that they can meet their quotas. The biggest ad-sponsored WoW fan sites are bombarded with banners for gold and account sales. Even in-game, I get emails and whispers from spammers telling me the addresses of gold sellers. And now I crack open my new issue of PCG, only to be slapped in the face with even MORE gold ads? C’mon, guys! Have a heart for a poor besieged troll. Drop the gold advertisements, won’t you please?"

After months of behind-the-scenes talks with our sales department, I’m extremely proud to announce that starting with last month’s issue, PC Gamer will no longer accept ads or ad dollars from Gold Farmers. Screw them. As a company, we have agreed to turn down what literally amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual ad revenue so that you, as a reader, can game easy knowing that we’ve got your back. I challenge my fellow PC gaming mags and websites to follow our path and to help us close down these bastard companies by attrition.

For my part, I sincerely apologize to all of our readers for not being able to make this happen sooner. Unfortunately, 'the separation of church and state' that exists between PC Gamer’s ad sales team and editorial team make negotiations like this one tricky. But we’re all on the same page now. Good thing, too, because for a while there I felt like I was a big green dude in purple pants, bearing the weight of an entire mountain on my shoulders.

Next: Reaction

Even at this early stage (the issue only went on sale at newsstand in early January), the reaction has been, as I’m sure you can imagine, extremely positive. We’ve already received numerous emails from elated readers, thanking us for our stance. I’ve even taken a couple of phone calls from some very happy MMO publishers.

Honestly, though, we didn’t do this because we were looking for praise. Not at all.PC gaming mags and websites aren’t supposed to run ads like these and we know it. Our readers hate them, we hate them, game publishers hate them. It was important to me that we pull these ads because they never should have appeared in PC Gamer in the first place.

Unfortunately, companies like IGE make far too much money to simply up and disappear just because PC Gamer stopped taking their ads. But I’m hoping that if enough of us – enough magazines and websites – can get together and agree to bar them access to our various publications, that the number of gamers who use such services will begin to decline. And, of course, at some point soon, MMO publishers, collectively, are going to have make a strong push of their own – do more than just ban suspicious accounts – if they really want to get (and keep) farmers out of their games.

Inspired to subscribe

Getting back to those elated readers, here’s a sample of what they’ve been telling us:

"I just thought I'd let you know that your decision to no longer use gold farmer company ads in your magazine has inspired me to subscribe. I usually just pick up an issue here and there depending on what game is prominently featured, but if you're not supporting the gold farmers, then I want to support you as best I can. Thank you!"

And another: "Blizzard is trying to cope with the problem of gold farmers but I believe they have grown somewhat apathetic. Sure, they recently said that they closed 18,000 'hacker'accounts over three months, but it still has not really sent a message that gold farmers will not be tolerated. Your stance has sent that message. It's a hard line and I'm thrilled to see someone actually make it. Tell your sales department that I'll being renewing my subscription until the day I die."

Emails like these leave no doubt in my mind that we did the right thing. Now the industry as a whole must pull together to get rid of this scourge, these parasites. Otherwise, one of the most promising sectors of the market may eventually be consumed from within.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?op...=2058&Itemid=2





Chinese WOW Players Speak Out
Ellie Gibson

Chinese World of Warcraft players are being discriminated against by English speakers who assume they're all gold-farmers, according to reports on Chinese-language website Tales of Warcraft.

More than 7,000 posters on the site's forum claim they have fallen victim to the problem, which is said to occur when Chinese players attempt to join groups. Apparently there is a common belief among English speaking players that most non-English speakers are gold farmers and are only playing for commercial gain.

As a result, players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English. If the sentences contain spelling or grammar mistakes, the player is rejected. Since you have to join groups to complete certain quests in WOW, this is presenting many Chinese players with a serious problem.

Mark MacKay, owner of the WOW Gold Price List website, has condemned this practice in a statement which reads: "Over over 1.5 million World of Warcraft players are from China alone, with the majority of these players being non-English. While their has been recent publicity about the gold farm factories in China, it by no means justifies thinking that every Chinese or non- English speaking player is a gold farmer."

