Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 25th, ’06

[JackSpratts]

"Questions of new technologies that share files completely anonymously across networks provoked defiant applause from the room." – D. Clark Denison


"We have seen no effect on the eDonkey traffic levels." – Andrew Parker


"Telstra does not shape file sharing traffic." – ISP spokesman


"I've downloaded maybe 50 songs [from iTunes], but I was always more likely to borrow CD's from my friends." – Alex Ostrovsky


"I could get the same amount of money from my parents, but that wouldn't tell me if my business plan or idea was a good one. That tells me my parents love me." – Jeff Mellen


"Copying of music and movies is more prevalent today than it was in 2001 when Napster was at its height. All the lawsuits against thousands of individuals as well as people maintaining sites like Razorback2 don't appear to be making a serious dent in peer-to-peer file sharing." – Fred von Lohmann


"Have you reached out to the family? I can ask it 10 more times if you refuse to answer it. You are under oath." – Rep. Tom Lantos, D, CA



































February 25th, ’06





Razorback Servers Seized
Thomas Mennecke

It appears that one of the largest eDonkey2000 communities is no more. Often occupied by over 1 million eDoney2000 users spread over several servers, Razorback2 is often regarded as the very lifeblood of this network. This morning, users of this server network found their community offline.

At this time, details are extremely scarce. However it is being reported the Federal Belgian Police have raided and seized Razorback2's servers. In addition, it is suspected the administrator of Razorback2 is currently in custody.

Razorback2 was an eDonkey2000 indexing server - very different in nature from an indexing site such as ShareReactor. Unlike indexing sites, Razorback2's index was only available through an eDonkey2000 client such as eMule. While it does not host any actual files or multimedia material, it does index the location of such files on the eDonkey2000 network. The legality of such indexing remains questionable, however this has not deterred copyright enforcement actions.

Giving credence to this report, the Razorback2 home page simply times out upon request. In addition, pinging the IP address of Razorback's home page and eDonkey2000 servers yields the same result. Only "fake" Razorback2 servers are online, communities designed by copyright enforcement entities to mimic yet deter unauthorized file-sharing.

The Belgian Federal Police homepage at this time have no information regarding this raid, however considering the magnitude of the situation this should change. One thing is certain; Razorback2 has been removed from the eDoneky2000 network. Most noticeably, the eDonkey2000 population has shrunk from its usual 3.5 million users to approximately 3 million users - an unusual departure from its average.

Update: Below is the MPA press release provided to Slyck.com:

BELGIAN & SWISS AUTHORITIES BREAK RAZORBACK2

World's Largest P2P Facilitator Put Out of Illegal Business

Brussels, Los Angeles-- In a joint operation today police and prosecuting authorities in Belgium and Switzerland shut down the infamous file-swapping network Razorback2. Razorback2 was the number one eDonkey peer-to-peer server facilitating the illegal file swapping of approximately 1.3 million users simultaneously. Razorback2 was operated as a commercial enterprise indexing over 170 million files including millions of copyrighted movies, software, games, TV programming and music with international and U.S. titles. The site was regularly used by people located all over the world, with the vast majority of users based in Europe.

"This is a major victory in our fight to cut off the supply of illegal materials being circulated on the Internet via peer-to-peer networks," said Motion Picture Association (MPA) Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman. "By shaving the illegal traffic of copyrighted works facilitated by Razorback2, we are depleting other illegal networks of their ability to supply Internet pirates with copyrighted works which is a positive step in our international effort to fight piracy."

Swiss authorities arrested the site's operator at his residence in Switzerland this morning and searched his home. At the same time, on the authority of a local magistrate, Belgian police seized the site's servers located at an Internet hosting center in Zaventem near Brussels. The operation conducted by Swiss and Belgian authorities aimed at cutting off a major supply and facilitator of illegal files to several popular illegal file swapping networks. By shutting down Razorback2, the ease with which pirates can obtain illegal content online will slow dramatically. Since November of 2004, authorities have closed down all of the major eDonkey servers in the United States, and now, Europe.

The operators of Razorback2 had clear financial motives. In addition to collecting "donations" from users, revenue was also generated through the sale of advertising on the site, usually promoting pornographic websites. In addition, the availability of offensive content will be inhibited. The operators of this eDonkey site chose not to exercise control over files being traded by users which including those containing child pornography, bomb-making instructions and terrorist training videos.

"Razorback2 was not just an enormous index for Internet users engaged in illegal file swapping, it was a menace to society," said Executive Vice President and Worldwide Anti-Piracy Director John G. Malcolm. "I applaud the Swiss and Belgian authorities for their actions which are helping thwart Internet piracy around the world."

Razorback2 posted statistics on its site regarding the number of uses online at any one time, reveling in its reputation as the world's largest P2P facilitator. Today, users attempting to connect to Razorback2 read the message "Razorback space 2.0 appears to be dead."

Chris Marcich, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of the MPA's European Office said: "We are very grateful to the Swiss and Belgian authorities for their cooperation and effective action in dealing with this particularly egregious enterprise and the individual profiting from it."

The MPA and its member companies, working with the local film industries, have a multi-pronged approach to fighting piracy, which includes educating people about the consequences of piracy, taking action against Internet thieves, working with law enforcement authorities around the world to root out pirate operations and working to ensure movies are available legally using advanced technology.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1102





Schwarzenegger Signs Tougher Law On Counterfeit CDs

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a new law cracking down on the sale of counterfeit CDs. The new law reduces the threshold for felony criminal sales of pirated CDs from 1,000 copies down to 100. "Intellectual property rights and creativity are bedrocks of the California economy," Schwarzenegger said after signing the bill, according to the Los Angeles Times. "This bill makes it easier for authorities to crack down on the rip-off artists who illegally copy and sell music CDs."

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) both praised the decision, saying that lowering the threshold to 100 units will make it much more difficult for CD pirates to balance their need for illegal inventory with the risk of being caught and facing serious consequences.

"Every time a pirated CD is sold at a flea market, street-side table or retail outlet, the works of many talented artists, record label employees, writers, technicians, designers and producers are stolen,” said Mitch Bainwol, Chairman and CEO of the RIAA. “This law ensures that thieves threatening the livelihoods of those in the music industry will face much greater risk of being prosecuted and appropriately punished. This law will make thieves think twice about peddling stolen music.” He added, “It is critical that this activity be treated for what it is – dealing in stolen property and profiting from it. And that must come with serious consequences."

A statement from the RIAA and NARM says that in 2005, more than one million pirated music CDs were seized in California. More than 1,200 arrests were made related to those seizures. "Retailers who operate legally shouldn't have to deal with unfair competition from thieves,” said NARM President Jim Donio. “Independent stores like Dimple Records and major chains like Tower Records, both headquartered in Sacramento, and all the other companies who run businesses or have stores in the state of California welcome this important anti-piracy legislation."
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=178771





British Police Unit Targets Film Piracy

A police unit dedicated to combating movie piracy and those responsible for the manufacture and distribution of pirated films has launched in London.

In partnership with the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact), the new unit will pursue individuals and groups profiting from the sale of fake DVDs.

"This will clearly send a message that this type of crime will not pay," said Det Chief Superintendent Nigel Mawer.

Fact's Ray Leinster called the creation of the unit "a unique development".

By targeting the financial gains at the heart of film piracy, the Metropolitan Police unit hopes to prevent the funding of criminal activities in other areas.

'Significant profits'

"This will assist Fact's capacity to address and confront the threats from organised networks which are making significant profits from film piracy," said Mr Leinster, director general of Fact.

"The creation of the unit is also proof of the increasing recognition of film piracy as a crime of significance amongst the law enforcement community."

The unit, which will initially operate for a one-year period, will work alongside Fact collating intelligence on crime trends and activities in film piracy.

UK-based Fact represents major British and US film companies, as well as media distributors and companies within the TV industry.

Initially set up in 1983 to deal with videotaped feature films, the organisation increasingly investigates copyright infringement involving DVDs and other digital formats.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/4740668.stm





MPAA Sues Newsgroup, P2P Search Sites
John Borland

The Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that it sued a new round of popular Web sites associated with movie piracy, including several that serve as search engines but do not distribute files themselves.

The lawsuits mark an expansion of the copyright holders' legal strategy in the file-swapping world, targeting sites that help make downloading easier, but aren't actually delivering the files or the swapping technology themselves.

It's also the first time the group has sued organizations that direct their members to the Usenet newsgroup system, an MPAA spokeswoman said. The movie group makes little distinction between a peer-to-peer network and the search engines that point to pirated works, saying that all facilitate the distribution of copyright works.

"Disabling these powerful networks of illegal file distribution is a significant step in stemming the tide of piracy on the Internet," John Malcom, MPAA director of Worldwide Antipiracy operations, said in a statement.

The issue of targeting search engines rather than actual file-swapping networks themselves has been a touchy one in Silicon Valley, because ordinary search engines such as Google and Yahoo also can be used to find pirated works.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects search engines from liability for linking to pirated works, but only if the site operators don't know that the specific content is infringing, are not deriving financial gain from the links, and act quickly to remove the links when contacted by copyright holders.

Unlike a traditional search engine such as Google, the sites targeted Thursday are filled almost exclusively with links and references to copyright movies, software and music.

IsoHunt, one of the largest search engines targeted, does provide a copyright statement that says, "We respect copyright, and will filter such P2P links at your request."

The full list of sites sued Thursday include Torrentspy.com, IsoHunt, BTHub.com, TorrentBox.com, NiteShadow.com, Ed2k-It.com, NZB-Zone.com, BinNews.com and DVDRs.net.

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann said that the courts had not yet ruled on whether search tools could be held liable for copy infringement. Most relevant cases, such as record labels' suit against MP3Board several years ago, have been settled before the issue has come to trial, he said.

"We haven't had a case that really tests the case of whether providing an indexing service by itself an infringement," von Lohmann said.

Thursday's suits are part of a growing series of lawsuits, criminal and civil actions taken around the world, as the movie industry works to stamp out the still-strong growth of film and TV show swapping online.

The MPAA has had a string of successes targeting sites that distribute movies in the BitTorrent file format, shutting down popular hubs such as Suprnova, LokiTorrent, and others. Earlier this week, the Hollywood announced that it had collaborated with Swiss and Belgian police to shut down a major European server called Razorback 2, part of the eDonkey network, which was allegedly used by as many as 1 million people.

File-swapping traffic has continued to grow globally throughout the course of the legal actions, however. Net monitoring firm CacheLogic estimates that P2P still accounted for more than 60 percent of overall Internet traffic at the beginning of 2006, with video files accounting for about 60 percent of that data.

Traditional peer-to-peer software companies such as eDonkey and LimeWire have not been targeted by lawsuits in recent months. However, they have faced warnings from record labels and the MPAA that their turn could come soon if they continue to allow unregulated swapping online.

The MPAA previously announced an agreement with BitTorrent.com, the creators of the BitTorrent file-swapping technology who also run a file search engine. Under that agreement, BitTorrent agreed to take down links to feature films in its search tool.
http://news.com.com/MPAA+sues+newsgr...3-6042739.html





Are Usenet Fans Vulnerable To Copyright Lawsuits?
John Borland

In a new series of lawsuits, Hollywood studios for the first time are targeting companies that provide access to Usenet newsgroups.

This corner of the Internet, largely a leftover from the days before the Web exploded into the mainstream, rarely gets much attention. It's still primarily a forum for text discussions (and overwhelming amounts of spam), where techies help one another with Windows and driver problems, and animal lovers share cat stories.

But in the last few years, a handful of technologies have emerged that have made newsgroups a much more fertile place for downloading copies of movies, music and software. Here's a quick primer on what happens there and what the Motion Picture Association of America has done.

Q: What are newsgroups?
A: Also known as Usenet, newsgroups are one of the earliest forms of sustained conversation online. Initially started by Duke University graduate students in 1980, Usenet evolved over the years into thousands of individual newsgroups that focused on specific subjects such as dogs, science fiction authors, politics or pornography.

Readers post messages similar to e-mails to a specific group. All the content of that group is relayed through servers across the Net, and can be read with a newsgroup reader such as Forte's Agent, or inside some other Web browser and e-mail programs. Most ISPs subscribe to a newsgroup feed, though these are becoming harder to find. Google archives much of Usenet's traffic, all the way back to January 1981, at groups.google.com.

Another historical note: Before becoming a Web standby, the "frequently asked questions," or FAQ, format was widely popularized on newsgroups (though it didn't originate with them).

Q: What does this have to do with piracy?
A: Early on, people learned to send pictures, movies or even full software applications through Usenet groups by breaking the large files into small individual pieces and sending them separately. These large files, called "binaries," could be reconstructed by most newsgroup software, as long as all the pieces came through.

Q: Is this the same as file-sharing?
A: In a sense. Uploading a copyrighted file to a newsgroup is illegal, and the recording industry has targeted individual posters in the past (though largely before peer-to-peer networks emerged).

But unlike peer-to-peer networks, the files uploaded are stored in pieces on the Usenet servers around the world, not on individual computer users' hard drives.

Q: Isn't all this harder than using BitTorrent or eDonkey?
A: For most of Usenet's history, it has been much harder, and more inefficient. Big movie or software files can be broken into hundreds of individual pieces, for example, and if one or two get lost, it can make the whole movie or application unusable.

But in the last few years, several technologies have emerged to make this easier.

One, called Par files (shortened from Parity), lets big files be reconstructed even if some of the individual pieces are missing. Par files are used in other places where data transfer is unreliable, and they are becoming increasingly common on Usenet.

The other technology is an innovation similar, in a sense, to BitTorrent's torrent files. Dubbed NZB files (and created by a company called NewzBin), they automatically group together all the disparate pieces of a big binary file, allowing it to be downloaded and reconstructed with a single click.

Q: Who is the MPAA actually targeting?
A: With this round of suits, the MPAA is focusing on a small group of companies that search the Usenet feeds for movies, software, music and other files. Some of them provide the NZB files along with the search results, so the files can be instantly downloaded. Others simply provide an index of everything that's been posted to newsgroups.

Q: Are newsgroup search engines illegal, then?
A: That's a tricky question. The MPAA says all the sites they've sued are facilitating piracy. But the legal status of search engines has never quite been clarified, and indeed, Google itself is the largest newsgroup search tool in existence.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides a legal shield, or "safe harbor" for search engines that meet a certain set of requirements, including the ability for copyright holders to request that links to copyrighted material be taken down.

BinNews, a Florida-based site that was sued on Thursday, contends that it doesn't provide direct links to files and in fact helps copyright holders find their works on Usenet so they can be removed. Its owner, a 31-year-old businessman named Joe (he declined to provide his last name), says he'll fight the lawsuit.

Q: Are people who have uploaded or downloaded copyrighted files from Usenet at legal risk?
A: The current lawsuits are targeting only the search engines and NZB file hubs. However, as with virtually every activity on the Internet, uploading and downloading files from Usenet does leave a trace that can be tracked back to the individual ISP and computer, if copyright holders dedicate enough resources to it.
http://news.com.com/Are+Usenet+fans+...3-6043057.html





RIAA Alters 'Sloppy' Testimony
p2pnet

Did RIAA spokesman Jonathon Whitehead deliberately switch the names of two completely different p2p applications in an attempt to con a judge hearing a p2p file sharing case?

No, says the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) in a plea to have Whitehead's testimony changed. It was a "clerical error".

Programming expert Zi Mei has been shredding Whitehead's evidence in Atlantic Recording v John Does 1-25, with Ty Rogers representing John Doe.

"He asserts that all Does are Gnutella users, directly contradicting earlier testimony, which included pages of Kazaa screenshots," said Mei last time around.

"This demonstrates that he either doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, or that he's simply inventing evidence and switching to Limewire after we totally destroyed him on the Kazaa stuff, hoping no one would notice.

"It's obvious that Mr. Whitehead doesn't know Kazaa from a kazoo either, or he's simply pretending he doesn't. The RIAA's 'investigative' techniques are sloppy and harmful, to say the least."

Now, the RIAA has amended the "error" in its Second Whitehead Declaration in Atlantic v Does 1-25, "claiming that its previous version - saying that all defendants were users of Gnutella - was wrong, and that only 11 of the 25 were Gnutella users, while 14 were Kazaa users," says Ray Beckerman's Recording Industry vs The People."

"Whitehead said in his Second Declaration that ALL the Does were indeed Gnutella users," Mei told p2pnet.

"They're trying to downplay the maneuver by saying it should be allowed, and that this new information doesn't prejudice the defendant, but really, it just goes to show you how sloppy and irresponsible the RIAA are with their claims and statements."
http://p2pnet.net/story/8017





Big Three ISPs Say Peer-To-Peer OK
Andrew Colley

BROADBAND customers of Australia's largest ISPs can use peer-to-peer file- sharing services such as BitTorrent and Kazaa without being throttled by their ISP, at least for now.

Australia's largest internet providers say they are not limiting peer-to-peer file sharing traffic on their networks and have no immediate plans to impose restrictions on the activity.

However, some say they have the means to apply limits if that is required in the future.

Internet suppliers recently revealed that file- sharing traffic is restricted on two of Australia's best-known dedicated wireless data networks.

This prompted fears of the practice being adopted more widely.

Unwired, which markets its portable service to students, confirmed that it limited peer-to-peer traffic on some parts of its network to smooth the flow of data that it classes as real-time.

Two iBurst resellers, Independent Service Providers and BigAir, have defended the practice of prioritising some forms of internet traffic.

Australia's top three broadband providers, Telstra, Optus and iiNet say they don't differentiate between peer-to-peer and other forms of internet traffic.

"Telstra does not shape file sharing traffic," a Telstra spokesman says.

The only shaping Telstra does is to accounts that have gone over 10GB in a month, he says.

IiNet managing director Michael Malone said internet providers needed to ensure their networks were free of congestion, rather than differentiate between types of traffic.

IBurst and Unwired were trying to reduce their bandwidth bills, he said.

Peer-to-peer use was targeted because it was likely to involve "dodgy" activity, he said.

"From our point of view, if you tell a customer you're getting 2GB of downloads during the month, that's what we need to supply," he said.

Optus said it had the technical means to prioritise traffic on its network but that it would only use the technology in emergencies or "some other unforeseeable circumstance".

IBurst reseller Pacific Internet said fixed-line internet pricing plans were more appropriate than wireless plans for peer-to-peer users.

Broadband users are divided on the practice.

One broadband user who asked not to be named said deprioritisation of traffic was a reasonable way of addressing network congestion problems.

"Deprioritisation should be applied to applications that can tolerate reduced throughput and increased response times, including P2P," he said.

IBurst user Boyd Chan said ISPs should only use traffic prioritisation when it was "absolutely necessary".

"ISPs should be geared up with the necessary backhaul to support whatever amount of data at whatever time of the day to support their users," Mr Chan said.

Some ISPs are sceptical that limiting peer-to-peer file sharing traffic was feasible from a technical standpoint.

"It's technically very dodgy to do," Mr Malone said.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html





MUTE P2P File Sharing Host Selection Weakness
Secunia Advisory

Gary Whetstone has reported a weakness in MUTE, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions.

A design weakness in the MUTE client causes it to select hosts to connect to based on 10 random hosts that are retrieved from a single mWebCache. This can potentially be exploited to cause MUTE to connect to malicious hosts if the mWebCache has been populated with addresses of malicious hosts.

Successful exploitation discloses the identity of the MUTE client.

The weakness has been reported in 0.4.1. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution:
The weakness will reportedly be fixed in the next release.

Provided and/or discovered by:
Gary Whetstone

Original Advisory:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewc.../...xt?view=markup
http://secunia.com/advisories/18980





I.B.M. Researchers Find a Way to Keep Moore's Law on Pace
John Markoff

I.B.M. researchers plan to describe an advance in chip-making on Monday that could pave the way for new generations of superchips. The development, which comes from materials research in the design of advanced lenses and related technologies, will make it possible to create semiconductors with wires thinner than 30 nanometers, one-third the width in today's industry-standard chips.

The advance potentially clears one of the biggest hurdles facing the progress of Moore's Law, the observation of Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder of the Intel Corporation, that the density of chips doubles roughly every two years. Mr. Moore made the observation about chip-making technology in 1965, and most semiconductor engineers now believe that the doubling rate will continue through at least the middle of the next decade.

Currently, the densest computer memory chips store 4 billion bits of information; the extension of Moore's Law might make possible a generation storing 64 billion bits by 2013. Such a chip could store roughly 2,000 songs based on today's storage standards.

The industry now uses advanced laser light sources to photo-etch wire lines that are finer than the wavelength of light itself. This is done by generating interference patterns that allow subwavelength resolution. But there had been a general consensus in the industry that this technology would fail below 40 nanometers, requiring a shift to X-ray light sources or other printing technologies.