MacKay doesn't have an instant solution to the problem, but says that English- speaking WOW players should "Keep a more open mind and trust people a little more.

"This would go a long way to bringing some racial harmony to World of Warcraft and the world in general."
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=62500





Local news

Connecticut Probing Sale Of Cell Phone Records
Jeremy Pelofsky

Connecticut is investigating companies that may have illegally sold consumers' cell phone records, state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said on Wednesday.

"My office has an aggressive, ongoing investigation and will take any action appropriate to pursue any company illegally obtaining and profiting from personal cell phone records," Blumenthal said.

The investigation began in recent months after his office received a handful of complaints.

The Federal Communications Commission said last week it had launched an investigation into how companies obtained the phone records that are available for purchase on the Internet.

In Washington, a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation on Wednesday that would make it a crime to steal and sell records for cell phones, traditional landlines and Internet-based telephones.

The bill would criminalize the act of making false statements to obtain a customer's phone record or access records on the Internet without permission. It would also become a crime for a phone company employee to sell customer data without permission.

"Stealing a person's phone log can lead to serious personal, financial and safety issues for just about any American," said Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat.

Also sponsoring the bill was Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat. The bill would likely have to go through Specter's committee as well as the Senate Commerce Committee.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said in a statement that the panel will review possible legislative options and "will hold a public hearing in the near future to investigate how to better protect phone records."

Reps. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, and Jay Inslee, a Washington Democrat, said they plan to offer similar legislation when the U.S. House of Representatives returns later this month.

Rep. Edward Markey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce telecommunications and Internet subcommittee, also plans to offer legislation, according to his spokeswoman.

There are more than 200 million cell phone subscribers, according to a wireless industry organization, CTIA.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said last week the agency would take action against telephone carriers that failed to adequately protect consumers records. He also said it may be up to the Federal Trade Commission to take action against those who fraudulently obtain the data.

"Commission staff have been coordinating with FTC staff on activities underway in both agencies to address this disturbing conduct," Martin said in a January 13 letter.

T-Mobile, the No. 4 wireless carrier, owned by Deutsche Telekom AG <DTEGn.DE>, said on Wednesday it had sent cease and desist orders to a number of companies to stop the practice.

The biggest U.S. wireless carrier, Cingular Wireless, owned by AT&T Inc. <T.N> and BellSouth Corp. <BLS.N>, said last week it had obtained a temporary restraining order against Data Find Solutions and 1st Source Information Specialists Inc.

It said it had sued the companies alleging they "unlawfully obtained and disseminated Cingular customer records."

Web sites offering call records for a price include locatecell.com and datatraceusa.com. Reuters was unsuccessful in immediately contacting them.

Locatecell.com has posted a notice on its home page stating that queries regarding Cingular numbers "will not be accepted or processed at this time."

(Additional reporting by Sinead Carew in New York)
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/s...toryId=1146492





Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service
Andrew Pollack

There are bacteria that blink on and off like Christmas tree lights and bacteria that form multicolored patterns of concentric circles resembling an archery target. Yet others can reproduce photographic images.

These are not strange-but-true specimens from nature, but rather the early tinkering of synthetic biologists, scientists who seek to create living machines and biological devices that can perform novel tasks.

"We want to do for biology what Intel does for electronics," said George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard and a leader in the field. "We want to design and manufacture complicated biological circuitry."

While much of the early work has consisted of eye-catching, if useless, stunts like the blinking bacteria, the emerging field could one day have a major impact on medicine and industry.

For instance, Christina D. Smolke, an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, is trying to develop circuits of biological parts to sit in the body's cells and guard against cancer. If they detected a cancer-causing mechanism had been activated, they would switch on a gene to have the cell self-destruct.

Jay D. Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley, with part of $42.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is trying to take up to 12 genes from the wormwood tree and yeast and get them to work together in E. coli bacteria to produce artemisinin, a malaria drug now extracted from the wormwood tree.

J. Craig Venter, the maverick scientist who sequenced the human genome, wants to create microbes that produce hydrogen for use as fuel.

To be sure, scientists have been putting genes into bacteria and other cells for three decades. The term "synthetic biology" seems to include various activities, some of which are not altogether new.