A group of I.B.M. researchers who collaborated with a team from JSR Micro, an advanced materials company based in Sunnyvale, Calif., will present papers describing the advances at an industry technical conference on photolithography to be held in San Jose, Calif., beginning Monday.

The researchers have created the thinnest line patterns to date using deep ultraviolet lithography, the laser technology used to print circuits on chips. The research has yielded a set of ultrafine lines, each only 29.9 nanometers in width. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)

I.B.M. technologists said the demonstration reduced the risk in the decisions being made by the industry as to which technologies to bet on as many as five years in the future.

"We would like to show a pathway to continue optical lithography," said Robert D. Allen, manager of lithography materials at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center.

The industry has also been pursuing X-ray light sources as a path to the future. That technology, however, would require that the semiconductor manufacturing industry be drastically revamped. For example, using X-ray light sources would require the industry to use mirrors rather than optical lenses to focus the X-ray sources.

The advance also indicates that the industry has found a way to continue to extend the life of argon fluoride excimer lasers that generate the ultraviolet light used in the photolithographic process. Those lasers have a wavelength of 193 nanometers, yet they are now used commercially to create chips with components as fine as 65 nanometers.

The key to pushing the technology further is a fluid immersion process for conducting the light onto the material that is etched to form the circuit pattern.

The researchers discovered that they could enhance the resolving power of the light source by shifting to a lens made from a crystalline quartz material and exotic immersion liquids that have better refraction properties than those currently used by the industry.

"This is significant," said Fred Zieber, a semiconductor industry analyst at Pathfinder Research. He noted, however, there is more required to turn this into a commercial lithographic process.

The I.B.M. researchers performed their research on a custom piece of equipment they call Nemo, referring to the character in Jules Verne's novel "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/te...y/20chip.html?





US Government May Outlaw Rootkits
Eric Bangeman

Several months after the discovery that Sony included a dangerous rootkit on some copy-protected music discs, the reverberations are still being felt. Late last week, the US Department of Homeland Security said that if companies fail to clean up their act when it comes to rootkits, the government would take action. Although there is currently no legislation pending, the DHS said that new laws or other regulations "may be warranted" if companies continue to trample on the security of their customers' systems.

Last fall, a security researcher digging around in his system discovered a rootkit installed by a Sony disc and created by a UK company called First 4 Internet. At first, Sony brushed off the problem, but after several days of PR nightmares, the company caved in and announced it would stop using First 4 Internet's software and a few days later, decided to recall all infected discs.

Aside from raising the public awareness of the dangers of DRM—especially when companies are not forthright about its existence and functionality—Sony's monumental blunder led to the inevitable lawsuits and subsequent settlement.

What is not as widely known is that officials from the Department of Homeland Security met with Sony and read them the riot act, according to Jonathan Frenkel, direcdtor of law enforcement policy for the DHS's Border and Transportation Security Directorate. The DHS is concerned that the problem could recur, albeit on a larger scale. "It's a potential vulnerability that's of strong concern to the department," said Frenkel.

Despite the DHS's public warning, the problem of obtrusive DRM isn't likely to disappear anytime soon. MPAA and RIAA member companies are bound and determined to shove DRM down our throats, telling us that we need it in order to resist the temptation to become evil pirates. But DRM is not about piracy, it's about being able to charge multiple times for the same content.

At least Sony's blunder brought the issue of DRM into the public eye, with some results. SunnComm, a DRM software maker, said that future versions of its software would be better behaved. Based on the warnings emanating from the DHS, companies using DRM will have to learn to operate above-board if they want to avoid government intervention in the form of legislation. The threat of action is nice, but outlawing DRM that potentially compromises the safety of a user's system is a better solution. If such legislation was in place last year, tens of thousands of people wouldn't have had their PCs compromised by a rootkit from Sony.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060220-6217.html





Broadcast Treaty Has Potential To Grant Unwarranted "Protections"
Peter Pollack

The subject of an ongoing series of discussions between the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), broadcasters, and representatives from a variety of nations, the WIPO Broadcast Treaty carries the promise of standardizing how certain types of intellectual property are treated around the world. It also presents the ominous threat of granting a powerful 50-year right of control to anyone who first broadcasts audio or video content.

A video featuring comments on the WIPO treaty by US Copyright Office head Marybeth Peters has recently surfaced. In it, she sheds some light on the fact that, although US broadcasters would love to see the additional control granted to them, at least some people in the government are not necessarily in agreement on the issue, and the topic is not yet decided. Because the WIPO Broadcast Treaty is not yet a hot-button issue, many people may not have heard much about it and a bit of background is in order.

For the purposes of our discussion, it should be noted that broadcasters are separate from content creators. Broadcasters are working to protect you (in theory) and themselves (most certainly) from evildoers who would steal a legitimate broadcast signal. They plan to institute this protection by gaining specific legal rights for themselves at the expense of the content creator and the fair use. If you've ever posted any kind of sound and video on the Internet, you could be affected by this provision of the Broadcast Treaty, should it be adopted.

First, let's try to envision an environment in which a person creates a work of audio and video. That person would then be considered the copyright holder. If that person licenses their work to a broadcaster, a contract would be created that enumerates exactly what the broadcaster is allowed to do, and for how long it can be done, e.g., the broadcaster has exclusive rights to broadcast the work for five years, etc. After the term of the contract, the copyright holder gets those rights back.

If that idea makes sense to you, take a look around, because that's essentially the situation we have in the United States right now. There are exceptions and nuances to copyright law that have been omitted for the sake of clarity, but the overall concept remains true.

In other parts of the world, the situation is somewhat different:

... nearly 50 years ago broadcasters in some countries got an additional right, layered on top of the copyright. Even if the material being broadcast was in the public domain, or the copyright holder had no objection to redistribution, the broadcaster was given a legal right to prevent it - a 20-year period of exclusivity. The ostensible reason was to encourage broadcasters to invest in new networks.

In the early days of broadcasting, governments often instituted regulations which affected the broadcasting environment in their country for many years to come. Some of these regulations were smart, some were foolish. In hindsight, the idea that broadcasters needed a 20-year copyright-like period to maintain control of a broadcast seems odd. The US had no such law, and American broadcast networks have thrived so much that many societies around the world—including our own—have spent much of the past half-century wringing their hands over the cultural influence of American broadcasting.

Nevertheless, US broadcasters have sometimes looked at their counterparts in countries with the 20-year protection law and wished that they were given similar rights. With the advent of the Internet, options are now being discussed that are analogous to the decisions made in the early years of broadcasting, and broadcasters are eyeballing an opportunity to make sweeping changes in the name of protecting intellectual property.

The proposed changes would institute the protection law in all countries which sign the Broadcast Treaty, increase its time span from 20 years to 50, and include audio and video content on the Internet under the definition of broadcasting.

In other words, suppose a TV show is shown on ABC. ABC would then get control over any and all rebroadcasts of that show for the next 50 years. Similarly, upload a personal video for hosting on YouTube or Google, and that web site would gain control over it for a half-century. Welcome to the future, Pomme and Kelly. [video]

Cheering on the protection provision in the Broadcast Treaty is DiMA, the Digital Media Association, which counts Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Napster among its members and the MPAA and RIAA among its friends. DiMA argues that the proposed protection needs to be extended to webcasts, lest piracy run rampant, but they never get around to explaining why the protection is needed in the first place—even for traditional broadcast.

Equivalent legal protection against commercial theft of webcasts will be a win for all. Copyright owners and performers who receive royalties from webcasting will not lose money to which they are entitled. Producers will know that material they license for webcast cannot lawfully be retransmitted or commercially exploited without their permission. Investors will know that webcasters have a chance to protect their business and expand their own audience.

Silly me, I thought retransmitting copyrighted material was already against the law. I'm not sure how an illegal act can be prevented by making it more illegal, but giving broadcasters copyright-like control would be certain to at least have the effect of tangling fair use in an additional layer of bureaucracy while providing a new stream of licensing fees to broadcasters by making them effectively co-copyright holders.

Finally, Marybeth Peters weighs in as someone out of the ordinary: a government employee possessing the voice of reason:

"We actually do have in our communications law a signal protection provision. Theft of services. You can't basically steal a cable, um, signal without consequences. So, the concept that they have there, is already in the law of the United States as it exists. The question is, should you expand it out? I think the most controversial piece is, the scope of the right that's being created, and the position that the US took, well, if you are going to give that type of a right to a broadcast—theft of their signal—then you should look at all people who are similarly situated, including webcasters. Now, that has been totally rejected by the rest of the world.

[...]

"I actually think that, from what I've read, that Europe wanted to, Europe wanted to basically protect broadcasters when they simulcast. We don't see the difference, so if you're gonna go that far, then, we think you should go further. But, what I read in the cables, and when I talk to my people, um, there really has not been support for this broader, um, scope of a treaty...and, we'll see what's in the next two meetings. (Transcribed from the video by the author)"

The head of the US Copyright Office thinks that the support isn't there for additional broadcaster protection, and it isn't needed anyway. History seems to demonstrate that she's right, but there's no doubt that the money and the lobbying hammer will continue to come down on the side of big broadcasting and the Internet services. It's just a question of how hard and how soon.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060222-6237.html





Gutierrez: Pirated Software ''Unacceptable''
AP

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez says he knows from personal experience as a Kellogg's executive the adverse impact of China's lax enforcement of copyright laws.

In an Associated Press interview, Gutierrez said Wednesday that flagrant theft of U.S. copyrighted material by China was ''absolutely unacceptable'' and must be halted, starting with the Chinese government's widespread use of pirated computer software programs.

''It doesn't reconcile with a country that is going to host the Olympics and have that kind of worldwide recognition to be procuring government software that is pirated,'' Gutierrez said in the interview.

Gutierrez said the Chinese government's use of counterfeit software would be one of the top issues the Bush administration would raise in a series of mid-April meetings with the Chinese including the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to Washington on April 24.

''If China wants to be a legitimate player at the table, and they do, and they want the legitimacy that comes with being a large economy in a global environment, they need to play by these rules'' involving the protection of copyrighted material, Gutierrez said.

His comments come a week after the administration pledged tougher enforcement of unfair trade laws governing China with creation of a China enforcement task force in the office of U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman.

The tougher approach is viewed as an effort to head off growing protectionist sentiment in Congress. Lawmakers have filed a number of bills that would impose economic sanctions on the country unless greater efforts are made to narrow a U.S. trade deficit with China that hit $202 billion last year, the largest imbalance ever recorded with a single country.

Pending legislation in Congress includes a proposal to impose 27.5 percent penalty tariffs on Chinese products unless China stops artificially depressing the value of its currency to gain trade advantages. Another bill would make China's normal trading privileges with the United States subject to annual review.

Critics of those bills contend they would drive up the cost of clothing, toys and appliances for American consumers without doing much to lower the trade deficit.

Gutierrez cautioned that the United States must ensure that whatever actions are taken with regard to China don't backfire.

''We don't want to do something that hurts our economy and hurts our workers because we are getting emotional,'' he said.

Gutierrez, who headed cereal giant Kellogg's before he joined President Bush's Cabinet last year, said he learned firsthand about the problems of protecting copyrights and patents in China when he lost a court case in 1996. The Chinese court ruled that Kellogg's did not have the right to keep competitors from using the famous rooster on rival corn flakes boxes.

''I think today that wouldn't happen,'' he said, noting that Starbucks just won a case against a competitor using their logo in China.

U.S. companies contend that copyright piracy in China is costing them billions of dollars a year in sales, and that in some areas, 90 percent of the goods sold are counterfeit products.

Gutierrez indicated that unless improvements are made, the administration would consider bringing a copyright issue case against China before the World Trade Organization.

Portman suggested last week that the United States could soon bring WTO cases against China in the area of copyright piracy and China's high tariffs on U.S. auto parts. Treasury Secretary John Snow, meanwhile, indicated China could be branded a ''currency manipulator'' in a report to Congress in April unless the country does more to let its currency rise in value against the dollar.

During a wide-ranging interview, Gutierrez insisted that a Bush administration decision to turn over shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates would not jeopardize America's security against terrorists.

''We are not turning over the security of our ports,'' he said of a deal that has touched off a furor in Congress and elsewhere.

Gutierrez said he would discuss ways to develop closer economic ties with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt during a trip to the region later this week.

On another matter, he said the Commerce Department was involved in making sure that American companies will be able to cope with a possible outbreak of the bird flu by having them respond to questionnaires that ask about their plans for dealing with a possible epidemic.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/nati...=1&oref=slogin




Yahoo Exec: Labels Should Sell Music Without DRM
John Borland

Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg raised eyebrows Thursday at the Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles with a proposal rarely heard from executives at large digital music services: Record labels should try selling music online without copy protection.

According to attendees, Goldberg pointed to the experience of eMusic, which offers its subscribers access to MP3 files without any digital rights management attached. Rights management restrictions have created a barrier for consumers, he said, making it a hurdle to transfer music to portable devices, and creating incompatibility between music services and MP3 players.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said that Goldberg was "basically trying to move the industry forward," and wanted to prompt industry-wide discussion "about what the consumer experience is."
http://news.com.com/2061-10799_3-604...2756&subj=news





The Click That Broke a Government's Grip
Philip P. Pan

The top editors of the China Youth Daily were meeting in a conference room last August when their cell phones started buzzing quietly with text messages. One after another, they discreetly read the notes. Then they traded nervous glances.

Colleagues were informing them that a senior editor in the room, Li Datong, had done something astonishing. Just before the meeting, Li had posted a blistering letter on the newspaper's computer system attacking the Communist Party's propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters' pay if their stories upset party officials.

No one told the editor in chief. For 90 minutes, he ran the meeting, oblivious to the political storm that was brewing. Then Li announced what he had done.

The chief editor stammered and rushed back to his office, witnesses recalled. But by then, Li's memo had leaked and was spreading across the Internet in countless e- mails and instant messages. Copies were posted on China's most popular Web forums, and within hours people across the country were sending Li messages of support.

The government's Internet censors scrambled, ordering one Web site after another to delete the letter. But two days later, in an embarrassing retreat, the party bowed to public outrage and scrapped the editor in chief's plan to muzzle his reporters.

The episode illustrated the profound impact of the Internet on political discourse in China, and the challenge that the Web poses to the Communist Party's ability to control news and shape public opinion, key elements to its hold on power. The incident also set the stage for last month's decision to suspend publication of Freezing Point, the pioneering weekly supplement that Li edited for the state-run China Youth Daily.

Eleven years after young Chinese returning from graduate study in the United States persuaded the party to offer Internet access to the public, China is home to one of the largest, fastest-growing and most active populations of Internet users in the world, according to several surveys. With more than 111 million people connected to the Web, China ranks second to the United States.

Although just a fraction of all Chinese go online -- and most who do play games, download music or gossip with friends -- widespread Internet use in the nation's largest cities and among the educated is changing the way Chinese learn about the world and weakening the Communist Party's monopoly on the media. Studies show China's Internet users spend more time online than they do with television and newspapers, and they are increasingly turning to the Web for news instead of traditional state outlets.

The government has sought to control what people read and write on the Web, employing a bureaucracy of censors and one of the world's most technologically sophisticated system of filters. But the success of those measures has been mixed. As a catalyst that amplifies voices and accelerates events, the Internet presents a formidable challenge to China's authoritarian political system. Again and again, ordinary Chinese have used it to challenge the government, force their opinions to be heard and alter political outcomes.

The influence of the Web has grown over the past two years, even as President Hu Jintao has pursued the country's most severe crackdown on the state media in more than a decade. The party said last week that Freezing Point would resume publishing, but Li and a colleague were fired, making them the latest in a series of editors at state publications to lose their jobs.

With newspapers, magazines and television stations coming under tighter control, journalists and their audiences have sought refuge online. The party's censors have followed, but cyberspace in China remains contested terrain, where the rules are uncertain and an eloquent argument can wield surprising power.

Dueling Views

They clashed from the start, two men named Li with conflicting ideas of what a newspaper should be.

One was the maverick editor Li Datong, 52, a tall man with a scholarly air who had spent his entire career at the China Youth Daily and helped turn the official organ of the Communist Youth League into one of the country's best papers. After the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, he nearly lost his job for leading journalists in a petition drive seeking freedom of the press.

The other was the new editor in chief, Li Erliang, 50, short in stature and slick in manner, a favorite of the propaganda authorities who made his reputation running the party's official mouthpiece in Tibet. He was an outsider at the Daily, a product of the party apparatus who was sent in to get the paper's feisty staff under control.

One night soon after his arrival in December 2004, the new editor stopped the presses and tore out Li Datong's Freezing Point section because it contained an article criticizing the Chinese education system. The next morning, the chief editor went to Li Datong's office to explain, but Li was furious and refused to talk to him. He just kept writing, banging on his keyboard and ignoring his new boss, colleagues recalled.

Relations between the two men only got worse. The party's propaganda department had targeted Freezing Point in its media crackdown because it often published investigative reports that embarrassed officials, as well as essays on history, society and current events that challenged the party line. Colleagues said Li Erliang, who declined to be interviewed, tried to rein in the section to please his superiors. Li Datong, who spoke out after Freezing Point was suspended, said he fought to protect it.

"The propaganda department wanted to shut us down, and we were under a lot of pressure," he said. "They tried to get rid of our columnists and cut the size of the section and take away reporters, but we resisted."

Then, in August, Li Erliang proposed a point system for awarding bonuses to the paper's staff members. Reporters would receive 100 points if their articles were praised by provincial officials, 120 if praised by the propaganda department and 300 if praised by a member of the Politburo. Points would be deducted if officials criticized articles. Just one report that upset a party leader could mean loss of a month's salary.

The newsroom simmered with anger, reporters said. But Li Datong saw an opening to fight back. "The plan was just stupid," he said. "A newspaper can evaluate reporters that way, and many do, but it can't be so blatant about it."

Li holed up in his apartment, and two days later, emerged with a 13,000-word letter that denounced the point system, saying it would "enslave and emasculate" the paper, cause circulation to plummet and put the Daily out of business.

He also painted a damning picture of the propaganda apparatus. He described an official who measured photos of two party leaders before publication to make sure neither man would be offended. He wrote about a senior editor who resigned in protest over an obsequious column that compared President Hu's words to "a lighthouse beacon, pointing and illuminating the way for China's students." And he attacked the party's censors, questioning their legitimacy and alleging they favored publishers who showered them with gifts and banquets.

Li saved his harshest words for his new boss. But he crafted his letter carefully, citing the support of generations of party leaders for the paper's journalism and even quoting Karl Marx to make the case that editors should put readers first.

He showed the letter to a few colleagues and to the reporters on his staff. Then, on Aug. 15, at 10:09 a.m., he posted it on the newsroom's computer system. "I hoped it would have an impact," he said. "I never expected what happened next."

System of Censorship

Every Friday morning, executives from a dozen of China's most popular Internet news sites are summoned downtown by the Beijing Municipal Information Office, an agency that reports to the party's propaganda department.

The man who usually runs the meetings, Chen Hua, director of the Internet Propaganda Management Department, declined to be interviewed. But participants say he or one of his colleagues tells the executives what news they should keep off their sites and what items they should highlight in the week ahead.

These firms are private enterprises, and several, including Sina, Sohu and Yahoo! China, are listed on U.S. stock exchanges or have attracted U.S. investment. But because they need licenses to operate in China, they comply with the government's requests.

The meetings are part of a censorship system that includes a blacklist of foreign sites blocked in China and filters that can stop e-mail and make Web pages inaccessible if they contain certain keywords. Several agencies, most notably the police and propaganda authorities, assign personnel to monitor the Web.

The system is far from airtight. Software can help evade filters and provide access to blacklisted sites, and Internet companies often test the censors' limits in order to attract readers and boost profits. If an item isn't stopped by the filters and hasn't been covered in the Friday meetings, the government can be caught off guard.

That is what happened with Li Datong's letter. Minutes after he posted it, people in the newsroom began copying it and sending it to friends via e-mail and the instant messaging programs used by more than 81 million Chinese.

"We had to move quickly, before they started blocking it," recalled one senior editor, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Pu Zhiqiang, a lawyer and advocate of journalists' rights, said he received a copy at 10:20 a.m., 11 minutes after Li posted the original. He forwarded it to 300 people by e-mail and sent it to others using Microsoft's MSN Messenger program. Then he began posting it on some of the bulletin board sites that have proliferated in China.

At 11:36 a.m., Pu put the memo on a popular forum called Yannan. Then he noticed that someone had posted a copy on another part of the site.