"This has a catchy new name, but anybody over 40 will recognize it as good old genetic engineering applied to more complex problems," said Frances H. Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech.

Some synthetic biologists say they will go beyond genetic engineering, which often involves putting a single foreign gene into a cell. The human insulin gene, for instance, is put into bacteria, which then make insulin for use as a drug. But there have been genetic engineering projects involving multiple genes, so the number of genes alone is not enough to define synthetic biology.

Rather, the difference seems more about mind-set. "We're talking about taking biology and building it for a specific purpose, rather than taking existing biology and adapting it," Professor Keasling of Berkeley said. "We don't have to rely on what nature's necessarily created."

Also new is an engineering approach - the desire to make the design of life forms more predictable, like the design of a bridge. That could be because many leaders of the field are not biologists by training.

Ron Weiss of Princeton is a computer scientist. Michael Elowitz of Caltech trained as a physicist, and Drew Endy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a structural engineer. Mr. Endy and colleagues at M.I.T. have started a "Registry of Standard Biological Parts." The parts, called BioBricks, are strings of DNA that can perform certain functions like turning on a gene or causing a cell to light up.

In theory at least, these components can be strung together to build more complex devices, just as an electronic engineer might put together transistors, resistors and oscillators to build a circuit. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Texas used some BioBricks to engineer bacteria so that a sheet of them could capture an image as photographic film does. The microbes were altered so that those kept in the dark produced a black pigment while those exposed to light did not.

Some scientists envision that biological engineers will one day sit at computers writing programs for cells, like software developers. But the code would be written in sequences of DNA, rather than computer language. When finished, the programmer would press the "print" button, as it were, and the DNA would be made to order.

The field is also starting to attract some investment. In June, venture capitalists put $13 million into Codon Devices, a startup company in Cambridge, Mass., that is developing a way to synthesize long stretches of DNA far less expensively than existing methods. The founders include Professors Church, Endy and Keasling.

Professor Keasling is also a co-founder of Amyris Biotechnologies, which is helping make the malaria drug. And Mr. Venter has started Synthetic Genomics to work on his energy-producing microbes.

What make the engineering approach possible are the inner workings of a living cell. Genes, made of DNA, contain the instructions for producing proteins, which carry out most functions in cells. Some proteins can bind to DNA, turning particular genes on or off. This interplay, which is one way that cells regulate themselves, is not too different from how electronic circuits function, with one transistor turning another on or off.

To make the blinking bacteria, for instance, Mr. Elowitz designed the biological equivalent of an electronic oscillator. It uses three genes that trump one another like the rock, scissors and paper in the children's game. Gene X makes a protein that turns off Gene Y. Gene Y makes a protein that turns off Gene Z. And Gene Z makes a protein that turns off Gene X.

So if Gene X is on, it will turn off Gene Y. But the absence of Protein Y allows Gene Z to turn on. Protein Z then turns off Gene X, allowing Gene Y to turn on, turning Gene Z off, and so on. So the three genes turn on and off in an endless cycle.

To make the bacteria blink, Mr. Elowitz programmed a gene for the production of a fluorescent protein to be turned on whenever Gene Z was off.

Some newer efforts involve trying to manipulate entire colonies of microbes to cooperate with one another. They take advantage of something called quorum sensing, a natural communications system that bacteria use to determine whether there are enough of them present to mount an attack.

The bacteria secrete a particular chemical into their environment that they and their brethren can detect. When many bacteria are present, the level of this chemical in the environment increases. The concentric circle bull's-eye pattern was made by engineering E. coli to respond to a quorum-sensing chemical from a different microbe.

Some bacteria were programmed to produce a green fluorescent protein at high concentrations of the chemical. Others were programmed to produce a red protein if exposed to a somewhat lower concentration.

The bacteria of both types were mixed together and spread on a surface. In the center were placed some microbes that emitted the chemical, which diffused away from the center. The bacteria closest to the center were exposed to a high concentration. Those programmed to respond to high concentrations turned green. Some of the bacteria further away turned red.

The work, published in Nature in April, was led by Mr. Weiss of Princeton and Professor Arnold at Caltech. Mr. Weiss, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and molecular biology, is now trying to use similar principles to help control the differentiation of stem cells into different types of tissues in different locations.

"That's how the body develops its organs," he said, "by relying on cell-to-cell communication."

The two scientists also published a paper in Nature the same month in which they used quorum sensing to control bacterial populations artificially, by engineering the microbes to turn on a suicide gene if the concentration of the quorum-sensing chemical grew too high. As soon as the first cells started killing themselves, the concentration of the chemical would drop, so the remaining cells could recover.

The demonstrations, however clever, also illustrate problems inherent in designing biological circuits, as opposed to silicon ones. One is that living things are always dividing and evolving.

Indeed, the population-control system breaks down within days because some of the bacteria mutate so that the suicide gene is not switched on.

Those bacteria, having a selective advantage, quickly take over the colony, said Lingchong You, lead researcher on the project at Caltech and now an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke.

Another challenge is that the genes of the circuit can interact with the native bacterial genes in unexpected ways.

There is also great variability among living creatures. The blinking bacteria, for instance, do not light up in unison, but at greatly varying rates. Even a newly formed daughter cell will not blink in sync with its mother cell, despite being almost identical genetically.

"You write the same software and put it into different computers, and their behavior is quite different," Mr. You said. "If we think of a cell as a computer, it's much more complex than the computers we're used to."

For that reason, some scientists say, it might be difficult ever to make biological engineering as predictable as bridge construction.

"There is no such thing as a standard component, because even a standard component works differently depending on the environment," Professor Arnold of Caltech said. "The expectation that you can type in a sequence and can predict what a circuit will do is far from reality and always will be."

The unpredictability could lead to safety risks. What if the novel organisms were somehow to run amok? In addition, the same technology could be used to synthesize known pathogens based on their published DNA sequences.

Scientists have already created a poliovirus from scratch and more recently recreated the 1918 pandemic flu virus.

"It's quite clear this technology could be dangerous" if misapplied, Mr. Endy of M.I.T. said.

The field is starting to grapple with whether it should be regulated and, if so, how. Scientists set up a safety framework for research when genetic engineering was invented in the 1970's.

Much of the concern centers on efforts to make entire microbes. Some scientists call this synthetic genomics as opposed to synthetic biology, though there is considerable overlap. A big concern is making pathogens by synthesizing their DNA based on published DNA sequences.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has given $570,000 to M.I.T., the Venter Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent policy research organization, to study the societal implications of synthetic genomes. The group hopes to have a report by midyear, said Gerald L. Epstein, senior fellow for science and security at the strategic studies center.

In March, the Health and Human Services Department set up the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity to give advice about research with potentially nefarious uses. That board in turn established a working group on synthetic genomics and synthetic biology that met for the first time in November.

David A. Relman, chairman of the working group, said the challenge was to weigh the promise of the field against the perils.

"We fully recognize the inherent beneficial and very positive attributes of all of this work," said Dr. Relman, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford, "and don't want to stifle it or curtail it or constrain it for no substantive reason."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/science/17synt.html





File This Under Data Overload
Jonathon Keats

As a young historian visiting the National Archives more than four decades ago, Allen Weinstein met an employee named Mr. Taylor who seemed to know the whereabouts of every document - from the Declaration of Independence to the latest Bureau of Mines report - in the entire block-long neoclassical complex. Mr. Taylor was still working there last February when Weinstein was sworn in as the ninth archivist of the United States.

Weinstein has a lot to say about the 84-year-old civil servant when I meet him in his vast office, furnished mostly in the generic colonial-federalist style favored by embassies and bed-and-breakfasts. It doesn't matter that I've come to talk about the new Electronic Records Archives project, which Lockheed-Martin will build at a cost of $308 million over the next six years. "What are your hopes for ERA?" I ask the nation's archivist. "What are your concerns?"

"I worry about losing Mr. Taylor," he mumbles, his voice barely audible. Weinstein is a lean man with sparse white hair, a round face drawn into a pout, and a laminated ID hanging over his necktie. He clings with both hands to the padded arms of his chair. "I worry about losing Mr. Taylor's expertise and the expertise of people like him. They've been living with history."