About the same time, the editors' meeting at the China Youth Daily ended and Li Erliang rushed back to his office. Colleagues said he contacted superiors in the propaganda department and the Communist Youth League after reading the memo.

Neither the government's censors nor the editors at the major Web sites had begun deleting the letter, yet. Some editors said they waited because it didn't challenge the party's authority or discuss subjects that were clearly off-limits, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre. At the same time, the official censors either failed to spot the memo or hesitated to act because they were worried that some senior officials might support Li Datong's views, editors said.

As they waited, the letter continued to spread.

At 12:17 p.m., it appeared on an overseas news site run by the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, and minutes later on others managed by exiled dissidents. These sites are blocked in China, but many people access them using software that slips past the government's firewall.

By 1:30 p.m., a prominent blogger, Li Xinde, had downloaded the memo. He said he sent it using China's top instant messaging service, QQ, to more than 20 chat groups, each with 30 to 40 members. By 2 p.m., the memo had been posted on popular university Web sites.

The document was spreading so fast that many people received multiple copies. A writer in Anhui province said that when he went online to check his e-mail at 2:30 p.m., four friends immediately offered to send him the memo on MSN Messenger. But two copies were already in his inbox, including one that had been sent to 1,000 people.

Race in Cyberspace

It was midafternoon before someone in the party bureaucracy decided Li Datong's letter should be removed from Chinese cyberspace and government officials began calling executives at the major Web sites.

Some said they were contacted by the Beijing Municipal Information Office, others by its national-level counterpart, the State Council Information Office. None reported receiving a formal notice or any legal justification for the decision. As usual, they were just told to delete the offending material.

There are at least 694,000 Web sites in China, according to official statistics, and the party didn't try to contact them all. They called the most popular sites in Beijing first. Hours passed before some smaller bulletin board sites were notified. Forums with national audiences in other cities received calls only at the end of the day.

At a recent news briefing, Liu Zhengrong, a senior Internet affairs official in the State Council Information Office, declined to explain the legal basis for the orders, saying only that many comments about the China Youth Daily remained on the Web.

Even as Li's memo began disappearing from some Web sites, it went up on others the authorities had not contacted. Shortly before 10 p.m., it was posted on the popular Tianya forum. At 11 p.m., it became a featured item on Bokee, China's top blog and portal site.

Almost everywhere the letter appeared, users added hundreds of comments backing the reporters of the China Youth Daily. Inside the newsroom, spirits were buoyed. Some journalists posted notes on the internal computer system supporting Li Datong.

The next morning, officials continued calling Web sites, but readers started posting the memo on sites that had already removed it. Some Web site managers said they tried to drag their feet or leave copies on less prominent pages. One said the memo was viewed 30,000 times before he took it down.

But other Web sites added Li Datong's name to keyword filters used to block sensitive material from being posted.

At 2:15 p.m., Li Erliang distributed a rebuttal on the China Youth Daily's internal network. It was quickly leaked, too, triggering another wave of e-mails and postings.

Authorities were scrambling for a way to end the controversy. A few hours after Blog-City, an overseas blogging site, was blocked, the party announced in a rare retreat that it was ditching Li Erliang's point system.

"It was a breakthrough, and the Internet played a critical role," said Xu Zhiyong, a civil rights lawyer in Beijing. "If something is written well enough, they can't stop it from spreading. People will find a way to read it."

Freezing Point enjoyed a renaissance in the months that followed. Li Erliang appeared chastened, unwilling to risk another fight he might lose, reporters said.

But in January, propaganda officials finally shut down the section. Before doing so, they called executives from all the major Web sites to a special meeting and warned them not to allow any discussion of the action.

The news spread quickly anyway.

Researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...rss_technology





Congressman Quizzes Net Companies On Shame
Declan McCullagh

When the U.S. House of Representatives convened a hearing on Wednesday to talk about China and the Internet, it quickly devolved into an exercise in political speechmaking.

Not until nearly halfway through the event did any of the technology executives receive a chance to respond to a rapid-fire series of condemnations.

One exchange, though, with Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, stood out. Lantos, who is co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, quizzed executives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco Systems not about technical or legal details--but about their view of the morality of cooperating with China's ruling Communist Party. Lantos, a Budapest-born Jew who represents the southwest quadrant of San Francisco, is the only member of Congress who is a Holocaust survivor.

For their part, the four technology companies said compliance with censorship has been a difficult decision, but ultimately the cost of doing business in China and being able to provide even limited services to Chinese users. Google's German operation censors Nazi-related Web sites from search results. Microsoft pointed out that the U.S. Justice Department has prosecuted people involved in offshore gambling even when the casino site is in a location where it's perfectly legal. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has required Google to censor search results in the United States.

Following is a transcript, edited for clarity, of Lantos' exchange with Microsoft lobbyist Jack Krumholtz; Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan; Google Vice President Elliot Schrage; and Mark Chandler, a vice president and general counsel of Cisco. (See related video excerpts.)

Rep. Tom Lantos: Can you say in English that you're ashamed of what your company and what the other companies have done?

Google: Congressman, I actually can't, I don't think it's fair for us to say that we're ashamed.

Lantos: You have nothing to be ashamed of?

Google: I am not ashamed of it, and I am not proud of it...We have taken a path, we have begun on a path, we have done a path that...will ultimately benefit all the users in China. If we determined, congressman, as a result of changing circumstances or as a result of the implementation of the Google.cn program that we are not achieving those results then we will assess our performance, our ability to achieve those goals, and whether to remain in the market.

Lantos, to Cisco: Is your company ashamed?

Cisco: (Begins to talk about products that Cisco sells.)

Lantos: Just answer me directly. The totality of the things that you and the other three companies have done, are you proud of it or are you ashamed of it?

Cisco: The products we provide in China are identical to the products we provide worldwide...What we have done is followed very closely the policies of our government, which are informed by human rights concerns and have been for 30 years now, in terms of providing what products are appropriate and not appropriate to provide to China and which users.

Lantos: I am asking a direct question. Is there anything you have done in the whole period you operated in China that the company ought to be ashamed of?

Cisco: We think that is a positive thing that we do throughout the world including China...My answer is I feel that our engagement is consistent with our government's goals.

Lantos, to Microsoft: Is your company ashamed?

Microsoft: We comply with legally binding orders whether it's here in the U.S. or China.

Lantos: Well, IBM complied with legal orders when they cooperated with Nazi Germany. Those were legal orders under the Nazi German system...Do you think that IBM during that period had something to be ashamed of?

Microsoft: I can't speak to that. I'm not familiar in detail with IBM's activities in that period.

Lantos: You heard (Rep. Christopher Smith's) speech (click for PDF). Assuming that his words are accurate, is IBM to be ashamed of their action during that period?

Microsoft: Congressman, I don't think it's my position to say whether IBM should be ashamed.

Lantos, to Yahoo: Are you ashamed?

Yahoo: We are very distressed about the consequences of having to comply with Chinese law...We are certainly troubled by that and we look forward to working with our peers.

Lantos: Do you think that individuals or families have been negatively impacted by some of the activities we have been told, like being in prison for 10 years? Have any of the companies reached out to these families and asked if you could be of any help to them?

Yahoo: We have expressed our condemnation of the prosecution of this person, expressed our views to the Chinese government...We have approached the Chinese government on these issues.

Lantos: Have you reached out to the family? I can ask it 10 more times if you refuse to answer it. You are under oath.

Yahoo: We have not reached out to the families.

Microsoft: In the five cases where Microsoft has removed sites at MSN Spaces in China (not one involves) anyone being incarcerated, so I'm not aware of any families for us to reach out to.

Lantos, to Microsoft: Have the families been adversely affected?

Microsoft: Not to my knowledge.

Lantos: You have done a lot of work to prepare for this hearing; you wish this hearing had never taken place, we all understand that...Have you explored (contacting the families)? Have you taken the trouble? Have you reached out to the families that may have been adversely affected?

Microsoft: With respect to the blogger whose content was taken down on Dec. 30, we returned his content to him because that was his intellectual property.

Lantos, to Google: I'm asking you a direct question (about families)--I don't want your philosophy.

Google: We don't offer a service that puts anyone in that situation, and the best way we honor their situation is to ensure that we are not associated with a similar situation. We don't offer products that would put us in a position of putting people like that in danger.
http://news.com.com/Congressman+quiz...3-6040250.html





Google Has No License For China Service: Newspaper

Internet search giant Google Inc.'s controversial expansion into China now faces possible trouble with regulators after a Beijing newspaper said its new Chinese-language platform does not have a license.

The Beijing News reported on Tuesday that Google.cn, the company's recently launched service that accommodates the China's censorship demands, "has not obtained the ICP (Internet content provider) license needed to operate Internet content services in China."

The Ministry of Information Industry, which regulates China's Internet, was "concerned" and investigating the problem, the paper said.

Google has weathered criticism from United States lawmakers, international free speech advocates and Chinese dissidents for abiding by Chinese censors' demands that searches on its new Chinese service block links about sensitive topics, such as Tibet and the 1989 anti-government protests in Tiananmen Square.

A spokesperson for Google told the paper that it shared an ICP license with another, local company, Ganji.com -- a practice followed by many international companies in China, including Yahoo Inc.and eBay Inc..

Usually, foreign investors in Chinese internet services must hand over operation of the service itself to a Chinese partner, with the foreign investor receiving payment for technical support.

The paper said Google.cn's operations appeared to be different and the name Ganji does not appear in reports about the U.S. company's China activities.
http://money.iwon.com/ht/nw/bus/2006...=home&SEC=news





Google Denies Report on China Operation
Joe McDonald

Google Inc. denied a report Monday that its Chinese-language search engine, which has been criticized for blocking searches for politically sensitive material, is operating without a required government license.

The newspaper Beijing News reported that the ICP - or Internet content provider - license listed by Google.cn on its Web site belongs to a Chinese company, Ganji.com. It said the situation has "attracted the attention" of Chinese regulators.

"Google has a partnership with Ganji.com through which Google has the required license to operate Google.cn," said Google spokeswoman Debbie Frost in a written response to questions about the report.

A spokesman for China's Ministry of Information Industry, which regulates Internet use, said it was aware that Google.cn didn't have its own license. The spokesman, Wang Lijian, wouldn't say whether that was permitted by Chinese rules or give any other information.

Some other foreign Internet companies such as eBay Inc. also operate in China using the licenses of their local partners.

Google and other foreign competitors are eager to gain a share of China's fast-growing online industry, the world's second-largest after the United States, with more than 100 million people online.

Google launched Google.cn last year in an effort to increase its appeal to Chinese Web surfers. The company has a Chinese- language search site based abroad, but users complain that Chinese government filters slow access to it.

The Chinese government operates what is widely regarded as the world's most sweeping effort to monitor and limit Internet use, with all online traffic passing through state-controlled gateways and filters block access to foreign sites deemed subversive or pornographic.

Web sites in China are required to remove banned content.

Google and other U.S. Internet companies are under criticism from American lawmakers and free-speech advocates for cooperating with such controls.

Google.cn blocks searches for material on human rights, Tibet and other topics banned by the government. Yahoo Inc. has been accused of providing Chinese authorities with information that led to the jailing of two Chinese e-mail users, and Microsoft Corp. shut down the Web log of a Chinese user at the government's request. Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) also has been accused of cooperating with Beijing.

At a hearing last week in Washington, Rep. Tom Lantos complained to executives of those companies that their actions were a "disgrace."

Technology companies have defended their actions in China, saying they have to obey Chinese law.
http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/200...=home&SEC=news





Google Rips Bush Administration's Search Request
Elise Ackerman

Google called the Bush administration's request for data on Web searches as ``so uninformed as to be nonsensical'' in papers filed in San Jose federal court Friday, arguing that turning over the information would expose its trade secrets and violate the privacy of its users.

The 21-page brief filed by the Mountain View search giant angrily dissected the government's claim that the search results would produce useful evidence regarding child pornography.

The Justice Department asked a federal judge to force Google to turn over the data last month, after Google refused to comply with an earlier subpoena. Government lawyers said the searches would help it defend the Child Online Protection Act, which was struck down as unconstitutional. The law is designed to keep children from sexually explicit material on the Internet.

The Justice Department has a week to submit a written response. A hearing is scheduled for March 13 in U.S. District Court in San Jose.

Google's struggle with the Justice Department has focused worldwide attention on the risk that Internet technologies will be used by governments for surveillance purposes -- and that the privacy of users could be compromised without their ever knowing it.
In justification of its demand of data from Google, the Justice Department revealed that it had requested -- and received -- similar data from Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.

Google's resistance to the U.S. government has won the company praise from many of the people who use its service. At the same time, its stance toward the Justice Department subpoena has been contrasted with the company's recent decision to roll out a Chinese-language search service that complies with Chinese government censorship requirements.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco Systems came under withering criticism for their actions in China at a congressional hearing earlier this week.

While the government did not ask Google for information relating to the identity of its users, Google said people sometimes search for their social security numbers or for their credit card numbers or other personal data.

``What will the government do with this information?'' Google asked.

The ACLU also filed a 10-page brief supporting Google on Friday, saying that the government's explanation regarding why it needed the searches was ``too vague'' to justify a court order.

``The government is not entitled to go on a fishing expedition through millions of Google searches any time it wants, just because it claims it needs that information,'' ACLU staff attorney Aden Fine wrote in a statement. ``Google has rightly denied the government's demand.''

The ACLU sued to overturn the child protection act in 1998.

The Justice Department originally demanded on August 25 that Google turn over two months of search queries and all the Web addresses in Google's index. Government lawyers subsequently agreed to narrow the search, however, as both Google and the ACLU argued that they did not explain what they would do with the data.

``They say it's to measure how people use the Web, but they've never explained how this information would help them achieve the goal,'' said Christopher Harris, an attorney who helped draft the ACLU brief.

In order to revive the child pornography law, government lawyers must show that it is more effective at keeping pornography from children than existing technological filters.

In its brief, Google argued that simply knowing the Web addresses that exist in Google's index would not enable the government to determine which contained pornographic material since the content of a Web page can change every day. While Google's records would not help the government make its case for the law, it could help Google's competitors gain access to the company's confidential query data.

``They could conform their size and crawling metrics to Google's thereby generating search results that mimic Google's,'' the brief stated.

Google described the lengths it goes to protect its search algorithms from competitors, including not disclosing the number of computers it uses to run the search engine, the number of queries processed in a day, the type of browsers those queries are entered on and the nature of the search strings people type in. ``The very fact that the Government is so uninformed about the value of search and URL information and so dismissive of Google's interest in protecting it speaks volumes about why the Court should protect Google from this compelled disclosure,'' the company wrote.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...l/13901327.htm





Policing Porn Is Not Part of Job Description

Montgomery homeland security officers reassigned after library incident
Cameron W. Barr

Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.

The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words "Homeland Security." The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.

After the two men made their announcement, one of them challenged an Internet user's choice of viewing material and asked him to step outside, according to a witness. A librarian intervened, and the two men went into the library's work area to discuss the matter. A police officer arrived. In the end, no one had to step outside except the uniformed men.

They were officers of the security division of Montgomery County's Homeland Security Department, an unarmed force that patrols about 300 county buildings -- but is not responsible for enforcing obscenity laws.

In the post-9/11 era, even suburban counties have homeland security departments. Montgomery County will not specify how many officers are in the department's security division, citing security reasons. Its annual budget, including salaries, is $3.6 million.

Later that afternoon, Montgomery County's chief administrative officer, Bruce Romer, issued a statement calling the incident "unfortunate" and "regrettable" -- two words that bureaucrats often deploy when things have gone awry. He said the officers had been reassigned to other duties.

Romer said the officers believed they were enforcing the county's sexual harassment policy but "overstepped their authority" and had to be reminded that Montgomery "supports the rights of patrons to view the materials of their choice."

The sexual harassment policy forbids the "display of offensive or obscene printed or visual material." But in a library, which is both a public arena and a county workplace, the U.S. Constitution trumps Montgomery's rules.

At most public libraries in the Washington area, an adult can view pornography on a library computer more or less unfettered. Montgomery asks customers to be considerate of others when viewing Web sites. If others are put off, librarians will provide the viewer of the offending material with a "privacy screen."

Fairfax County forbids library use of the Internet to view child pornography or obscene materials or to engage in gambling or fraud. But Fairfax library spokeswoman Lois Kirkpatrick said, "Librarians are not legally empowered to determine obscenity."

D.C. library spokeswoman Monica Lewis said the system is working on guidelines for Internet use, but she added that recessed computer screens generally ensure patrons their privacy.

Although many library systems in the United States use filtering software, the D.C. and Fairfax systems do not, and Montgomery uses such software only on computers available to children. Leslie Burger, president-elect of the American Library Association, said the reality is that "libraries are not the hotbed of looking at porn sites."

Still, Montgomery plans to train its homeland security officers "so they fully understand library policy and its consistency with residents' First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution," Romer said in his statement.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...66.html?sub=AR





Defamation Case Raises Issues of Fairness in Mexico
James C. McKinley Jr.

A roiling scandal here over the attempts of a state governor to jail a reporter has raised questions about whether the rich and powerful are using their influence with politicians to silence critics.

It began in December when a Cancún journalist who had written a book about child pornography and pedophile rings in the resort town was arrested with no warning and driven across the country to the state of Puebla. The writer, Lydia Cacho, was then charged under state law with defaming a textile businessman, Kamel Nacif, in her book, "The Demons of Eden." In her book, Ms. Cacho wrote that Mr. Nacif was a friend of Jean Succar Kuri, a man accused of pederasty in Cancún, and was paying for his legal defense.
Defamation and slander are criminal charges in Mexico, and Ms. Cacho was held briefly in jail before being released while state prosecutors began their investigation into the charges. In Mexico, with no grand jury system, an arrest can be made before the charges are substantiated.

Last week, however, someone gave an audiotape to a Mexican radio station and a national newspaper, La Jornada, that renewed the debate over Ms. Cacho's arrest. The recording carries an ugly conversation celebrating Ms. Cacho's arrest between two male voices that the journalists from the newspaper and the radio station said had been identified as the Puebla State governor, Mario Marín, and Mr. Nacif.

On the tape, the voice that is said to be the governor's tells the other man that he has dealt a blow to someone presumed to be Ms. Cacho, using an expletive to refer to her. "I told her here in Puebla the law is respected, and there is no impunity," the voice continues.

Governor Marín has denied in a statement that the voice on the tape is his. Mr. Nacif has not made a statement.

The tape is seen by journalists and politicians here, though, as fueling the worst suspicions about how wealthy people with ties to politicians can use Mexico's legal system, which lacks grand juries, juries or open trials, to harass their enemies.

The release of the tape to the news media has also fueled a political uproar. Governor Marín is from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the machine that ruled Mexico for 70 years. He immediately became the target of attacks from other parties.

Rubén Aguilar, a spokesman for President Vicente Fox, denounced the statements on the tape as "brutal and undignified" and announced that the case might be assigned to a newly appointed special prosecutor for crimes against journalists.

Members of the lower house of Congress from the other two major parties passed a resolution on Tuesday demanding Governor Marín's resignation, then passed legislation calling for a congressional investigation, arguing that the governor had violated Ms. Cacho's constitutional rights and should be impeached. On Thursday, they voted to demand that he step down until the investigation was finished.

The Senate was about to pass even stronger legislation calling for Mr. Marín to step down, when the members of his party marched out of the session, denying the other parties a quorum. In the meantime, the party's candidate for president, Roberto Madrazo, suggested that the Fox administration was using scandal to hurt his campaign, though he later called for an investigation into Mr. Marín's role in Ms. Cacho's arrest.

For her part, Ms. Cacho has said the tapes confirm her worst fears that she had been arrested out of vengeance for her writings and not for any legitimate reason. She said that state officials had gone so far as to threaten her with beatings and rape when she was released from jail.

"I think the case against me will be dropped, because it was a vengeful act," she told La Jornada.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/in...ge&oref=slogin





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Is Skype A Haven For Criminals?
Nate Anderson

From a law enforcement point of view, digital communication is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows for the simple collection, sorting, and processing of massive amounts of information (such as in the FBI's Carnivore system), but on the other hand, it is much easier for users to encrypt their communications with almost unbreakable codes. Now that VoIP calls are becoming commonplace, governments around the world are struggling to adapt to the new technology, and Skype has found itself under extra scrutiny.

The reason is that Skype uses 256-bit, industry-standard AES encryption that is nearly impossible to break without the key. The Skype privacy FAQ explains the system this way:

"Skype uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) - also known as Rijndael - which is also used by U.S. Government organizations to protect sensitive, information. Skype uses 256-bit encryption, which has a total of 1.1 x 10^77 possible keys, in order to actively encrypt the data in each Skype call or instant message. Skype uses 1024 bit RSA to negotiate symmetric AES keys. User public keys are certified by the Skype server at login using 1536 or 2048-bit RSA certificates."