Several rooms away, one of Weinstein's deputies, Robert Chadduck, is trying to figure out how to live with history of the digital variety. As research director of ERA, he has set up his computer laboratory in the only space he could get: the conference room of the archives' National Historical Publications and Records Commission. On the shelves surrounding his three screens are hardcover reprints of writings by Frederick Douglass and John Marshall. He doesn't appear to notice the books as he paces the room, waiting for an assistant named Mark to call up some data he wants me to see. "ERA is unprecedented for the National Archives," Chadduck says, and his voice almost breaks with pride as he informs me that "it's identified in the president's budget as a major systems acquisition."

On the monitors behind Chadduck, I watch Mark mutely arrange the images. There's a topographical map of Hawaii, a fly-through simulation of the Great Lakes, and a virtual reality model of a NASA space platform. Each is stored on disk or tape in a different location: the National Archives' College Park storage facility, the University of Maryland, the San Diego Supercomputer Center. "The challenge is to create a transcontinental, persistent archive," one that can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, Chadduck says. But his sample fails to convey the vastness of the estimated 347 petabytes of data preserved in the archives in thousands of digital formats.

The National Archives has been receiving electronic materials since 1970, but plans for long-term preservation of it all didn't begin until 1998. And the government has only started to take it seriously in the past three years. "Isn't that a bit late?" I ask Chadduck. "I won't presume to speak for the White House," he replies testily. He directs my attention elsewhere, handing me a small poster cluttered with more logos than a stock car. There are insignias for the Library of Congress, the National Science Foundation, the Department of State, and the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others, each indicating a research partnership that the National Archives has recently established. These entities have been grappling with digital preservation for a while, and Chadduck hopes to benefit from their efforts. "We don't want to reinvent the wheel," he says.

So ERA will be a modular system, relying as much as possible on technologies (many of them open source) developed elsewhere. For example, one anticipated module will be responsible for determining what kind of software was used to create an incoming document. Another will translate it into a usable format. Others will handle distribution, backup, and searchability. The modules can be replaced or added as technology advances - there would never be a need to reengineer the entire system. Another boon, at least from a bureaucratic standpoint, is that nobody has to define the limits of what the system will actually do.

Of course, no matter how the system evolves between now and 2011, one module it won't encompass is Mr. Taylor. While Lockheed's design prototype emphasizes intuitive access for users ranging from amateur genealogists to career paper pushers, no software on the market today or in the future is likely to have the veteran archivist's idiosyncratic expertise, his intuitive grasp of the collection's contents.

Mr. Taylor is elusive these days. He hides in the stacks whenever Weinstein shuffles by. "He's afraid that the archivist is trying to retire him," explains Miriam Kleiman, another Taylor protégé. "Retire him?" Weinstein counters, enunciating his words for the first time since I've met him. "I want him to work 40 more hours a week."

He sighs. Weinstein has just been given the largest appropriation in National Archives history, for a system that will be the envy of every library around the world, but I see that it doesn't satisfy him in the least. "What happens next, I'm not sure, just not sure," he mutters.

The archivist of the United States looks down at the floor. What he really needs, no technology can provide.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...osts.html?pg=2





When Art and Science Collide, a Dorkbot Meeting Begins
Brian Braiker

The artists may have ceded SoHo to swanky shops and million-dollar digs, but once a month the scene at one of its remaining galleries might best be described as Revenge of the Nerds.

On a recent Wednesday, "dorkbot" was holding the first meeting of its sixth year at the Location One gallery. Scruffy hipsters toting six-packs, blinky Web developers arguing the merits of their preferred P.D.A. and an inordinate number of dreadlocked heads packed the gallery beyond capacity to hear three brief, charmingly unpolished lectures.

Founded five years ago by Douglas Repetto, the director of research at Columbia University's computer music center, dorkbot is an informal club of artists, techies and geeks who do "strange things with electricity," according to their motto. In five years, chapters of the club have sprung up in nearly 30 cities around the world, from Seattle to Rotterdam to Mumbai.

At every New York meeting, Mr. Repetto invites three people to deliver 20- to 30- minute presentations of their work, which tends to inhabit a no-man's land between science and art. A question-and-answer session follows, which serves as an informal peer review to help presenters hone their ideas, Mr. Repetto said.

"They're doing things, but they're not quite sure, What is this? Where does it fit?" Mr. Repetto said. "It doesn't belong in a gallery, and they can't write a paper on it."

This month's meeting was held on what may or may not have been Sir Isaac Newton's 363rd birthday, but the fact that history is unclear on that matter did not dissuade Mr. Repetto, 35, from enlisting him as the evening's mascot. Slides of Newton and Newton-related arcana flashed across a screen before the lectures began.

But what would Sir Isaac have made of Mikey Sklar?

Mr. Sklar, a UNIX engineer presenting at dorkbot for the second time, demonstrated how he had a $2 chip surgically implanted into his left hand - and why he did it. The Radio Frequency Identification tag under his skin uses the same technology that the E-ZPass system employs to identify cars on toll roads. Mr. Sklar, 28, said his tag unlocks his computer and accesses news feeds as part of an art project.

"This is a pretty crude attempt at becoming a little more cyborg," he explained to the audience, only half joking.

As for why he chose dorkbot for the debut of his body-hack, Mr. Sklar wrote in an e-mail message: "This forces me to get my act together. By that I mean I have to clearly document my project and come up with an explanation of why I did this work."

Also at the dorkbot meeting were Alyce Santoro, an artist who weaves funky textiles out of a "sonic fabric" of audiotape and cotton, and Luke DuBois, a composer and "computational artist," who discussed a process he developed called "time-lapse phonography."

Mr. DuBois used his application, essentially time-lapse photography for sound, to create a new piece of music out of the 857 songs that have appeared at the top of the Billboard charts since 1958. The result, called "Billboard," is a 37-minute-long drone: each hit song is reduced to its average timbre and key by an algorithm that speeds up the original work without giving it a chipmunk chirpiness.

"It's a great way to get a gestalt of a piece of music," Mr. DuBois explained.

With popular tech and culture Web sites like boingboing.net and gothamist.com linking to dorkbot listings (at dorkbot.org) and even presenters' home pages, the monthly event has also become one way for artists and engineers to generate publicity.

"I've gotten more links from dorkbot than from any other Web site," said Michelle Rosenberg, an artist who delivered a lecture on the history of hearing aids and presented her own headphone sculptures at a meeting last January.

"It was a group critique," she said. "The questions asked were informal and curious. You have a different group of people coming to dorkbot than would come to an art lecture."

And that, said Mr. Repetto, is the whole point.

"If you have to tell people you're giving a presentation at something called dorkbot," he added, "you can't be too serious."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/sc...ork.html?8hpib





The Essence Of A Geek
Matthew Broersma

When the dot-com bubble burst in late 2000 a lot of amateur and professional investors lost their shirts. It was a pretty embarrassing time for the financial markets and a time that a lot of people would choose to forget — but not everyone.

For a few years, an interest in computers and technology became inextricable linked with wealth and power — geek became chic. Technology companies suddenly became the focus of the kind of attention that had been reserved for the music or fashion industries. In the UK TV makers even went so far as to create a hip series, Attachments, based around the antics of a tech start-up.

True, much of this temporary kudos enjoyed by technologists was obliterated in the dot-com mushroom cloud, but not all. On some level, technology and technologists were permanently lifted a couple notches up the cool-o-meter. And that process, kick-started by the dot-com gold rush, has accelerated recently — motivated by a different and altogether more pervasive force. A plethora of seductive technologies typified by the Motorola V3 family or the iPod, combined with success of online services offered by Google and eBay, have slowly invaded the wider consciousness — inspiring a kind of techno-lust in the general public.

We're all geeks
IT industry analyst James Governor of RedMonk, claims that while it may not yet be cool or trendy to admit, a degree of technical sophistication has become expected. He claims that increasingly, "we're all geeks" — even if a lot of people don't care to admit it.