All Skype traffic is automatically encrypted end-to-end without requiring any user intervention, and this encryption is posing a problem to authorities who need (or want) to listen in on conversations. Skype executives state that their software is free of all backdoors, and a security researcher who saw some (but not all) of the code agrees. Still, the company claims that it "cooperates fully with all lawful requests from relevant authorities," which may mean that they turn over keys to governments upon request.

The call can also be tapped once it leaves the Skype system and enters the normal telephone network, so calls to a landline are inherently insecure. Still, strong AES encryption is enough to defeat real-time surveillance of telephone calls of the kind possibly used by the NSA. That doesn't mean that nothing can be gleaned from watching the traffic, which can be used to identify who the call is routed to and how long it lasts, but it does mean the contents of the call remain secure.

Rather than being a new issue for law enforcement, though, this is actually just a new version of an old problem: how to access encrypted data on a suspect's computer? Encryption algorithms have been good enough for some time to prevent all but the most determined brute force attacks, but there are obviously other ways of solving the problem. For the FBI, keyloggers are a popular choice; they obviate the need for backdoors or for sophisticated computer solutions. They simply steal the password. The same (metaphorical) approach may give them access to Skype calls; rather than breaking the encryption, they simply grab the key and decrypt the data.

The FCC ruled last year that VoIP providers need to offer backdoors into their systems for wiretapping reasons, but Skype isn't based in the US and so is not subject to the rule. It is subject to the EU's new Data Retention Directive, though, which may require them to retain call logs and decryption keys for a period of time. If so, real-time monitoring of Skype calls would still be out, but after-the-fact review of recorded calls from people of interest might well be possible for the government.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060217-6206.html





Internet Calls, Even if You're Not Close to Your Computer
John Biggs

Skype, the program for making online phone calls, generally requires users to be tethered to a computer and an Internet connection. The VoSKY Call Center changes that equation, adding some interesting new options to the mix.

The Call Center, which costs $69.95 and is available at VoSKY's Web site, www.vosky.com, works with an Internet-connected Windows PC. When you attach an ordinary landline phone, you can use it to make calls to regular phones over the Internet at a reduced rate using the SkypeOut service, or make calls directly to other online Skype users, a free service.

The system can also forward incoming Skype calls to other phones — including mobile phones — and notify you when a specified Skype user appears online by ringing your phone.

The Call Center, which draws its power from the PC's U.S.B. port, even works the other way if you connect it to your regular phone line at home. When out and about, you can call your home phone and route your call onto the Internet through the Call Center, meaning you can make Skype calls from anywhere.

It appears to be getting easier every day to reach out and touch someone through the Internet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/te...in&oref=slogin





Sony BMG Names New CEO to Replace Lack
Matt Moore

Sony BMG Music Entertainment Names Rolf Schmidt-Holtz As Its New CEO to Replace Andrew Lack

The chief executive and chairman of the board are trading hats in a shake-up at Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the powerhouse record company behind such pop stars as Britney Spears, OutKast and Travis Tritt.

Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, who had been chairman, is replacing CEO Andrew Lack, who becomes chairman of the board. The swap, announced Friday and effective immediately, follows months of criticism of Lack's tenure as CEO, including investor discontent over spiraling fees paid to artists and a scandal over copy protection software in Sony CDs.

The unit was formed after Sony Music Entertainment and BMG, the music unit of Guetersloh, Germany-based Bertelsmann, formally combined their businesses. Sony and Bertelsmann each own half of the company.

Following the change, Schmidt-Holtz will assume overall management responsibility, while Lack "will lead the company's public policy and industry initiatives, and assume operating responsibility and oversight for the theatrical film business of Sony BMG," a joint statement said.

"I am extremely pleased to take on this new leadership role with the company and to continue to help Sony BMG accelerate its tremendous growth and performance," Lack said. "Rolf and I are fortunate to have a roster of extraordinary artists and a top-notch team of creative executives around the world."

The company operates several labels, including Columbia, RCA, Jive and LaFace, and its artist roster features Aerosmith, Jessica Simpson and Alicia Keys, among others.

Schmidt-Holtz was BMG's chief executive from 2001 until the merger in mid-2004 and has been chairman of the merged company's board since then. He will relocate to New York and will take up oversight of Sony BMG's theatrical film business.

Because of the swap, he resigned from Bertelsmann's executive board, the company said.

"With this management change Rolf and Andy are now aligned in positions that will take advantage of the significant progress the company has already made, as well as their formidable business skills and respective management experiences," Sony Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer said.

Bertelsmann CEO Gunter Thielen said Schmidt-Holtz "has impressively proven his flair for the creative and economic aspects of success in the music business."
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060210/germa...y_bmg_ceo.html





Can Surround Sound Save MP3?
Eliot Van Buskirk

Ever since computers picked up the handy ability to play decent-sounding music, fans have overwhelmingly defaulted to the MP3 format for audio files because it sounds pretty good, doesn't take up much space and (perhaps most importantly) works with more devices than any other digital audio format.

It may seem as if the venerable MP3 standard is here to stay, but it faces attack from a number of angles. First, it doesn't sound as good, byte-for-byte, as files purchased from iTunes Music Store (in the AAC format) or any of the Microsoft-compliant stores.

Second, the CD rippers/encoders that most people use -- iTunes and Windows Media Player -- have encouraged users to rip to AAC and WMA over the years. Third, only one major online music store, eMusic, proffers songs in the MP3 format, and it lacks most major releases. Fourth, geeks who love MP3 for its wide compatibility can now choose from preferable open-source alternatives such as Ogg Vorbis.

Finally, today's faster connections and more capacious hard drives have audiophiles turning to lossless codecs such as FLAC and those offered by Apple Computer and Microsoft.

Thomson, the entity that licenses the MP3 format to the world (it's not free or open source, as some suspect), tried to update MP3 for the first time in 2001, to the mp3Pro format. That effort failed. Only RCA -- owned by Thomson -- added mp3Pro support to its MP3 players, and consumers mainly ignored it.

In its second attempt to shepherd the MP3 format into the future, Thomson's MP3 Licensing Group unveiled a new format last year, a surround-sound version of the MP3 format imaginatively called MP3 Surround.

MP3 Surround files are essentially ordinary MP3s with an additional layer of information that tells compatible players where to place sounds. New devices designed to support the format deliver rich and accurate surround sound -- whether through a 5.1-channel system or simulated through a pair of stereo headphones. The format adds minimal overhead, consuming just 15 additional bits per second. And it is backward compatible, so MP3 Surround files will play on any device that supports plain-vanilla MP3, sans surround.

During my tests, MP3 Surround performed well enough to warrant serious consideration among device manufacturers and music fans. The songs sounded more expansive and present than their stereo counterparts, and I didn't hear any additions to the sound that marred the experience. I used Shure E3c earbuds for testing, so the surround effect is evidently not dependent on having full-size headphones.

In order for you to hear MP3 Surround today, you'll need a computer with the playback software installed (available on all4mp3.com). But computer playback is no longer enough. If a digital audio format is to succeed these days, it'll need support on a wide array of home and portable devices.

Several promising avenues for MP3 Surround home playback loom on the horizon. According to Rocky Caldwell, general manager of Thomson's MP3 Licensing Group, any DVD player could be upgraded with firmware to decode MP3 Surround files and pass the bits through to a 5.1 amplifier using a digital connection. RCA plans to release a player that comes standard with that capability later this year.

Because home theater-in-a-box units already have six channels of amplification, a manufacturer could include MP3 Surround support right out of the box. Caldwell told me Thomson is leveraging the strong relationships it forged with manufacturers to add MP3 Surround support to next year's devices.

The third possibility could be the most promising: Caldwell said "a major Japanese consumer-electronics manufacturer" will be releasing a device similar to the Xbox that might include MP3 Surround support natively. Needless to say, the integration of MP3 Surround into the Sony PlayStation 3 would be a huge shot in the arm to the new format, especially because so many PS3s will be purchased by tech-savvy types and connected to surround-sound systems.

On the portable front, Thomson would need to add MP3 Surround support to as many devices as possible that have the processing power to decode the files. Caldwell asserted that any portable video player would have the required processing power of 150 mips and could be upgraded to support MP3 Surround through a firmware update. The company will almost certainly have its RCA division create an MP3 player that supports MP3 Surround, but that won't be enough (as it discovered through its RCA-only mp3Pro experience).

Considering the lopsided nature of today's MP3 player market, Thomson would also need to convince Apple to put MP3 Surround on the iPod. Apple has never permitted any company to install third-party software on the iPod, but according to Caldwell, Thomson has a very close relationship with Apple.

MP3 Surround faces some stiff competition in this arena from SRS Labs' Wow plug-in (already found on Samsung MP3 players among others), Dolby Laboratories' Dolby Headphone technology (already found on some Sony Vaios), and Plantronics' Volume Logic (once the subject of a petition to force Apple to add support for it to the iPod, it's now available as an iTunes add-on for $20). None of these offer exactly what MP3 Surround does, but all of them are positioned close enough to capture the market for enhancing sound on portable audio devices.

Thomson has an ace up its sleeve when it comes to device integration: The new licensing fee for MP3 Surround is -- zero! Developers and manufacturers can add MP3 Surround for free (as long as they were already paying for MP3). This gives Thomson a considerable advantage over the other companies Apple might tap for such a project.

Even if MP3 Surround makes it onto enough hardware to succeed, one large question remains: Where is MP3 Surround music going to come from? Piracy-paranoid record labels would never consider selling their music in the MP3 Surround format because it lacks the digital-rights-management protection that prevents users from sharing (or in some cases even playing) their files. Fraunhofer once issued a press release announcing a version of the MP3 format that included DRM capabilities, but that never came to light.

According to Caldwell, MP3 Surround can succeed without the labels' cooperation. "MP3 never had major-label content, and seems to have been relatively successful. On the other hand, Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio both had major label content, and millions, if not tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, spent promoting it and they haven't succeeded, (among other reasons) because they don't address the convenience issue."

Assuming the labels won't sell you MP3 Surround songs, you could try turning DVD-A or SA-CD recordings currently on the market into MP3 Surround files. That would require considerable technical sophistication, and either illegal software or tedious real-time recording (from a DVD-A/SA-CD player into a 5.1-capable soundcard's input).

Using software available on the all4mp3.com site, you could also choose to batch-process your own files to create backward-compatible 5.1 simulations that consume 15 bps more disk space than untreated stereo MP3s. But that process is quite time-consuming, and doesn't create true MP3 Surround files, since it only starts with two channels of data.

Thomson desperately needs a good source for MP3 Surround files to surface, whether that's a legitimate MP3 Surround store, a renegade application for converting DVD- A and SA-CDs directly into MP3 Surround files, or a file-sharing network where people can download pre-converted MP3 Surround files.

If that happens, MP3 Surround could succeed for the same reason that MP3 did and still does: its overwhelming compatibility. MP3 Surround files play just fine on MP3 players that don't support the "surround" part of the file, and users with MP3 Surround equipment will be able to enjoy the exact same surround-sound file on their headphones and 5.1 systems for enhanced sound.

If people have MP3 Surround files on their hard drives, you can bet manufacturers will fall over themselves to add MP3 Surround support to their 2007 lines of MP3 players.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70230-1.html





Intel to Open Technology Center in Gaza
AP

Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company, is planning to build the first information technology education center in the volatile Gaza Strip.

The Intel Information Technology Center of Excellence is intended to provide IT training to Palestinians and stimulate development of high-tech industry in an area where half the labor force is unemployed. The center is being developed in conjunction with Washington, D.C.-based American Near East Refugee Aid and the Islamic University of Gaza.

"We don't want to discount the tension in the area ... but from our perspective, we view it as something that can have a positive impact," said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. "If you talk to the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, this is exactly the kind of thing they want. They want education, they want paths to improve the economic well-being of their citizens."

Intel has had a presence in Israel for more than three decades, but over the past few years has launched an initiative to also expand its investments in the Arab world.

The center is the company's first large project in the Palestinian territories, an area where American corporate involvement is rare.

It will be staffed primarily by Palestinians and will be located a couple of miles outside Gaza City in an area staked out to become a technology park with the Intel center as its anchor, said Peter Gubser, president of ANERA. Construction is expected to begin in about two months, with completion a year later.

The cost to build and equip the center will only be about $1 million, Gubser said, because a dollar goes a lot farther in the Middle East.

Though the security situation in Gaza is not good, Gubser believes the willingness of Intel to be an American corporate pioneer in the Gaza Strip may encourage other American corporations to follow.
http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/200...=home&SEC=news





BlackBerry Addicts Win Reprieve In Patent Row
Philippe Naughton and agencies

American BlackBerry addicts have been spared an immediate dose of cold turkey after a federal judge in Virginia stopped short of pulling the plug on the devices in a long-running row over technology patents.

The relief could be shortlived. US District Judge James Spencer said that there was no doubt Canadian firm Research in Motion Ltd (RIM), the makers of the BlackBerry, had infringed patents belonging to the privately- held NTP Inc.

He said that he would issue a final decision on an injunction "as soon as reasonably possible".

More than three million Americans use the gadgets popularly dubbed the CrackBerry, to stay in touch with their e-mails while on the move. The devices, popular in Congress and widely used in the White House, also function as mobile phones and personal organisers and allow basic web browsing.

The device's success, however, has been played out against a backdrop of legal hostility between RIM and NTP over infringement which has been dragging through the courts for more than four years.

The two companies reached a tentative settlement of $450 million early last year, but the deal fell through. In the meantime, RIM has been challenging the validity of the patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office - but that process has been lagging behind the legal action and RIM today faced the possibility that it would be told either to reach a financial settlement or switch off the devices.

Last month, the US Supreme Court rejected a bid by RIM to review the patent dispute, instead handing the case back to Judge Spencer at the US District Court in Richmond, Virginia. The judge, who has appeared sympathetic to NTP's arguments so far, could yet decide to issue an injunction preventing further use of the patented technology.

The patent row covers only use of the machines in the United States, where NTP was granted a series of patents on wireless e-mail in the early 1980s.

UK and other European users would, theoretically, be unaffected by any shutdown and could continue thumbing away on commuter trains and in City champagne bars, but with so much business going through the United States a ruling against RIM could have larger economic implications.

In the run-up to today's hearing, the war of words between the companies continued to heat up.

NTP, based in Arlington, Virginia, put out a statement saying that RIM had "utilised its money, power and political influence to overcome its complete defeat in the court system and to inappropriately influence the US Patent Office process".

RIM, meanwhile, said that if push came to shove it could use other technology not covered by NTP's patents, technology that it is already trialling successfully.

"We’ve got dozens of customers using it and we haven’t had one complaint," said Jim Balsillie, RIM's joint CEO.

"Our approach is very simple. We need something reasonable where it gives us the scope to run our business. But the truth of it is, all they’re trying to do is jig a timing game, because these patents will go in the garbage. The chance of them surviving is zero. Like they’re gone."

Analysts say that there is little chance of a BlackBerry blackout because even if the Virginia District Court found against RIM, it would either stump up the cash for a settlement - which could cost it as much as $1.5 billion - or introduce the new technology.

NPT will continue to push for the court to come to a judgment as quickly as possible. "Win, lose or draw, this is (a case in which) fast justice is better than slow justice," said Don Stout, the NTP co-founder.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/ar...056976,00.html





Facing Pressure, White House Seeks Approval for Spying
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and David E. Sanger

After two months of insisting that President Bush did not need court approval to authorize the wiretapping of calls between the United States and suspected terrorists abroad, the administration is trying to resist pressure for judicial review while pushing for retroactive Congressional approval of the program.

The administration opened negotiations with Congress last week, but it is far from clear whether Mr. Bush will be able to fend off calls from Democrats and some Republicans for increased oversight of the eavesdropping program, which is run by the National Security Agency.

The latest Republican to join the growing chorus of those seeking oversight is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Mr. Graham, a former military prosecutor whose opinion on national security commands respect in the Senate, said he believed there was now a "bipartisan consensus" to have broader Congressional and judicial review of the program.

"I do believe we can provide oversight in a meaningful way without compromising the program," he said, "and I am adamant that the courts have some role when it comes to warrants. If you're going to follow an American citizen around for an extended period of time believing they're collaborating with the enemy, at some point in time, you need to get some judicial review, because mistakes can be made."

Four other leading Senate Republicans, including the heads of three committees — Judiciary, Homeland Security and Intelligence — have said they would prefer some degree of judicial oversight. Their positions, if they hold, could make the negotiations more difficult.

The White House is hoping that talks will lead to legislation to approve the program, much as Congress eventually approved Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Mr. Bush expanded on his defense of the program in Tampa, Fla., on Friday, saying he believed that he had to take extraordinary steps in a time of war.

"Unfortunately, we're having this discussion," he said of the debate over wiretapping. "It's too bad, because guess who listens to the discussion: the enemy."

He added: "The enemy is adjusting. But I'm going to tell you something. I'm doing the right thing. Washington is a town that says, you didn't connect the dots, and then when you do connect the dots, they say you're wrong."

But two days before Mr. Bush spoke, the White House opened the door to talks in the hope of avoiding a full-scale Congressional investigation. According to lawmakers involved in the discussions, a number of senior officials, including Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., the chief of staff, began contacting members of the Senate to determine what it would take to derail the investigation.

The White House has refused to discuss those talks. Trent Duffy, a deputy press secretary, said the administration "does not want to negotiate in the media."

But some lawmakers have given glimpses of the conversations, including Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, a member of the intelligence panel who was prepared to vote with Democrats on Thursday to open an inquiry until the White House agreed to negotiate.

Ms. Snowe, who favors some kind of judicial review, characterized the talks as a "fundamental shift" in the debate. "I think there has been a quantum leap," she said in an interview, adding that senators were "really trying to wrestle the best way to craft a measured bill."

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts of Kansas, has said he would prefer to see the program brought under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Mr. Roberts also says he is concerned that in an era of fast-paced electronic surveillance, the court may not be able to issue warrants quickly enough to meet the needs of the program.

Without offering specifics, Mr. Roberts spoke in an interview last week of "streamlining FISA" and said the N.S.A. would have to be involved in those negotiations.

Complicating the effort to reach a deal is the difficulty of surmounting the president's No. 1 objective: that no discussion make public the technology underlying the spying effort.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has given the administration two weeks to negotiate. If the White House does not demonstrate a good-faith effort, members say, the Democratic proposal for a full-scale inquiry will be back on the table at the panel's next meeting on March 7.

Republican leaders of the House Intelligence Committee have also agreed to some kind of inquiry, but there is a dispute about how broad it should be. Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan and the committee chairman, was traveling in Asia on Sunday and could not be reached for comment.

With Congress in recess for the next week, reaching an agreement on any legislation that contains concrete details seems unlikely. As Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, said: "People are all over the place. We don't have a consensus."

Mr. DeWine is calling for legislation that would explicitly authorize the wiretapping and exempt it from the 1978 law that created the intelligence court to review classified applications for wiretapping inside the United States. The White House has embraced that concept, because it would take away the uncertainties of judicial review.

Mr. DeWine said he would also create small subcommittees of the Senate and House intelligence committees, with "professional staff," to oversee the program. "The key is oversight," he said.

It is unclear how Mr. DeWine's idea could turn into legislation without describing the surveillance program in some detail, which Mr. Bush has opposed.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are still demanding an inquiry. They also say that writing legislation will be impossible without knowing all the facts.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and his party's senior member on the intelligence panel, said, "No member of the Senate can cast an informed vote on legislation authorizing, or, conversely, restricting, the N.S.A.'s warrantless surveillance program when they fundamentally do not know what they are authorizing or restricting."

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, has drafted legislation that would require the FISA court to review the constitutionality of the eavesdropping program. Mr. Specter says he is sympathetic to the administration's concern that briefing lawmakers could lead to leaks, which is why he wants to turn the matter over to the courts.

But he insists that the eavesdropping must be subjected to a rigorous constitutional review and has said that anything short of that would be "window dressing."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/politics/20nsa.html?





U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review
Scott Shane

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program.

A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.

One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located.

"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."

The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org, on Tuesday.

The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the National Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives.

But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.

Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program.

"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy."

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said.

Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work.

Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said the National Archives sought to expand public access to documents whenever possible but had no power over the reclassifications. "The decisions agencies make are those agencies' decisions," Mr. Kurtz said.

Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since 1998 and that it was "committed to the highest quality process" for deciding what should be secret.

"Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players involved," Mr. Gimigliano said.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the program.

Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.

"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts."

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped "declassified," freely given to researchers and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.

Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained, the agencies were technically correct. But he said the complaints about the secret program, which prompted his decision to conduct an audit, showed that the government's system for deciding what should be secret is deeply flawed.

"This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr. Leonard said. "There's got to be a better way."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/po...age&oref=login





Germany Weighs if It Played Role in Seizure by U.S.
Don Van Natta Jr.

This article was reported by Don Van Natta Jr., Souad Mekhennet, and Nicholas Wood, and was written by Mr. Van Natta.

For more than a year, the German government has criticized the United States for its role in the abduction of a German man who was taken to an American prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he said he was held and tortured for five months after being mistaken for a terrorism suspect.

German officials said they knew nothing about the man's abduction and have repeatedly pressed Washington for information about the case, which has set off outrage here. At a meeting in Berlin last December, Chancellor Angela Merkel demanded an explanation from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the incident.

But on Monday in Neu-Ulm near Munich, the police and prosecutors opened an investigation into whether Germany served as a silent partner of the United States in the abduction of the man, Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Arab descent who was arrested Dec. 31, 2003, in Macedonia before being flown to the Kabul prison.

The action came after a two-and-a-half-hour meeting at police headquarters in which Mr. Masri told the police that he was "90 percent" certain that a senior German police official was the interrogator who had visited him three times inside the prison in Kabul but had identified himself only as "Sam." The German prosecutors said Monday that they were also investigating whether the German Embassy in Skopje, Macedonia, had been notified about Mr. Masri's kidnapping within days of his capture there, but then had done nothing to try to help him.

Mr. Masri's case has come to symbolize the C.I.A. practice known as extraordinary rendition, in which terror suspects are sent to be interrogated in other countries where torture is commonly used. In broadening its criminal inquiry into the abduction of Mr. Masri to the activities of its own government, German prosecutors are trying to determine whether the German government worked secretly with the United States in the practice.

"I feel deceived and betrayed by my own country," Mr. Masri, a 42-year-old unemployed car salesman from Neu-Ulm, said in an interview.

The German police official identified as "Sam" denied that he had visited Mr. Masri in Afghanistan and said he was "on holiday" at the time in Germany, but that he could not remember exactly where. The man was present on Monday at the police station, where Mr. Masri picked him out of a 10-person lineup. After speaking with him, Mr. Masri said that his voice was similar but that his hair style was different.

Martin Hofmann, a prosecutor in Munich, said Monday that his office would not "assume that this man is Sam" but would "go forward with our investigation."

A senior German official familiar with the case said that Mr. Masri was "at best mistaken" and that the police official "cannot be Sam."

The New York Times is withholding the official's name at the request of Germany's intelligence services because he often does undercover intelligence work. He frequently gets "sensitive" assignments and helps clean up "dirty work" for the German foreign intelligence service, said one of his longtime colleagues, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A senior Macedonian government official who was directly involved in Mr. Masri's detention told The Times that not long after Mr. Masri's capture, Macedonian officials notified the German Embassy in Skopje. C.I.A. officers in Macedonia conducted the interrogation of Mr. Masri, according to Macedonian officials.

August Stern, the Munich-based federal prosecutor who is leading Germany's criminal investigation of Mr. Masri's kidnapping, said his investigators were trying to determine whether the German Embassy had been told about Mr. Masri's capture, and then sent a German agent to the American prison in Kabul to talk with him. Mr. Stern and other senior police officers and prosecutors said they would try to interview the officials in the embassy in Skopje in coming weeks.

August Hanning, secretary of state for the Ministry of the Interior, denied in an interview that any member of Germany's secret services had visited Mr. Masri while he was held captive. "He has never been to Afghanistan," Mr. Hanning said of the German police official.

Two senior German officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the case's sensitive nature, denied that Germany's Embassy had been told about Mr. Masri's capture. "The German Embassy in Skopje was not informed by Macedonian authorities while German citizen el-Masri was in custody in Macedonia," a Foreign Office spokesman said. Another official said Germany did not learn about Mr. Masri's detention until May 31, 2004, when the American ambassador to Germany at the time, Daniel Coats, informed German officials about Mr. Masri's capture and eventual release.

"According to our investigation, I am convinced that German officials did not have any knowledge before his release," the official said.

Later this week, the German government is expected to turn over a report to Parliament about Mr. Masri's case.

Meanwhile, investigators at the Council of Europe, led by Dick Marty, a Swiss lawmaker, are looking into whether there was quiet cooperation between the C.I.A. and its counterparts in European countries, including Germany, Italy and Sweden, where suspected terrorists were kidnapped and sent to third countries for interrogation.

In Italy, the authorities in June charged 23 C.I.A. agents with the abduction of a terrorism suspect from the streets of Milan. Italian officials insist that they did not know about the procedure, but some elected officials in Italy said the Americans must have tipped off their counterparts in the Italian intelligence agency.

European officials have been sharply critical of the C.I.A.'s rendition program. In particular, German officials have rebuked the United States for playing a role in the abduction of one of their citizens and then transporting him to Afghanistan on a chartered C.I.A. plane.

"I have no explanation for the whole case," a senior German official said. "To bring such a man like el-Masri from Europe to Afghanistan and to ask him some questions and six months later, the explanation is that it's a terrible error is not very convincing. To me there are still a lot of questions."

Manfred R. Gnjidic, Mr. Masri's lawyer, said he is convinced that Germany "stood by like a little school boy, watching what was going on with my client and doing nothing."

After more than five months in captivity, the United States released Mr. Masri without filing charges. His case was first disclosed in The Times in January 2005.

At the meeting last December in Berlin between the German chancellor and Ms. Rice, the kidnapping of Mr. Masri was discussed privately, but the two leaders seemed to disagree about the substance of that conversation afterward.

Ms. Merkel said the Bush administration had admitted that it had mistakenly abducted Mr. Masri. But Ms. Rice declined to discuss with reporters anything about the case. She said only that she had pledged to Ms. Merkel, "When and if mistakes are made, we work very hard and as quickly as possible to rectify them."

In Washington, a senior State Department official said Monday that the department would not comment on Mr. Masri's case, noting that it was a matter of litigation in both Germany and the United States. In late 2003, Mr. Masri left his family in Ulm for a trip to Macedonia. Macedonian and German officials said he was arrested at a border checkpoint on Dec. 31, 2003, because his name was on an Interpol terror watch list. But they said the name referred to another Khaled el-Masri.

Mr. Masri was then held in a hotel in Macedonia for several weeks, where he was questioned by the C.I.A., according to senior Macedonian and American officials. A senior Macedonian official said the German Embassy was notified about Mr. Masri within days of his capture. "Unofficially, they knew," the official said of the Germans.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.

Two senior Macedonian officials said the Americans had asked to have Mr. Masri detained in Macedonia for 23 days. "We consider the Americans as our partners," a senior Macedonian official said. "We cannot refuse them."

Mr. Masri said he had pleaded with his captors to let him go. "Call the German Embassy," Mr. Masri said he had repeatedly told them. "I'm a German citizen. Please tell them I am here!"

"They don't want to talk to you," he said one of his captors had replied.

In a recent interview, Mr. Masri said: "I thought it was strange that they kept telling me the Germans didn't care about me. Now I know why they said that — because it was true."

At the hotel, Mr. Masri said he had been asked whether he was a member of Al Qaeda. But he was struck by the many questions he was asked about his time in Germany. He said the questions had led him to suspect that the Germans were cooperating with the Macedonians.

A German official disputed that assertion, saying Germany often shared information with their American counterparts about suspected terrorists. But the official acknowledged that the German police had not considered Mr. Masri to be an "important" suspect.
Publicly, Macedonia has denied that Mr. Masri was held illegally. "There is nothing the ministry has done illegally," Hari Kostiv, the minister of interior at the time and later the prime minister, said in an interview. "The man is alive and back home with his family. Somebody made a mistake. That somebody is not Macedonia."

By late January 2004, Mr. Masri was sent to Afghanistan, where he said he was held and beaten over the next five months.

For Mr. Masri, one of the biggest mysteries was the identity of the interrogator who identified himself as Sam, and who spoke fluent German. He visited three times during Mr. Masri's final month at the Kabul jail.

During the first meeting, Mr. Masri said he had asked the man if he was from Germany, but the man declined to answer. Mr. Masri said he had asked him, "Do the Germans know I'm here?"

"He said he did not want to answer," Mr. Masri said. "I asked him if my wife knew I was there. Sam said she doesn't know. He then said, I shouldn't ask questions, I should only answer them."

During their second meeting, the man was no longer belligerent, Mr. Masri said, bringing him cookies, chocolates and a copy of the German newsmagazine Focus. The man also asked if Mr. Masri wanted "anything from Germany."

"I said, 'Nothing, thank you,' " Mr. Masri said.

In their last meeting, a week before Mr. Masri's release, the man told him that he would be returning home soon. The last time Mr. Masri saw Sam, the interrogator was speaking with a man who he believed was an American. Soon afterward, Mr. Masri was released.

On Dec. 12, 2005, Mr. Gnjidic, the lawyer for Mr. Masri, received an e-mail message from a German journalist named Frank Kruger, who suggested that Sam might be a German police official. Earlier this month, Mr. Gnjidic said he had obtained a videotape of the police official that convinced Mr. Masri that he was Sam. On Monday, after meeting the man at police headquarters, Mr. Masri said he was 90 percent certain that the police official was Sam.

"The man was very nervous, and he could not look at me into my eyes," Mr. Masri said. "The hair is different, but the voice sounded very similar."

"For me, it is very important that we know who this man was," he said.

Mr. Gnjidic said he found it hard to believe that other than the prosecutors in Munich, no one in the German government has sought Mr. Masri's testimony about his ordeal. "The scandal for me is that the Germans did nothing when they heard a German had been captured," he said. "They should have protested very hard and tried to stop this."

Don Van Natta reported from Munich for this article, Souad Mekhennet from Neu-Ulm and Munich, and Nicholas Wood from Skopje.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/in...ge&oref=slogin





EU Approves Landmark Data Retention Law

European Union justice ministers Tuesday approved a controversial new law requiring telecom operators to store phone and Internet data to help fight terrorism.

The so-called data retention directive has been the subject of a heated political debate in Brussels for over a year, with supporters saying it is needed to track down terrorists, pedophiles and criminal gangs, and civil liberties campaigners arguing it is an intrusion on basic rights.

Under the directive, telecom operators in all 25 EU states will be required to keep records of all phone calls and Internet communications for a period of six months to two years.

The measure already has the backing of the European Parliament, which succeeded in watering down the original proposal. European Commission vice-president Franco Frattini said the compromise was "not perfect" but hailed the directive's adoption as a "victory for democracy, a victory for our EU citizens, and a victory for the fundamental rights the European Union and its constituting 25 member states are based upon."
http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism...1-104633-9768r





Whitehall Branded Internet 'Villain of the Year'
Rhys Blakely

The British Government has been named "Villain of the Year" by a group of the world's largest internet companies after pushing through laws across Europe that will force firms to store more information on their customers' web and telephone use.

At an awards ceremony in London last night, the Internet Service Provider Association said the Government had used its presidency of the European Union in 2005 to push through EU-wide data retention laws that will force ISPs and telecoms companies "to retain more data for longer without proper impact assessment".

The association’s members, which include telecoms providers such as BT as well as internet giants such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, are already among the biggest repositories of personal data in the world.

Under the legislation, which was given final approval in Brussels this week, they will keep details of their European customers' telephone calls and internet use for up to two years.

Previously ISPs in Britain had operated under a voluntary code included in the 2001 Anti-terrorism, Crime & Security Act. The code suggested that subscriber information be stored for 12 months and web activity information – which includes logs of web pages visited – for just four days.

The Government has argued that such information is a crucial weapon in the fight against terrorism. Its support for the new EU measures measures followed the London bombings in July.

However, an ISPA spokesman told Times Online: "There are strong concerns that these data retention measures would be used for wider purposes than just terrorism.

"There is lot of confusion here, on issues such as data protection and human rights. It is not simply a matter of costs."

The body has suggested that data could potentially be made available to groups other than the security forces, in moves that could breach people’s privacy.

In America, Google recently confronted the White House over attempts to have the internet company hand over search data to the authorities, a row which once again brought online privacy concerns to the fore across the world.

The industry is also concerned ober the financial impact of the fresh legislation. One large internet service provider in the UK told Times Online it estimated the cost at £26 million to set up a system to retain data and another £9 million a year in administration costs.

Peter Cullen, Chief Privacy Strategist at Microsoft, told Times Online last year that globally, political debate has "frequently and increasingly resulted in vague and conflicting legislation" which "was not protecting consumers and was not flexible enough for business".
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/ar...056974,00.html





Finally, there is an Alternative to the Internet

NetAlter(TM) is a Patent Pending innovation based on a unique "Information, Communication and Computational" (ICC) architecture which will provide a robust alternative to the current Internet.
Press Release

Mumbai, India, February 23, 2006 --(PR.COM)-- NetAlter is a radically superior System and Method which will offer "Safe and Smart surfing environment," "Super Fast Intelligent Deep Wide P2P Search," "Robust protection against Virus and Piracy," "GRID Supercomputing for every desktop," "Active Collaboration," "Protected Peer-to-Peer Personal Network" and more.

Users of applications based on NetAlter system will be able to download software, share files and information, create personal network and conduct online business without having to worry about surfing speed, junk information, unwanted advertisements, piracy, virus, spam and the myriad of other issues that presently plague the internet.

Following are some of the features that NetAlter will offer over the current Internet:

Secured Gateway to Smart Environment

Present Internet is a highly unorganized, read-only system where there are heterogeneous identities, standards and application interfaces resulting in frustration for the average internet user.

The NetAlter System offers a unified, user friendly visual interface based on standardized core browser technology, which can be customized to end-user requirement.

The NetAlter browser offers all-in-one functionality such as Multi Role (NetAlter Active, NetAlter Developer, NetAlter Service Provider, NetAlter Subscriber), Multi User, Multi tasking, Multi Language, support to Multi Collaboration and Sharing, Multiple Communication Channels (TCPIP/HTTP/Wireless, etc), Multi Platform and a variety of Styles, etc.

NetAlter will have a central controlling authority that coordinates the activity of certified channel nodes, to ensure that the Information provided by Individuals and organizations is verifiable, uniquely identified and organized.

A salient feature of NetAlter is its "Always Connected" mode which automatically switches to an alternate communication channel, when you're disconnected from the Internet.

NetAlter also offers end-users the ability to customize their browser container; giving them the option to block unwanted advertisements and display only selected advertisement channels.

The data on NetAlter is organized on the basis of semantic web which provides an intelligent organization of data based on a vertical as well as horizontal hierarchical classification.

This enables the NetAlter Browser to make available an active explorer that lists the current as well as new source of data in a vertical and horizontal organization, and is easily located and precisely searchable.

Domain names registration and associated litigation is history in the NetAlter System.

When a company releases their products and services on NetAlter, they are automatically placed under relevant classification, publicly broadcasted and easily accessible.

NetAlter provides a user friendly, wizard based interface, using which, NetAlter subscribers can select the application or service of their choice at the time of setup.

Akin to adding and removing programs in an operating system, users can easily subscribe or unsubscribe to applications and services at any given point of time.

NetAlter adheres to the service oriented application architecture (SOA).

Robust Protection from Virus and Piracy

Present Internet has become a heaven for spreading virus, illegal copying of software, music and information. End Users are also concerned about their privacy and security of personal information.

NetAlter is based on technology that is free from current Internet viruses and security vulnerabilities and offers comprehensive protection for Intellectual Property.

Each new service or product, published and distributed on NetAlter, is protected using a highly secured and encrypted unique Package or Product Key. Once a product or service is approved, certified and distributed on NetAlter, there is no scope for duplication of the same.

NetAlter also provides a centralized inventory of products and services and auditing of their usage pattern.

Superfast and Intelligent Search

Present Internet Search gives you very few options for obtaining a detailed or precise search result and indexes only about 30-40% of available information.

NetAlter Search will be Super Fast, Powerful and Visually Appealing; delivering surgically precise results.

It enables deep search of not just published content but also those available on local computers, private domains, intranets, databases, etc. by enabling artificial intelligence (AI), GRID Supercomputing, P2P and several other cutting edge technologies.

Users will have multiple advanced search options synchronized with an active explorer based on a detailed Ontology and Taxonomy hierarchical classification.

A salient feature of NetAlter Search is that if offers a period wise, geographical location wise, domains wise and field specific search with options to segregate search results on the basis of new or modified as well as archived data.

Information searched on NetAlter will be stored locally in database form and can be made available for offline search as well as further statistical analysis and comparison.

NetAlter Search also provides a system wide search encompassing understanding of user keywords and listing resources from every possible source in the NetAlter system.

Grid Supercomputing and Active Collaboration

Present Internet is based on outdated Client Server technology that wastes the resources of client & server computers and contributes to unnecessary network traffic, slowing down the Internet. Present Internet Websites also crash when there is a surge of hits. The online collaboration facilities available at present are limited in scope and functionality.

NetAlter provides the power of GRID based supercomputing in a democratic enterprise to the end user by distributing application processing over free resources available in a supercomputing GRID.

For this, NetAlter has developed a unique democratic system and method, wherein each NetAlter user can determine how much supercomputing power they require to access from the GRID, by simply sharing a proportionate percentage of their own local resources to this GRID.

When a user subscribes to this technology, applications and functions available on NetAlter execute at supercomputing speed.

NetAlter is a completely new System and Method which offers all the facilities and incentives for active collaboration between different entities such as Personal Networks, Communities, Enterprise, etc.

It provides a user-friendly, wizard based interface enabling Individuals, Groups and Business to easily create their own Personal Network or Intranet, using a highly secured Peer to Peer technology, which also provides safeguard for Intellectual Property Rights.

Similarly, NetAlter also provides developers with a unique platform to share their development work with other developers by licensing their software modules on NetAlter and earn royalty or license fees.

This is just a preview of what NetAlter has to offer. There are many more exciting features that NetAlter will deliver. To learn more about NetAlter, visit www.netalter.com.

About NetAlter Software Limited

NetAlter is a System and Method for which patent application has been filed via PCT in 126 countries including USA and India.

After 8 years of R&D and over 60 man years of vigorous research, a System and Method has been developed, that can be truly considered as an alternate to the current Internet system.

NetAlter Software Limited is a Mumbai based Indian unlisted company holding complete marketing rights over the NetAlter System and Methods and also the entity which will provide license rights for development of innovative solutions for NetAlter system.

NetAlter Software Limited is also the principal research and development arm of White Vision Software Limited which develops and markets copyrighted, user friendly software for social segment such as Matrimonial Hotline®, Community Hotline®, Web Manager®, etc.

Founded by IT entrepreneurs Yogesh Rathod and Rajesh Rathod, NetAlter Software Limited is the fastest growing R&D hub for cutting edge software solutions.

Our registered office details follow:

NetAlter Software Limited. #3 & 4, Sai Smruti,

Behind Deep Mandir Theatre,

Mulund (West),

Mumbai -- 400080, India.
# (91-022) 2592- 8553 (Fax) (91-022) 2591- 0141
http://www.pr.com/press-release/7116





BitTorrent Launches Free, Downloadable Music and Film Trailers From South by Southwest 2006
Press Release

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 21, 2006--BitTorrent Inc., developer of the world's most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) application, today announced it will be supporting the 20th Annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Music and Media Conference and 13th Annual SXSW Film Conference and Festival. To highlight the hundreds of musical acts from around the globe and emerging talents in independent film-making, SXSW and BitTorrent will offer free downloads. The music compilation and movie trailer package will be available on both www.sxsw.com and www.bittorrent.com. SXSWeek takes place March 10 - 19, 2006 in Austin, Texas.

With its highly efficient P2P publishing tool for delivering large files on the Internet, BitTorrent will enable consumers to quickly download a

compilation of songs by artists playing at SXSW, including The Secret Machines, Giant Squid, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Boyskout and hundreds of others. Similarly, SXSW will be offering a collection of movie trailers from this year's schedule of SXSW Films, which includes over 50 world premieres. With BitTorrent as a publishing platform, it significantly lowers transfer costs and offers increased speed and effectiveness for the downloader.

"With the amount of bandwidth it takes to make such massive digital files available over the Internet to SXSW fans worldwide, we would simply not be able to do it effectively without BitTorrent," said Scott Wilcox, Chief Technology Officer of SXSW. "This will be the second year that BitTorrent is offering its software and services to make sure that the voices and the work of the independent artist community are available for the whole world to enjoy."