To illustrate his point, Governor recalls a recent conversation involving his wife and some of her friends — mostly women who would probably describe themselves as non-techies. One of the women pulled out a new Windows Mobile smartphone while protesting that she wasn't "a geek". Governor then politely enquired whether she had her email sychronised to the device — she did. This then initiated a conversation about mobile phone design — the last thing the technical analyst was expecting given the company. "You expect to have that kind of conversation with guys, but not with women," Governor says.

While some of Governor's comments may come across as sexist — they do illustrate the idea that a certain level of technical sophistication is increasingly becoming the norm rather than the exception. In fact if the levels of female interest in tech can be counted as some kind of barometer for a general geekiness pervading society then there seems to be some truth in the Governor's assertion that increasingly we are all nerds to some degree.

Technical sophistication
A recent survey by the Sci-Fi channel discovered that an increasing number of women could be included in the ranks of a new demographic it nick-named "New Geek". The research revealed that a third of the UK's total 6.9 million geeks were actually female. "Whereas once geeks were seen as solitary, embarrassing and uncool, the statistics show that New Geek is chic, popular and hugely influential," the researchers claimed.

"New Geeks", as described by the channel's research, are relatively young (83 percent are under 44) and well-off (21 percent have family income of more than £50,000) and are 125 percent more likely to visit pubs, clubs and bars than the average person.

However, while some commentators would admit that levels of technical literacy may indeed be on the rise, they disagree that this translates into an increase in the number of hardcore techies in existence. The defenders of geek — IT professionals on the whole — maintain that there is a definite dividing line between geeks and non-geeks; one has the interest and skills to actually make things, while the other merely uses them

Shakespeare's geek
All this begs the question, what exactly is a geek and what sets them apart? Historically, the word was associated with oddness. Possible predecessors include the medieval dialect words geck, from Low German, and gek, from Middle Low German, meaning "fool"; Shakespeare used the word "geck" in this sense in several plays. (For instance, from Cymbeline: "Why did you suffer Iachimo, slight thing of Italy, to taint his nobler heart and brain with needless jealousy; and to become the geck and scorn o' the other's villany?")

The modern word surfaced in American slang in the early 20th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and continued to refer to various kinds of oddballs. The OED records this example from the 1916 Wells Fargo Messenger: "A new Wells agent struck our town the other week, and say you never saw a more enthusiastic geek!" By the 1950s Webster's dictionary recorded that the word referred to a carnival sideshow weirdo "whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake".

At some point, the word began to be used to refer to people with an interest so obsessive that it puts them outside the mainstream — as it still is used to talk about people with an inordinate knowledge of, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. However, it's most immediate association is now with technology, and particularly with people who actually make technology work.

Too much Buffy
Somewhere along the line, geek also seems to have lost most of its negative connotations — unlike nerd and anorak, which still tend to be used as insults. The word's reclamation was probably a more or less deliberate effort on the part of geeky technology types who began using it to refer to themselves, say some. "It's a taking-back-the-language thing," says Jez Higgins, a freelance developer.

To some degree "geek" overlaps with "hacker", a word used as a badge of honour to mean a particularly adept programmer, though "hacker" has some extra moral implications that "geek" lacks. Most would agree that Bill Gates is a geek, but few would class him as a hacker, due to the perecieved quality of his company's technology and his taste for world domination. "He doesn't have the hacker's ethos," Higgins says.

Soul of a New Machine
The traditional idea of the geek (as opposed to the New Geek) seems to originate from the world of the sciences and the oddballs they tend to attract — people like Albert Einstein, who had a wardrobe full of identical clothing and saw nothing wrong with smoking cigarette butts collected off the street. Once computers started to become an important force in society, nonfiction accounts such as Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, Steven Levy's Hackers and Robert X. Cringely's Accidental Empires familiarised the public at large with the people behind the scenes — the nerdy, obsessive, and strangely heroic computer types who created modern computing in the 1970s and 1980s and commercialised the Internet in the 1990s.