"South by Southwest has become an important and globally recognized venue for indie artists to showcase their work," said Ashwin Navin, president of BitTorrent Inc. "BitTorrent, as the free and open standard for cooperative distribution technology, is a natural fit for what everyone hopes to achieve at the festival, and bring the expression to a global audience."

South by Southwest Music and Media Conference (SXSW) 2006, in its twentieth year, will take place March 15 - 19, 2006. The SXSW Film Conference and SXSW Interactive Festival, both in their thirteenth year, will take place March 10 - 14, 2006 with the Film Festival running from March 10 - 18, 2006 in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit www.sxsw.com.
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...&newsLang =en





With a Few Clicks, You, Too, Can Start to Change Your Life
Virginia Heffernan

Television has historically defined itself against work. The sedentary television rules the living room in view of a fat sofa — those great monuments of domestic leisure. The evening news marks the end of the workday; prime time exists as an alternative to plays and movies; and those lucky enough to be sick or jobless get to watch talk shows and soaps.

Watching television is so much the opposite of work, in fact, that it's hardly even a purposeful act: If you spend Saturday and Sunday watching television, you can credibly say you spent the weekend doing nothing at all.

But now we find ourselves in the midst of the long-anticipated convergence of Internet and television, and a weird thing is happening: people are watching television during the workday, in offices, at their computers, sitting up straight in unupholstered desk chairs. They're watching fake ads or clips from "Saturday Night Live" that show up in e-mail in-boxes. And they're watching with their fingers on keyboards, toggling between "Lost" or lusty Colin Farrell and Excel spreadsheets.

No wonder, then, that the latest programmers — people trying to create sustainable, popular, commercial Internet television — are incorporating workday attitudes of diligence, can-doism, detail-orientation and, above all, procrastination into new shows. AOL's self-improvement series, "AOL Coaches," is available only at aol.com/ coaches, and if you want to tune in at the office, you might just get away with it. The series is broken into installments that aren't even called episodes: they're "workshops," and each one of them includes plenty of opportunities to study, memorize, check off boxes and even take little tests. It has the look and feel of real work, and all the virtuous fun of finally doing your expenses.

The current headliner in the "AOL Coaches" series is Star Jones Reynolds, a lawyer and co-host of "The View" on ABC. Like many of the self-styled life coaches on the site, Ms. Jones Reynolds has a book to promote: something called "Shine," about falling in love. ("Shine" is packaged for sale on Amazon with a book about Laci Peterson's murder.) Having married, Ms. Jones Reynolds now qualifies as an expert on life's sweetest reward, and here she is on the screen, in what looks like an animated headshot, jabbering solemnly under stalactites and chandeliers of AOL graphics and toolbars. She's cited as a "love coach," though her wisdom is directed entirely at women looking for romance, and her workshop is called "Is He the One?"

Ms. Jones Reynolds's insight into love is almost exhaustingly ordinary; the script is so bland that it's hard even to tell which of her proud premarital disciplines — weight loss? chastity? — she's trying to hawk. I did learn that you should get acquainted with someone before having sex with him. Rarely does her advice rise to the level of women's-magazine truisms. (She encourages viewers to look for men who love their mothers and are supportive.) Only when she champions "a like-minded guy with whom you can be equally yoked" does the language achieve a little Biblical snap, and the bad men who should be avoided — mother-haters who refuse prenups — seem to be, by implication, unchristian.

The workshop offers a short quiz on love, which I took. It was harsh. It was called "Are there any deal-breakers?" and — laboriously clicking on answers that turned orange when I chose them — I got half the questions wrong. I didn't realize that if a man has no credit card, you have to "run," and I didn't know that you also have to run if you have a single doubt about whether a guy is the one. Yikes. I did know that you can't change a man — that mighty platitude I learned from Mademoiselle when I was 7 — but I was surprised to discover that new research apparently shows you can "soften" him somehow.

Ads for AOL radio ("Don't Surf in Silence") periodically interrupted Ms. Jones Reynolds's inquiry into his being the one. A pushy medley that combined Nirvana and Madonna — not kidding — didn't harmonize well with the svelte attorney's soothing smooth-jazz D.J. voice.

Trudging through her workshop was generally an unpleasant experience. The talking, animated head-and-shoulders image of her was so stylized — stiff hair, poreless skin, out-of-synch sound — that it seemed at times like a cartoon. If it was enhanced somehow, as it appeared to be, it might as well have been an animated cartoon and not film at all; in the future, I don't see why some of these coaches should even bother to film their stand-ups. Someone could make these creatures in a lab.

But Ms. Jones Reynolds turned out to be the exception on the "AOL Coaches" program. Many of the other coaches — coaches rather than just celebrities by trade — were superb: original, specific, energetic, even inspiring. As the bruiser success sergeants, for example, including Stephen Covey and Tom Peters, strutted manfully around my screen, I was ready to become the C.E.O. of Me, develop Brand Me, and get off the Road of Mediocrity.

John Gottman, the relationship clairvoyant who says he can predict who's getting divorced after watching couples for three minutes, was a revelation. Don't do harsh set- ups, he instructed, and that coded command came as big news. Ninety-six percent of conversations end the way they start, it seems; even if you get nice in the middle, a nasty start-up means you'll close in fury. Riveting. Not handsome or histrionic enough for regular television, Mr. Gottman has a muted style and bookish manner that's ideal for this form. With these figures surrounded by so much text — often talking points come up screen right — they come to seem like moving book illustrations. More than once a coach seemed like a hallucination, as if the portrait of a syndicated columnist had come to life in a newspaper and begun to speak from the page.

"AOL Coaches" lets you print out parts of the presentations of its coaches. It's less like television entertainment, and more like a teleconference; the papers are take- aways. Having watched every coach on the site, and some more than once — they were addictive somehow — I printed out piles of good advice and packed it into a binder for further study.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/ar...ib&oref=slogin





Web Services Upend Old Ideas About the Little Guy's Role
Steve Lohr

The old story of technology in business was a trickle-down affair. From telephones to computers, big companies came first. They could afford the latest innovations, and they reaped the benefits of greater efficiency, increased sales and expansion into distant markets. As a technology spread and costs fell, small businesses joined the parade, though from the rear.

Now that pattern is being challenged by a bottom-up revolution, one fueled by a second wave of Internet technologies like the search services from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and software delivered as a utilitylike service over the Web.

The second-generation Internet technologies — combined with earlier tools like the Web itself and e-mail — are drastically reducing the cost of communicating, finding things and distributing and receiving services online. That means a cost leveling that puts small companies on equal footing with big ones, making it easier for upstarts to innovate, disrupt industries and even get big fast.

The phenomenon is a big step in the democratization of information technology. Its imprint is evident well beyond business, in the social and cultural impact of everything from blogs to online role-playing games. Still, it seems that small businesses, and the marketplace they represent, will be affected the most in the overall economy. Long- held assumptions are suddenly under assault.

Fortune Below 500

One truism has been that while small businesses represent a huge market — companies with fewer than 500 employees, the government reports, account for half the nation's economic output and 60 to 80 percent of all new jobs — it is highly fragmented and hard to reach.

So big companies typically shunned the small-business market, and Silicon Valley start-ups tended to sidestep it, instead devising business plans focused on either the consumer or the large-corporate market. But Salesforce.com, which supplies customer tracking and management software online, has shown how to create a thriving business by selling first to small businesses.

"Our company was based on building momentum from the bottom up, and using the Web as we do drastically reduces the cost of sales and service," said Phill Robinson, senior vice president for marketing.

Today, the company has more than 18,000 customers and sales of more than $300 million a year. Its only problem seems to be growing pains, as the company's network went down a couple of times in the last two months. Many start-ups are trying to follow in the footsteps of Salesforce by offering software as an online service to reach smaller companies.

I.B.M. makes its living catering to the costly needs of its Fortune 500 clientele. But last year, it began offering small businesses Web-based software services like filtering for e-mail spam and viruses, starting at less than $2 per employee a month.

"I.B.M. could not afford to touch this market years ago," said James M. Corgel, general manager of services for small and medium-size businesses. "But as we automate more, we can afford to sell to the small-business market."

Creating More Gazelles

Students of small business have often noted that the most economically significant companies are the "gazelles," small businesses that become dynamic fast-growing companies. The new Web-based technologies could foster a proliferation of gazelles, stimulating job creation and wealth across the economy.

"In principle, this should lower barriers to the entry and growth of innovative small enterprises," said Frederic M. Scherer, an economist and professor emeritus at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

That principle is being widely practiced these days. Take the example of Bella Pictures, a three-year-old business in San Francisco. Its goal is to transform the enterprise of wedding pictures from a local craft of mixed quality into a national business of consistently high quality and personalized service. It has grown rapidly, and last wedding season, May through October, Bella shot photographs at 1,300 weddings.

Bella's 150 freelance photographers and 50 consultants in a dozen cities are linked in a virtual network. Every job, assignment, bride and mother-of-the-bride preference is entered into a Web-based customer relationship management program. Bella markets itself by buying keywords, like "wedding photography," on search engines like Google and Yahoo to bring customers to its Web site, bellapictures.com.

Bella solicits photographers on Craigslist, the online bulletin board, and photographers submit portfolios through the Web, too. All photographs are taken with digital cameras.

The technology behind Bella, said Tom Kramer, the president and a founder, has become available and affordable only in the last few years. Sophisticated customer- and job-tracking software, he said, used to be available only as million-dollar software applications, with hefty annual maintenance fees. Today, its Web-based equivalent is a pay-for-use service from Salesforce, which costs Bella a couple of thousand dollars a month. Web searching, online listings and the spread of digital photography, he added, are all crucial tools for Bella.

"Our business wouldn't have been possible five years ago," he said.

More Growth on Tap

The new technology is also giving small businesses the freedom to pursue new strategies. Brooklyn Brewery, founded in 1988, took a new path less than three years ago. The company wanted to build its beer into a larger regional brand. So it sold the trucks and storage facilities that it had used mainly in the New York area, and hired independent distributors to deliver its beer up and down the East Coast.

To become a regional business, the company wanted most of its employees to work outside Brooklyn, promoting its beer in new markets. It invested about $20,000 in a computer network so that its 15-person sales force, spread from Massachusetts to Georgia, could tap in from notebook computers for information on everything from sales leads to poster art for tavern promotions.

The strategy has paid off. Sales at the 27-person company have grown nearly 30 percent over the last couple of years to about $10 million in 2005, said Eric Ottaway, the general manager, who expects sales to rise about 15 percent this year. The growth has come without adding to his four-person administrative staff, Mr. Ottaway said.

Brooklyn Brewery farms out the maintenance of its computer network to a services company, Quality Technology Solutions of Morris Plains, N.J., which typically works for larger businesses. But it can make money on a smaller account like the beer maker because of the Internet and features that Microsoft has added to its Small Business Server software, which enables remote updating, troubleshooting and bug fixes, said Neil Rosenberg, president of Quality Technology Solutions. Mr. Rosenberg's experts can now monitor and tweak the brewery's computers from New Jersey.

"So I don't have to schlep a technician to Brooklyn for 80 to 90 percent of the problems," he said.

I.B.M., the giant of the technology services business, is not sending consultants to Cole Harford in Overland Park, Kan., either. Last year, Cole Harford, a distributor of restaurant supplies like napkins and plastic cups, started using a couple of I.B.M. Web-based software programs that monitor Cole Harford's e-mail for spam and viruses, blocking malicious code from reaching its 75 desktop and notebook personal computers. The service has been remarkably effective, said Laurel Johnson, the information technology director at Cole Harford, and it costs less than $5 a month per user.

Previously, Ms. Johnson said, she and an assistant used to spend two days a week wrestling with virus and spam troubles. Today, those problems take only four hours a month of her time, so she is planning to finally tackle a long-delayed project to automate the company's four warehouses.

Providing a Second Wind

The new Web technologies have also given a second life to languishing small businesses. Until a few years ago, the Newark Nut Company, a retail and wholesale vendor of nuts, candy and other snacks, was struggling in a declining urban neighborhood. But in 2003, Jeffrey Braverman decided to leave behind his six-figure salary at a private investment company in Manhattan and help revive his family's business.

Mr. Braverman pushed the business online, studied Web marketing and bought keywords on search engines. Since then, the company's employment has tripled to 12 people, Mr. Braverman said, and sales have tripled into millions of dollars a year. The business, now called Nutsonline.com, recently relocated to Linden, N.J.

Search technology, he said, can really open the door to wider markets for small companies. Far-flung customers can find a company's products, while keyword advertising makes marketing more specific and affordable. "It's just been phenomenal what Google has done for our business," said Mr. Braverman, who is 25.

Smaller businesses have now taken the lead in spending on information technology. Small and medium-size businesses — those with fewer than 1,000 employees — account for half of all spending on hardware, software and services in the United States, and their spending grew 35 percent faster last year than the overall market, according to IDC, a research firm. That trend, said Ray Boggs, an IDC analyst, is expected to continue for the next few years as small businesses become more eager and adept at using new Web technology.

JotSpot is a Silicon Valley start-up betting on the small-business market. It offers collaborative work spaces online where people can share and edit Web-based documents and databases for project management, help desks, recruiting, product development and other tasks.

JotSpot calls them "do-it-yourself applications." Anyone can create up to 20 Web pages shared by five people, at no cost. For more pages and larger groups, the monthly fees start at $9.

"The sweet spot for us is small businesses up to 200 people," said Joe Kraus, a co-founder and the chief executive of JotSpot. "The rise of software as a Web service, combined with search marketing, has totally changed the economics of supplying and selling technology to small businesses."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/bu...=1&oref=slogin





That Which We Call a Blog...
Dan Mitchell

THE rise of blogging is often cast in black-and-white terms: blogs versus the "MSM" (the derisive term some bloggers apply to the mainstream media).

But things may shake out more along the lines of journalism versus armchair yammering. Both can be, and are, presented on Web sites that call themselves blogs. Both have been presented in the mainstream media all along.

"The State of the Blogosphere" presented at sifry.com this week by David L. Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a leading blog search site, shows just how complicated things have become. According to Mr. Sifry's data, mainstream media sites, as measured by the number of blogs linking to them, are trouncing news-oriented blogs by a growing margin. Bloggers link to The New York Times Web site about three times as often as they link to the technology-oriented Boingboing.net. Only four blogs show up in the top 33 sites.

But it isn't the data or the rankings that matter most here. More interesting is that it's becoming hard to tell what is a blog and what is mainstream media.

Mr. Sifry calls Boingboing a blog — and so it is. But it also does some original reporting, and has professional journalists on its staff. And oddly, Mr. Sifry calls Slashdot (slashdot.com), a technology site with material created mostly by users, a mainstream site.

Meanwhile, more and more mainstream media sites are blogging. In the end, users are most likely drawn to sites for the quality and trustworthiness of the material presented.

The report also shows that while blogs may present no real threat to top news organizations, niche publications are far more vulnerable. "This realm of publishing, which I call 'The Magic Middle' of the attention curve," Mr. Sifry writes, "highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or niche. And what is so interesting to me is how exciting, informative and witty these blogs often are. I've noticed that often these blogs are more topical or focused on a niche area, like gardening, knitting, nanotech, MP3's or journalism."

This Book Brought to You By For the first time, a major publisher is offering a book online at no cost to readers, supported by advertising. HarperCollins is selling the book, "Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own" by Bruce Judson, through Mr. Judson's site, brucejudson.com. An alert poster at MetaFilter.com noted that the publisher's page for the book did not mention the free version. Despite the cheesy title, Mr. Judson, a fellow at the Yale School of Management, won accolades from Library Journal and others for his book.

Unpaid Shills Wanted Sony BMG, fresh from being exposed by a blogger for planting stealth, and potentially dangerous, antipiracy code in some of its CD's, is seeking interns to plug its artists online. The interns will promote artists in Web communities where many people go specifically to share music without the influence of corporate marketers. "Do you blog, have lots of friends at your MySpace page, and love music?" its ad at entertainmentcareers.net asks. Epic Records, a Sony BMG imprint, "is looking for skilled, motivated interns to promote artists on social networking sites like MySpace, Purevolume, Facebook and others." The ad doesn't say whether the interns will identify themselves to their online "friends" as agents of Sony BMG. But they'll get college credit (for this unpaid job, Sony BMG only wants applicants eligible for that) and a bullet point for their résumés, so what's the difference?

If Dogs Run Free The mundane, inhumane, toxic world of humans trapped in gray cubicles is artfully, and unfavorably, compared with the mindless, free, happy world of dogs romping in a park in a short film on a Web site that features several films by Mitchell Rose (mitchellrose.com). Another short, surprisingly poignant film depicts "a man and a 22-ton John Deere excavator" who "dance a dance of discovery, fulfillment and eventually, the loss that any diesel-based relationship must suffer."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/te...ine.ready.html





Techies Converge To Talk Mashups
Daniel Terdiman

Hundreds of technologists, reporters and investors are expected Monday morning in Mountain View, Calif., for MashupCamp, the first conference devoted to discussions about the custom programs that come from merging multiple application program interfaces.

In the wake of last year's launch of Google Maps and the slew of applications like HousingMaps--a blending of the mapping service and Craigslist housing listings--that quickly followed, many people have been focusing on mashups.

Now that interest will coalesce as about 300 people arrive at Mountain View's Computer History Museum for two days of meetings, panel discussions and hard-core networking among those who seek to develop mashups and those providing the APIs behind them.

Among the companies that are supporting MashupCamp--a nonprofit event in which anyone who signed up had the opportunity to organize a talk--are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems, Amazon.com and Salesforce.com.

MashupCamp co-organizer David Berlind is executive editor of business technology for ZDNet.com, which is owned by CNET News.com parent company CNET Networks.

In any case, the idea behind the event is that as an increasing number of companies make their APIs publicly available, more and more developers will come along to create mashups. Those in attendance--and dozens more who were unable to sign up in time to get in--will have the unique chance to network among each other and hopefully, Berlind said, figure out the next stage of the mashup ecosystem.

It's important to have an event like MashupCamp "because all the other events so far under the rubric of Web 2.0 have been executive-level events," Berlind said. "But we've never really before had an event where the actual developers of the mashups get together with the API architects to talk through what's going on."

At the end of the event, attendees will vote for the best mashup. The winner will receive a Sun Niagra server.

And while those in attendance will surely be working on creating all kinds of free and publicly available mashups, Berlind said the companies and developers alike will also be thinking beyond shareware, software that can be tried without cost.

"The real elephant in the room is what's the business model," he said.
http://news.com.com/Techies+converge...html?tag=st_lh

[JackSpratts]

Running a Hatchery for Replicant Hackers
Jennifer 8. Lee

At 26, Phil Yuen's identity lay somewhere between Dilbert and a Microserf. His office, on the first floor of Building 16 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., did not have a window. Not to worry. "I could see the window from my manager's office," he said.

Mr. Yuen was a midlevel manager who wrote specifications for enterprise project management software — giant computerized flow charts. "I drew boxes and lines to help other people draw boxes and lines," he said.

Then one night last spring, he was sitting in his apartment, surfing the Web. He went to Slashdot.org ("news for nerds") and saw an article that Paul Graham, the essayist and guiding light of computer programmers, was establishing a start-up company, later called Y Combinator, which would be giving seed money to hackers to start businesses. The word "hacker" is not derogatory in the computer world, but it is someone who is creative and resourceful with code.

"It's like Rob De Niro wants to start an acting school," Mr. Yuen said. "Do you want to join it? You get to work with him every week, you might even get a small little movie deal out of it at the end."

Mr. Graham, a 41-year-old dimple-cheeked entrepreneur who sold his company, Viaweb, to Yahoo in 1998, had developed a large following for his lucid and contrary essays in a geek community more comfortable expressing itself through programming code than coherent paragraphs. Among his essays, "How to Start a Startup" is a siren call, resonating with Gen Y programmers pondering quarter-life crises and with college students too inexperienced to be jaded.

After the establishment of Y Combinator, more than 200 teams, with two to four people a team, applied in just a few days for eight slots announced by the new company, which operates in Mountain View, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass.

After being accepted, Mr. Yuen and his team established two start-ups in the last seven months: one he gave up on; the other, called TextPayMe, is a service that sends cash payments to an online account through text messaging — akin to PayPal but using a cellphone.

Last month, Mr. Yuen was in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley, demonstrating his product to venture capitalists and other tech entrepreneurs. At a Y Combinator dinner, he asked Evan Williams, a co-founder of Blogger, who was a guest speaker at the event, for his cellphone number and then sent him $2 using TextPayMe. (Mr. Yuen, incidentally, has now accumulated a trove of cellphone numbers of Silicon Valley heavyweights and offers from three venture capital firms.) Mr. Williams, intrigued, mentioned he had the same idea earlier that day while brainstorming with friends. "It's something in the air," he said.

That night, at the dinner, Mr. Williams addressed a room full of refugees from Oracle, AOL, Microsoft and Accenture. "I think this is so cool what you guys are doing," said Mr. Williams, who sold his company to Google in 2003. "I would love to be part of something like this. I'm so jealous."

If it is possible to systematize the archetypal two guys in a garage (and they are generally guys), the year-old Y Combinator wants to do it. The company's formula is to throw smart people together and provide them $6,000 in seed money per person to cover the initial costs of the company, cookie-cutter legal paperwork and an extensive network of business contacts.

In return, Mr. Graham and his partners — Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris — collectively own 1.2 to 12 percent of the company, with an average of 6 percent. The company holds two boot camps a year for about eight groups each session, a summer one in Cambridge and a winter one in Mountain View. Y Combinator is not so much an incubator as a hatchery for baby companies, and as with all things spawned in bulk, some will die, some will flourish and some will eke by.

"Y Combinator comes down to two kids in a room with two computers and ramen noodles for a summer," said Chris Sacca, a principal of new business development at Google and a speaker at Y Combinator's one-day start-up school conference in October at Harvard. "It takes ambitious geeks and puts them in a situation with no distraction and expects audacious outcomes from them. The reason we like it is that that is what Google is." Indeed, Google has made acquisition overtures to one of the companies that was formed during the summer session, which the founders turned down.

Mr. Graham got the idea for starting Y Combinator after giving a talk to student entrepreneurs at Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science. He told them to look for seed money from rich people they knew, preferably ones who had made their wealth from technology. "Then I said, 'Not me,' and they all looked kind of downcast and then I felt like a jerk," he said. Then, on reflection, Mr. Graham thought, why shouldn't he try to support young hackers?

The goal for Y Combinator's young entrepreneurs is twofold: to make something people want (which is the company's motto); and to stretch their financing long enough for additional investment or to get acquired. For instance, Mr. Graham's former company, Viaweb, which made software to build commercial Web sites, was bought by Yahoo and reborn as store.yahoo .com. One Y Combinator business created last summer, a company that uses cellphones for social networking, got financing from a venture capital firm. Two other Y Combinator companies, a calendar Web site called Kiko.com and a news site, Reddit.com, received additional angel financing.

Y Combinator relies on certain premises: that open-source software and falling hardware prices means that tech start-ups are cheap to finance; that large companies are no longer at the forefront of innovation; and that mature technology companies find it cheaper to buy than to build.

The company takes its name from an obscure mathematical term, describing a function that generates other functions. Y Combinator is a company that creates other companies — a sly reference that would elicit a smile from a very narrow set of people, but luckily the same set that the company is trying to appeal to. It is the philosophical triumph of the passionate computer hacker over the uptight M.B.A.

"Paul is telling us, 'If you are having a good time, and you are building something that other people want, then the money is not going to be a problem,' " said Beau Hartshorne, 24, whose vision for a company he is calling Pixoh will allow people to resize and crop their photos within a Web browser.

Mr. Graham is more focused on creating cool products — that is, coding as art — than developing revenue models and protecting intellectual property. Thus, Y Combinator may not be as good at teaching participants how to build self-sustaining companies than it is preparing them to sell, or flip, their businesses. For Silicon Valley corporate war chests, acquisitions are often made for technical talent as well as product, which generally has to be rebuilt if it is kept at all. The whispered acquisition rate for companies is about $1 million to $2 million per technical employee.

"It's a way for recruiting for Yahoo where you don't have the risk and uncertainty of knowing if they can actually do something," said Joel Spolsky, a technology entrepreneur in New York City who also has a wide readership on the Internet.

"The danger is that you will run out of money before a buyer shows up," said Peter Rip, a managing director of Leapfrog Ventures, a venture capital fund in Menlo Park, Calif. "We are seeing a lot of guys being attracted to the ease with which they can start a company, but starting is really only the first step."

From a financial standpoint, the Y Combinator investments are small in a world where valuations are measured in millions of dollars, if not billions. "In the traditional venture capital model, $6,000 isn't enough to pay your corporate lawyer fees for your first financing," said Mr. Sacca of Google.

"It's not just about the money," said Jeff Mellen, 24, who quit Oracle with three of his friends to build an operating system that works within a Web browser.

Y Combinator provides the validation that young techies should keep pursuing their dreams. "I could get the same amount of money from my parents, but that wouldn't tell me if my business plan or idea was a good one," Mr. Mellen said. "That tells me my parents love me."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/bu...=1&oref=slogin





Muslim Hackers Hit 3,000 Danish Web Sites
Shaun Waterman

Muslim hackers angered by the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed have defaced nearly 3,000 Danish Web sites over the past month in the biggest politically motivated cyber attack long-time observers have ever seen.

Experts say that the world-wide protests over a Danish newspaper's decision to publish the caricatures, an act offensive to Muslims who regard any depiction of the Prophet Mohammed as blasphemous, may prove to be something of a coming-of-age moment for the emerging movement of Internet mujahideen -- Islamic extremists committed to waging a cyber Jihad on the Web.

"They see this as a huge opportunity," Stephen Ulph told United Press International.

Ulph, a terrorism analyst with the Jamestown Foundation who monitors web forums and chat rooms used by Islamic hackers, said, "You can feel the excitement (among their users)... There's a sense that they can make a real difference (on this issue)."

Roberto Preatoni, founder and administrator of Zone-H.org, which tracks Web graffiti artists, says his site has monitored 2,817 defacements of sites in the .dk domain since Jan. 21, when the cartoon controversy first boiled over into world-wide street demonstrations and riots.

"That is at least 10 times, maybe more like 20 times, the number of attacks (in that domain) we would expect in such a time frame," he told UPI, adding that thousands of other Web sites in Europe and Israel had also been defaced.

Several technology journals reported that the target sites were mostly owned by small organizations without advanced security.

"This is the biggest, most intense assault" he had ever seen, Preatoni said, eclipsing the hacker attacks that accompanied the row over a U.S. spy plane forced down in China in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

He said the phenomenon represented "the emergence of the digital Ummah," -- the Islamic theological term for the worldwide community of Muslim believers.

Preatoni said the graffiti messages varied, but their political character was obvious from their wording.

Some of the defacements supported peaceful protests like the global boycott of Danish goods called by Muslim leaders following the decision of the government there to support the publication of the caricatures.

Others, like one by a group calling itself the Internet Islamic Brigades, included pictures of the July 2005 suicide bombings in London, and the threat "I will bomb myself in Denmark very soon, as my brothers in Islam did in U.K (the United Kingdom)."

The tactics of the cyber jihadists are as various as their messages, Ulph said, citing efforts he had seen to influence the outcome of an online poll by a German news site; a coordinated 24 hour long attack on the Jyllands- Posten and other Danish sites; and a failed call for an "international day of embassy burning" on Feb. 13.

"This is the new front line," of the global jihad movement, he said.

Ulph said one of the striking features of the Danish assault was how well-organized it was. He called it the "most recent demonstration of the efficiency, coordination and ingenuity of the Internet mujahideen."

He said the cartoon issue was "a perfect focus" for jihadists, because it had motivated the Islamic masses, and given the extremists a popular cause to "use ... as a recruiting tool."

The recruitment question highlights the gap between committed extremists for whom the Web is simply another front on which jihad must be waged, and the broader community of Muslims active online.

Preatoni said that the large majority of those doing the defacements -- he estimated as many as 90 percent -- were existing hackers and Web graffiti artists, who would have been defacing other Web sites anyway.

"They are using this issue to give sense to what would otherwise be a senseless activity," he said.

He said Muslims represented an increasing proportion of hackers, crackers and other Web vandals, as the availability of the Internet spread in the Islamic world.

The number of hackers and defacers active in Turkey, for example, "has just exploded over the past year," he said, adding that one of the most prolific defacers in the world last year was a 45-year-old Turkish man using the name Iskorpitx.

Iskorpitx defaced nearly 50,000 sites in the past 18 months, he said.

But the other 10 percent involved in the Danish attacks were either retired or reformed Web vandals who had returned to the fray to join the cartoon protests; or else completely unknown newcomers.

"I've seen a lot of completely new names," in the past month, he said.

Preatoni said that some of the newcomers were "people who clearly had the technical capabilities all along" but had not previously been motivated. Ulph pointed out that extremist chat rooms and bulletin boards often had entire libraries of software and training materials for novice hackers.

The Danish cartoon issue, he said, offered the cyber jihadists the opportunity to reach out to those sympathizers who had not previously been actively involved -- the so-called armchair mujahideen. "Everyone can get involved," he said, and the chat rooms offered advice on how to remain anonymous online and hide the origins of cyber attacks.

Preatoni warned that, though defacement was relatively easy and simple to fix, "defacing takes absolutely the same skills as hacking," and that "most of the time (Web vandals) have access to the servers," meaning that they could do much more significant damage if they chose.

"It is just a matter of time," he said.
http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism...2-023534-1827r





Browser Bugs, A Year-Around Bite
Stefanie Olsen

Sure, we know that Web browsers aren't the safest applications for protecting our PCs against viruses, spyware and other technological malfeasance. But at a U.C. Berkeley research talk given Thursday, an assistant professor of computer science illuminated the problem in numbers.

For people who use Microsoft's Internet Explorer to browse the Web, the picture wasn't good. In 2004, IE was "unsafe" a total of 358 days of the year, meaning that the browser contained a publicly known, remotely exploitable hole for which there was no patch available. That means IE was "safe" only seven days, or 2 percent of the year, according to David Wagner, an assistant professor and well-known cryptography researcher. Wagner's team compiled the data from Scanit and Secunia.

Also, it would take 463 days to install all of the known IE patches to make the browser secure in 2004, according to Wagner's summary data. Thirty-four of IE's bugs were without patches.

In contrast, Opera was "safe" 300 days, or 82 percent of 2004. None of the bugs for Opera's browser went without a patch and it would take 93 days total to fix them.

Firefox scored best. It was "safe" 339 days, or 93 percent of the year. Only two of its bugs went without a patch and it would take 43 days to install its fixes, according to the data summary.

As Wagner said: "Security bugs are rampant." So batten down the hatches.
http://news.com.com/2061-10789_3-604...2604&subj=news





Too Many New Gadgets, Too Much Information at Risk
David S. Joachim

It is the corporate version of keeping up with the Joneses: every day, it seems, someone arrives at the office with a shiny new gadget that combines a cellphone with all sorts of features you used to find only on your computer. They can get e-mail messages, surf the Web, manage contact lists and calendars, and even create Word and Excel documents that can run on a conventional PC.

These smart phones and hand-held computers are so powerful that many office workers now travel without their laptops. Why bother with a clunky box that takes several minutes to start up and connect to a network, when you have a device that is always online and can access information on demand?

At first, owners and operators of small businesses may see benefits to this trend. After all, workers are paying for their own little devices in the name of convenience. But, it turns out, they are also giving their technology departments a big headache.

That is because these devices represent a sizable security risk. For one, they are configured to hop from Wi-Fi to cellular networks easily, exposing them to deliberate thievery of data. But a bigger threat, analysts say, is that small things are easier to lose, raising the prospect that confidential business files will get in the wrong hands.

Pocket-size devices are misplaced all the time — travelers left 85,000 cellphones and 21,000 hand-held computers in Chicago taxis during a six-month period last year, according to a survey by Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a maker of security software. And as these devices become capable of storing larger volumes of data, some experts are concerned about the increasing vulnerability of those files.

Analysts say that workers are too caught up with buying the latest gadgets, forgetting that their data is far more valuable than the device it runs on.

That is why some companies, realizing the potential for damage, are getting ahead on mobile security by actually buying small gadgets for their employees, albeit with security strings attached. Seitlin, a small insurance brokerage based in Miami, illustrates the point.

The firm decided to buy Palm Treo cellphone-organizers for about 30 of its 250 employees. The company could then dictate what data was stored on the devices, and it could install software to monitor them from afar and even lock them over the air if they fell into the wrong hands, said Ed Whipple, the company's vice president for sales and technology.

Seitlin sales agents, rather than carry client records on their Treos, must use a Web site to access claims histories and other private information. These files can be viewed but not stored on the devices through an online service called Nexsure from XDimensional Technologies. If an agent on the road is offline and needs information about a client, he calls the office for it, Mr. Whipple said.

If an employee reports that his cellphone is stolen, Mr. Whipple can send a text message to the device, which locks it and asks for a security code, using software called Butler. If the security code is not entered immediately, the memory on the device is wiped clean.

The catch is that the Treo must be turned on and transmitting over a wireless or cellular network for Butler to work. For this reason, some companies set up their devices to store all data on a removable SD memory card, which scrambles the data and renders it useless if the card is removed.

Seitlin also uses software from Intellisync that allows Treos to act like BlackBerry devices and automatically send e-mail messages without the user having to manually download them. This also allows the devices to stay synchronized with a server in the office.

"That's the beautiful thing," Mr. Whipple said. "If I drop my Treo in the water tomorrow, I can go out and buy another one," and the technology department can rebuild the software on a new one to look just like the old one, including all his personal contacts and calendars. This can be done in minutes over the air.

John Pescatore, a security analyst at Gartner, a market research company, said that forcing all users to synchronize their data to a single server over the air has another benefit over letting them use their office PC's for backing up data: it creates a log of all information moving to and from the devices. Monitoring software can be set up to search through the data exchanges to make sure no confidential data passes to unauthorized devices, he said.

Mr. Pescatore expects this year to be a turning point for mobile security, in the same way that personal firewalls and antivirus software on PC's gained importance early in the decade because of viruses like I Love You and Melissa. "The market doesn't demand security until something bad happens," he said.

Of course, security breaches get the most attention when they happen at big companies. But as hardware and software prices have dropped in recent years, small businesses are catching up to larger ones in terms of technology — and vulnerability.

By the end of the year, smart phones with so much storage and processing power will represent about half of all cellphones in the United States, compared with about 30 percent today, Mr. Pescatore said. The proliferation could get people in the habit of sending one another executable files like games, which can carry viruses.

More than that, the success of devices that use Microsoft's mobile operating system will mean a decline in the diversity of software, Mr. Pescatore added. Just as Microsoft's domination in PC's made it attractive for programmers to write viruses for Windows, the same could happen to hand-held devices.

In computing, as in nature, diversity is the great inoculator.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/bu...=1&oref=slogin





Behind the Music: How a Sony-BMG Feud Went Public
Jeff Leeds

Crowding into the Roosevelt Hotel on the evening of the Grammy telecast almost two weeks ago, the elegantly dressed executives from Sony BMG Music Entertainment had plenty to celebrate.

The soul singer John Legend, one of the company's newest stars, had snagged three trophies, including the coveted prize for best new artist; Kelly Clarkson, the former "American Idol" winner, scored a surprise two awards of her own.

But for the company's chief executive, Andrew Lack, the awards and congratulatory cheers that night may have seemed a little late. Barely 24 hours after the party, the music company's co-owners, Sony and Bertelsmann, announced a management shift that unseated Mr. Lack as chief executive, the result of a revolt sparked by executives from the Bertelsmann side.

Mr. Lack, 58, was named the venture's nonexecutive chairman, swapping titles with Rolf Schmidt-Holtz of Bertelsmann and ceding virtually all his authority over its daily operations.

It was a striking moment in the career of Mr. Lack, a longtime television news executive brought in to re-engineer Sony's flagging music unit in early 2003.

Mr. Lack, who had most recently been president of NBC, was chosen by Sir Howard Stringer, then Sony's top official in the United States and now chief executive of the Japanese electronics maker. The party line was that an outsider like Mr. Lack, unencumbered by music-business customs or deep personal ties, had an edge in redefining the company — even the industry.

But in the end, critics now contend, Mr. Lack turned out to be his own worst enemy.

While taking on industry convention, he failed to shore up relationships with critical players inside and outside Sony BMG and on its board, undermining his base of support.

One result is that there is new doubt about the ability of outsiders to pull the ailing music industry out of its tailspin.

"It's the subtleties of this business that can kill you," said Jay L. Cooper, a longtime Los Angeles music attorney. "I've seen some of the best and the brightest come into this business and be destroyed by it because they don't understand."

Further, Mr. Cooper said, "If you don't have the confidence and the respect of the people that are working for you, you've got a real problem."

Of course, Mr. Schmidt-Holtz, the incoming chief executive, is still regarded as a relative neophyte as well: he ran Bertelsmann's BMG unit for three years before it merged with Sony Music, but before that spent much of his career in television and magazines. Mr. Schmidt-Holtz must now try to prove not only that he can compete again in the unforgiving music arena, but than he can hold together the uneasy alliance between the venture's corporate parents.

Mr. Lack, who declined to comment for this article, departs the job as the company comes off a strong fiscal quarter and is poised to release a string of big titles. He is expected in his new role to remain active in steering the music giant's public policy initiatives and in guiding a Sony BMG film unit he created, which is planning a feature called "Reggaeton" this spring.

"I think he's going to make his presence known" in the new role, said Wayne Rosso, the former president of Grokster, the developer of an unauthorized file-sharing service. Mr. Lack broke from his industry rivals to forge an alliance with Mr. Rosso in devising a new, legal music service.

"I don't see him as a victim. I think he's going to be happier not having to baby-sit a lot of egos," Mr. Rosso said. "The music industry is firmly entrenched in its habits, and it's a very parochial, self-preserving industry."

It is also an industry that viewed the blustery, theatrical Mr. Lack warily almost from the start. But he impressed insiders by striking the merger deal with BMG in 2003, about nine months after he started at Sony Music.

The venture, overseen by a board split between the parent companies, altered the balance of power in the $30 billion global music business, shrinking the field of major competitors to four from five.

With revenue between $4 billion and $5 billion, it ranked as the world's second-biggest music company, rivaling the industry leader, the Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi Universal. The combined company's stars included Bob Dylan, Jennifer Lopez, Alicia Keys and Britney Spears.

It also provided a financial cushion. Mr. Lack and his team presided over an estimated $400 million in cost cuts, which included cutting 2,000 people from the payroll. Sony BMG's sheer scale promised to give Mr. Lack more muscle to establish new standards in the industry, which has been desperately trying to reinvent itself in the era of file-swapping, CD-burning and iPods. But it also gave birth to an in-house rivalry — and not the friendly kind — between Sony's labels and BMG's.

From early on, Mr. Lack had particular trouble winning the trust of BMG executives; some complained privately that he seemed slow to extend contracts to the unit's label officials in important territories. "He would never have allowed that to happen to Tom Brokaw," one person close to Bertelsmann said, referring to Mr. Lack's job at NBC.

Others complained that Mr. Lack seemed unsure how to handle certain sticky issues. He landed in the middle of a volatile personnel affair when he was held accountable for an increasingly tense pay negotiation with BMG's top United States executives, the legendary hit-maker Clive Davis and his chief deputy, Charles Goldstuck.

Since Sony and Bertelsmann created the venture, the two executives had been waiting to settle a question about how the company would calculate a hefty payout still due them in connection with the 2002 sale of their venture, J Records, to BMG. After unsuccessfully prodding Mr. Lack to resolve the matter, the two men wrote a letter to the Sony BMG board expressing frustration at the standoff.

Executives in the corporate suite were becoming frustrated with Mr. Lack, too. In July, Michael Smellie, a low-key BMG veteran who had been appointed Sony BMG's chief operating officer, had become so exasperated at Mr. Lack's leadership approach that he decided to quit, according to people close to him. In announcing his exit, he cited a desire to spend more time with his family in Australia.

Mr. Smellie, who had been one of the chief architects of the companies' complex integration, felt marginalized, according to people in whom he confided. He was largely limited to overseeing operations outside the United States, and while he initially backed Mr. Lack's appointment as chief executive, he lost faith that Mr. Lack could create a real culture for the merged company.

"The venture presented lots of opportunities, and a number of these were squandered because relationships were not as well managed as they might've been," Mr. Smellie said last week.

His exit, in particular, elicited deep concern among Bertelsmann executives, in part because it upset the venture's delicate balance of power. Mr. Smellie had been the most senior corporate executive from BMG. After word of his impending departure spread, he spoke with the head of Bertelsmann, Gunter Thielen, about his reservations about Mr. Lack, according to people briefed on the discussions.

The company's performance at the time appeared unsteady. Sony BMG posted two consecutive quarters of losses, its results burdened with revamping charges. For the first half of the year, Sony BMG's share of sales of new releases in the United States dropped to about 26 percent, off sharply from roughly 33 percent when the two companies combined, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. Much of the falloff at the time was attributable to the BMG labels, facing tough comparisons from the year before.