More recently, figures from the world of open source or free software have come more into the public eye. Specificall, you have programmers such as Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement; and Eric Reynolds, author of the influential open source manifesto The Cathedral and the Bazaar . Some of these figures fulfil the public's image of the geek as a bit peculiar — reclusive, having difficulties with social behaviour and the rest of it.

Stallman, for example, had a very solitary childhood and has retained a reputation as an extremely uncompromising personality, as described by Sam Williams in a 2003 biography, Free as in Freedom. "His rhetoric is very seductive, but he's also got a very repellent side of his personality. He's a control freak, he's very meticulous," Williams remarked in an interview at the time of the book's publication. Reynolds is known for his efforts to build bridges between Stallman's world of free software and the compromised world of business through the open source movement. He is also a libertarian who, when given an award by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, responded with a note saying, "When I hear the words 'social responsibility,' I want to reach for my gun."

Autism = geek?
It has become commonplace to link typical programmer personality traits to Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and particularly to Asperger syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. Wired Magazine even ran a lengthy investigation into a sharp rise in the number of autistic children born in the Silicon Valley area, though no conclusive link to the population of computer engineers there has ever been proven. While the relationship between Asperger-type personality traits and a talent for computer programming is difficult to pin down, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that one exists. As Hans Asperger himself wrote: "It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential."

To those who consider themselves true geeks, however, personality traits are beside the point — what's important about a geek is the passion to understand the way things work, to the point of being able to construct working systems yourself. Programmers are admired not because of their fame or social status, but for the quality of the code they write.

This appreciation even has an aesthetic side to it, something that non-programmers often find surprising, says developer Higgins. "When people talk about code and whether it's any good, the criterion that's most damning is that it's ugly," he says. "There's a simplicity and elegance in the expression that's appreciated." This aesthetic side is often missed by the outside world, but it is a recurrent theme. For example, Stallman, despite his apparently ascetic view of the world, is said to be something of an epicure who appreciates being taken out for a fine dining experience.

Social changes
It isn't just that the fame of geeks that has increased; society itself has changed dramatically. Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, a 1981 account of introverted young computer engineers working 24-hour shifts to create a minicomputer, seemed like bizarre science fiction at the time, but by the end of the 1990s it was another matter. In her 2003 novel The Bug, veteran programmer Ellen Ullman described how the developer's universe seems to have taken over the outside world:

"The workstation in a cubicle. The morning begun not with hello but with a system prompt. Everyone's day begins like that now, but on that morning of March 5, 1984, only programmers and testers lived that way. From log-in to log-out, email to email, mouse click to mouse click — we were just then starting to make computers 'friendly' for everyone, preparing the world for a programmer's life.''

Ullman's point is that while computers are making wonderful things possible, they are also recreating the world in their own image. "Computers abhor error... [and] abhorring error is not necessarily positive," she says in a 1990s Salon.com interview. "We learn through error... so it affects us to have more and more of our life involved with very authoritarian, error-unforgiving tools. I think the more time you spend around computers, the more you get impatient with other people, impatient with their errors, impatient with your own errors."

ADD?
Ever more pervasive technologies have only heightened the effect, to the point where it has become a cliché. "Sure, a lot of geeks tend to have ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder], and we all have ADD now," says Governor. "I can't have a conversation with my mother for five minutes because I want to check IM. We are living these bizarre, mediated lives, and of course there are drawbacks."

This shift isn't a one-way street, however — we may be coming to resemble geeks a bit more, but through the growing importance of design, technology is also changing to be a bit more human. Strangely enough, many have found the emerging crop of digital video recorders, such as Sky+, far easier to use than the traditional VCR. Gadgets such as the iPod employ complex technology — it's even possible to install Linux on one — but they employ very simple interfaces.

The iPod's success was crowned at the end of last year with designer Jonathan Ive receiving a CBE, and many see such products as the direction geek culture will take next. A new crop of influential programmers, such as 37 Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson or Ubuntu Linux's Mark Shuttleworth, are not even particularly geeky.

"These kinds of people are where the next great successes are coming from, they're great designers and great coders, and also uber-communicators," says Governor. "Great design is a way to create huge new markets, and that is a lesson IT is learning."
http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/business/...9247523,00.htm

















Until next week,

- js.

















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