Mr. Lack's supporters have denied that Bertelsmann was dissatisfied with any aspect of his performance, and note that for the three months ended Dec. 31, the venture delivered $178 million in net income, roughly eight times its results from the year-earlier period.

Contributing to the results was a $121 million decline in revamping charges. Rather than losing confidence in Mr. Lack, they suggest that the German media conglomerate moved to destabilize him because it feared Mr. Smellie's exit would reduce its power in the venture.

Mr. Lack had certainly come to loom large in his first two and a half years in the business. He emerged as a blunt, ombudsman-like executive, sharply contrasting with rivals who were gleefully trumpeting the prospects for the budding digital market.

Last year he predicted that Sony BMG would not see a significant sales increase until 2008 (though a source close to him said he was now more optimistic). He said the company had "too many lawyers and accountants," while the relatively low percentage of people assigned to dig for talent was "appalling."

Even some critics found him refreshingly candid. Indeed, one curiosity of the internal discontent with Mr. Lack was that many of his critics agreed with his positions, for example, that the company should do more to use its music videos and other visual content to generate new revenue. Many also supported his stance that Apple Computer's iTunes music service should sell songs for a range of prices instead of its flat rate of 99 cents a song.

Being right, however, did not translate into respect.

And beneath the surface, some executives who worked with Mr. Lack even before the merger found his style less than inspiring.

"It was very difficult for him to approach any situation without assuming that whatever the 'record guys' were doing was wrong," said Rick Dobbis, who was president of Sony Music's international arm before being squeezed out in the merger, and is now a manager and industry consultant. "It was difficult to believe that you would get support for your ideas."

At the same time, Mr. Lack managed to alienate a number of longtime insiders by keeping them at arm's length — including Allen Grubman, the powerful New York attorney who represents a bevy of top Sony BMG executives and artists, according to people who have discussed the matter with him.

"I think Andrew went out of his way to sort of buffer himself from us," said Jill Berliner, a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who represents such Sony BMG artists as the Foo Fighters and the Offspring. "If that was supposed to be intimidating, it had the opposite effect. We weren't impressed."

Mr. Lack's supporters say that he is coming under fire from old-school executives who were simply resistant to change. Moreover, they say he is being unfairly attacked by artists' attorneys whom he tried to block from winning wasteful or potentially unprofitable contracts.

But critics say one of his biggest missteps was the handling of a $100 million-plus new deal for Bruce Springsteen, who had spent his career on Sony Music's Columbia label. The hefty contract required the approval of the venture's governing board, but critics say Mr. Lack presented the agreement to the panel as a fait accompli.

Mr. Lack's supporters insist that Mr. Springsteen was aware that the deal still required the board's sign-off, and that the deal will ultimately pay off for the label. Indeed, they suggest that Mr. Lack would have faced even heavier fire if he had allowed one of the company's most respected stars to depart his longtime home for a rival label, and eventually, to take his catalog of master recordings with him.

Even so, the affair damaged Mr. Lack's standing among the board members. Mr. Thielen soon informed Mr. Stringer of Sony that Bertelsmann wanted to remove Mr. Lack from his post.

To industry observers who had seen outsiders come and go before, that came as little surprise.

"Our business is not that big," said Ms. Berliner, the attorney. "If you're going to be successful, you get to know everybody, so you can channel relationships in ways that make sense. And I kind of felt like Andrew never got told that."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/bu...pc&oref=slogin





A B-Movie Becomes a Blockbuster
David Carr

HOLLYWOOD is filled with intrigue that has nothing to do with who will win the best-actor Oscar next month. The selection process that currently has the A-List lighting up BlackBerrys and cellphones is emanating from a grand jury in Los Angeles that is looking into secretive business conducted by Anthony Pellicano, a high- profile private investigator.

The case, which could ultimately threaten the reputation and even the freedom of some of the entertainment industry's most prominent figures, also serves as a reminder that even though the studios are now just one more adjunct of large media companies, Hollywood has always been a wide-open town that lives by its own rules.

If you put all the elements of the Pellicano story in a movie pitch, they would laugh you out of the bungalow. A Hollywood private detective with wise-guy connections, Mr. Pellicano cleans up messes for the powerful, engaging in pervasive surveillance along the way. A reporter, Anita M. Busch, who has written for both The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, gets a little too close on a story about one of his clients, and he dispatches a small-time hood to blow up her car, according to a search warrant. The operative decides that the fireworks are too dicey and instead leaves behind a shattered windshield, a note that stays "Stop" and a dead fish in a tin tray. (And a rose, don't forget about the rose.)

It gets better. Federal authorities traced the attempt to terrorize the reporter back to Mr. Pellicano. On a November day in 2002, his office was raided, and in the safe investigators found $200,000, plastic explosives and two grenades. Eight days later, they go back and find the real dynamite: transcripts, tapes and computer files of phone conversations, many involving the most powerful people in the entertainment business.

At this point, according to Marvin Rudnick, a former federal prosecutor and one of Ms. Busch's attorneys, "the B-movie turns into a blockbuster."

ON Feb. 6, Mr. Pellicano and his cadre of alleged co-conspirators were indicted on 110 counts of racketeering and conspiracy. On Wednesday, Terry N. Christensen, a respected member of the Los Angeles bar, was indicted on wiretapping and conspiracy charges in connection with the divorce case of Kirk Kerkorian, the billionaire investor. At one time or another, Mr. Christensen has also represented Paramount Pictures, the Walt Disney Company, MGM/UA and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Many recognizable names have been questioned, among them Bert Fields, whose client list includes some of the city's better-known names, including Michael S. Ovitz, the once-powerful talent agent, and Brad Grey, now the chairman of Paramount. People who were in litigation against both men were subjected to background checks and wiretapping, according to the indictment, but neither has been implicated in any criminal activity. Still, with the indictment of Mr. Christensen, no one knows which way the marble will roll next.

Mr. Rudnick said that far-reaching issues were being raised.

"When you look at these cases, you have to ask yourself, 'Is there a protection racket in Los Angeles?' " he said. "And I think you are seeing evidence that there is right now, that people are using extra-legal means to neutralize antagonists in legal proceedings. The integrity of the courts has been called into question."

There are legal implications beyond civil matters like divorce and business disputes. Mr. Pellicano has done work on behalf of law enforcement in the past, and those cases would be opened anew if it were found that he violated the law in the conduct of his business. And given that federal investigators are in receipt of an uncertain number of recorded conversations, all those being questioned have to answer knowing that they may face federal perjury charges if they are less than forthcoming.

The last time there was even close to this kind of tension held in common in Los Angeles, Heidi Fleiss was under investigation for running a prostitution ring. Her black book contained many A-List names, but in the end none of the big boys ended up getting hurt. They may not be so lucky this time around.

"There is a great deal of schadenfreude going around among the lawyers who are not targets, I'm sure," said Eric Weissmann, an entertainment lawyer, who has no knowledge of anyone's guilt or innocence. "I think the problem is far more endemic than the lawyers or investigators. You have clients who want to win at all costs, and they are not necessarily interested in the Marquis of Queensbury rules of engagement. There is an enormous pressure to win."

If the case has legs, it could become a concern for the giant New York media companies that now own the movie business. While Time Warner, Viacom and Sony wrestle with balance sheets and the nuances of Sarbanes-Oxley, much of the old-school charm of Hollywood has stayed in place, with power brokers madly suing and swearing oaths against each other, all the while serially marrying and divorcing.

Going back to the days of moguls like Mayer and Wasserman, Hollywood sprang up to escape the scrutiny of the government and corporate overseers. Now, what had been a sideshow threatens to pull back the blankets on an underbelly of the business that never went away, even after the studios became another item in corporate quarterly reports.

A New York-based media executive who declined to comment on the record because his company had no involvement in the matter, said that the Christensen indictment "makes you wonder about the scope of the investigation."

No one, not even a new generation of corporate overseers, has ever been able to teach Hollywood manners. As one of the executives in "Indecent Exposure," David McClintick's 1982 account of the Begelman scandal at Columbia, said, "the new Hollywood is very much like the old Hollywood."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/bu...=1&oref=slogin





Two Plead Not Guilty in Sleuth Case
Allison Hope Weiner

The Hollywood entertainment lawyer Terry N. Christensen pleaded not guilty to wiretapping and conspiracy charges at an arraignment in federal court here.

Mr. Christensen, who was indicted on Feb. 15, was the first high-profile show business figure to be charged in connection with the widening investigation of the celebrity private eye Anthony Pellicano.

The charges against Mr. Christensen stemmed from his handling of a 002 legal dispute for his longtime client Kirk Kerkorian over paternity and child support issues with his ex-wife, Lisa Bonder Kerkorian. In the indictment, federal authorities charged that Mr. Christensen paid Mr. Pellicano at least $100,000 to tap Ms. Kerkorian's phone, and talked repeatedly with him about her conversations with lawyers and friends.

Separately, a former telephone company employee, Joann Wiggan, pleaded not guilty. In all, 13 people have been charged in connection with Mr. Pellicano's activities. Mr. Pellicano was indicted earlier this month on conspiracy and wiretapping charges, and has already served time on weapons charges related to the investigation.

The indictment of Mr. Christensen cited conversations he is said to have had with Mr. Pellicano in which the former detective relayed details of Ms. Kerkorian's phone calls.

In one conversation, on April 22, 2002, Mr. Pellicano allegedly told Mr. Christensen of a conversation between Ms. Kirkorian and her lawyers in which they discussed their reactions to a previous court hearing. The indictment also mentions another recorded conversation, on May 3, 2002, in which Mr. Pellicano told Mr. Christensen about Ms. Kerkorian's discussion of settlement expectations with her lawyers. And on or about May 14, 2002, the indictment says, Mr. Christensen told Mr. Pellicano to "wrap up" the illegal wiretap.

A lawyer for Mr. Christensen, Terree Bowers, said, "Terry Christensen's actions were legal, justified and necessary, and the same actions any reasonable lawyer would take if his friend and a young child faced death threats and serious injury."

The government declined to comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/mo...=1&oref=slogin





Peer-To-Peer Is An Identity Risk
Chung Kang-hyun, Kim Ho-jung

How easy is it to steal other people's private information on the Web? The JoongAng Ilbo conducted several tests with the help of a former hacker who is now a network security professional. It discovered that, armed with a simple data-tracing program, just about anyone with bad intentions could find hundreds of online documents containing lists of individuals' private information.

The test was performed after a recent massive case in which hackers used such information to create accounts for the online role-playing games "Lineage" and "Lineage 2." As of yesterday, the online game operator NCSoft Corp. said almost 60,000 people had called to shut down falsely-created accounts.

Information including resident registration numbers, phone numbers, addresses, academic backgrounds and family relationships can be found by typing in search words in peer-to-peer file-sharing programs.
Such programs are often used to share music and other data, and make available online all the contents of designated folders on a user's computer. If, by accident, a user designates his "My secret personal data" folder for sharing, it will be available to any other user running the same program.

Tests on three of those programs turned up more than 500 documents containing personal information in a matter of minutes. The information came from a range of sources ― insurance company correspondence, home shopping invoices, elementary school alumni lists and resumes. Resumes proved to be the most revealing of all documents, since almost all contained photographs of the individual. Credit card numbers, bank account numbers and PIN numbers could also be found through simple one-word searches.

Based on information it found on the Web, the Joong-Ang Ilbo made phone calls to 20 people, none of whom knew that their private information was available online.

Choi Hee-won, a researcher at the Korea Information Security Agency, advised individual users of peer-to-peer programs to be very cautious in designating which files or folders in their computer they shared with others. "Companies must continuously enforce their security policies, such as the use of firewalls, because hackers are always developing new techniques," he added.

Meanwhile, the Information Ministry announced yesterday plans to revise private information protection provisions in the communications laws, which will include measures forcing companies to discard personal data when a former customer severs his ties with the company. It said it would present a revised bill to the National Assembly in the first half of this year.
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/20060...090409041.html





Experts Debate File-Sharing Suits
D. Clark Denison

Sharing music for free is popular, easy and fun. It also violates many U.S. copyright laws. But literally millions of copyrighted files are shared every day, and only an unlucky few are actually held responsible for the crime.

It would seem that technology has indeed outpaced the law in today’s digital world.

This timely dilemma was held up for formal debate Friday as part of Pitt’s sixth annual Computer Science Day.

Working with the William Pitt Debating Union, the department of computer science invited two seasoned veterans from both sides of the issue.

Geoffrey L. Beauchamp — a Philadelphia lawyer and the Pennsylvania state counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America — teamed up with Pitt junior Melina Forte.

Charles Lee Mudd Jr. — a Chicago attorney experienced in representing defendants in RIAA suits — paired with Tony DiMattio.

Forte and DiMattio are members of the William Pitt Debating Union.

The main question: Should lawsuits against individual peer-to-peer users be sharply curtailed?

The debate began with opening statements from DiMattio in the affirmative and Forte in opposition.

While DiMattio conceded that “the law of the Wild West should [not] prevail on the Internet,” he argued that the RIAA’s lawsuits are “ineffective, alienating to the consumer public and they fail to account for individual circumstances.”

Citing increases in illegal downloads despite the RIAA’s legal actions, the affirmative side focused its point on arguing that the lawsuits do not serve as a deterrent to illegal file-sharers.

DiMattio went on to explain that the proceeds from RIAA lawsuits do not go to the artists whose work has been shared, but instead are used simply “to fund more lawsuits.”

Forte and Beauchamp centered their opposition on the two main goals of this type of litigation — to compensate the injured party and to serve as a deterrent to potential offenders.

“The lawsuits are successfully achieving both factors,” Forte said.

Forte also argued against exceptions to copyright laws.

“If we justify one theft of intellectual property,” she said, “who knows how many more exceptions will come.”

Addressing the harshness of the RIAA’s penalties, Forte cited billion-dollar costs incurred yearly by the recording industry because of Internet piracy.

According to the opposition, stiff fines are needed and are the only way to deter people from breaking the law.

“Like every other crime, a punishment is needed that will act as a deterrent,” Forte said. “Lawsuits are that deterrent.”

The expert speakers echoed these sentiments on both sides, but their statements reflected a greater specificity gained from their professional experiences.

While file sharing does violate the copyright law in most cases, Mudd argued that institutions like the RIAA need to shift their thinking about the issue to focus on “an equitable dispensation of justice,” as well as “explore viable alternatives [to lawsuits].”

“The entertainment industry is on the wrong side of technology and the wrong side of law. They always have been,” Mudd said.

Mudd cited the now historic debate that ensued when Sony introduced the BetaMax recordable videocassette. The entertainment industry sought unsuccessfully to ban the BetaMax because consumers could use the technology to make illegal copies of protected material.

“There are clearly non-infringing uses of peer-to-peer file sharing,” Mudd said, “and there are clearly benefits to peer-to-peer file sharing.”

Mudd also shared several cases he has been involved with where the circumstances were clearly extenuating.

In one instance a woman inherited a laptop from her deceased brother that was set up to share files, and, though she was unaware of the illegal sharing, she received “no sympathy” from the RIAA and was sued for the “flat fee” of $3,750.

“We have to address mitigating circumstances,” Mudd said. “It’s the way our justice system has been developed.”

Beauchamp’s arguments sought to justify the lawsuits as the only way to punish a crime that amounts to stealing.

“Consider it as if you were a shopkeeper in a bad neighborhood and your grocery store was beset by shoplifters,” Beauchamp said. “Instead of calling the police, your neighbors came to you and said, ‘Don’t call the police...you might want to change your business model.’”

The grocery store is the music industry and the bad neighborhood is the Internet, Beauchamp said.

Beauchamp thinks optimistically that there will come a day when advancements in software allow for easy, legal file sharing.

He added, however, “That day is not here.”

Until then, “The shopkeeper must call upon the courts and the police to protect his property,” Beauchamp said.

Beauchamp cited the rising popularity of legal downloading sites like iTunes and the widespread knowledge of the illegality of file sharing as proof that the lawsuits are working.

At the end of the debate, the floor was opened to questions from students, and it became clear that the arguments presented had not quieted the concerns of everyone who heard them.

Questions of new technologies that share files completely anonymously across networks provoked defiant applause from the room. New issues were spawned regarding Internet privacy rights and how they relate to the tracking of users who may share files illegally.

This issue was far from settled in a single day’s debate, but both sides called the event a success.

Mudd observed that the only way for matters like this to move forward is for people to “learn about the issue and the arguments involved.”
http://www.pittnews.com/vnews/displa.../43fac59c605c8





Yahoo!Mail Bans Allah And Dirty Harry Handles
John Oates

Yahoo! is banning the use of allah in email names - even if the letters are included within another name.

This was uncovered by Reg reader Ed Callahan whose mother Linda Callahan was trying to sign up for a Verizon email address. She could not get it to accept her surname.

Enquiries to Verizon revealed that a partnership with Yahoo! was to blame. Yahoo! will not accept any identies which include the letters "allah".

Nor will Yahoo! accept yahoo, osama or binladen. But it will accept god, messiah, jesus, jehova, buddah, satan and both priest and pedophile.

Ed Callahan told us: "On one level this is just silliness. But we have a war on terrorism and it's migrating to be a war on Muslims - this just shows the confusion there is between the two and how pervasive this is."

The Callahans are still waiting to hear back from Yahoo!

A spokesman for Yahoo! UK said: "This sounds like a glitch. But we will get back to Ed and Lindy Callahan with a full answer as soon as possible." .

More from the blogosphere here. (http://quickwired.com/kallahar/stories/2005-Yahoo/ yahoo.php)

Famous *allah*s: Dirty Harry Callahan, Lord Jim Calla(g)han (ex-British PM), errr...that's all...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02...ets_religious/





Money for Nothing

Hundreds of new sites are trading on web users' ignorance by selling inadequate or unnecessary technical support for free software
Danny Bradbury

Austelle describes herself as "a frequent internet user" who checks her email daily, participates in forums, and has multiple online accounts. But that did not stop her falling for a new loophole by which sites provide software that's available free elsewhere - and charge for "support" that may be limited or even nonexistent.

Austelle paid a website $33.90 for the Limewire peer-to-peer (P2P) client - which is available free from sites such as limewire.com. She found the fee-charging site after searching for file downloads in a search engine. "As soon as I joined, like within 10 minutes, I realised that I had been had, and that Limewire is a free download and is so easy to use that hardly anyone ever needs any assistance."

Austelle was the victim of a new breed of websites making money off free software. While companies such as Red Hat have for years charged money to distribute and support free software (particularly Linux), they clearly add value through support and CD distribution. But some of these new sites charge "membership fees" either to provide a downloadable version of the software copied from a legitimate website, or to redirect browsers to the site they should have gone to in the first place. Clearly, they capitalise on the ignorance of net newbies.

Most of these websites work similarly. Searching for free software titles such as "Skype" in search engines produces sponsored links that draw the novice user's eye away from the main search results. The websites behind the links charge users a membership fee to download the software. Internet forums and blogs are littered with postings from angry users who did not realise they could get the software free elsewhere, or who claim that the support was cursory at best.

Some sites make it clear that the software is available free elsewhere, and that users are paying for technical support. Not so with www.freedownloadhq.com. "I tried to find out who to contact," recalls fashion designer Shabazz Torres, who found the site through a Google search. "I replied to an email they sent confirming my payment, but there was no one I could contact to get a refund."

Support for customers

FreeDownloadHq.com is registered to XTreme Software Ltd, a company with an English address, but the resident at that address is a formation agent who registers companies on behalf of accountancy firms. He told us that XTreme Software was registered by David Shullick, of Xtreme Innovations in Florida. Shullick wouldn't speak to us but in a written response, the company said: "We do charge ... because we provide tutorials as well as full technical support on all the programs we offer access to." However, investigators for security software firm SiteAdvisor were unable to find any support.

Other players appear more legitimate at first glance. Sites such as Download-It-Free.com explain in their FAQ that the software is available free elsewhere. Nevertheless, a callcentre operative gave a slightly different story when we asked why we shouldn't download software such as BitTorrent's P2P client from BitTorrent for free. "Most of those sites, they won't charge you a one-time fee, but they'll charge you every time you want to download a file. We offer a one-time fee and then you get BitTorrent and the other programs free." BitTorrent does not charge for downloads, meaning the company running the call centre for Download-It-Free.com, Montreal-based Market Engines Inc, run by Daniel Assouline and Michael Dadoun, misled us.

Dadoun was once employed by well-respected Nortel Networks, a major Canadian telco, as senior manager of mergers and acquisitions.

Market Engines is involved with hundreds of websites, including FreeMP3Lover.com, Mp3MusicAccess.com and eMuleCenter.com. Many of these sites are part of an affiliation network operated by Cash Engines, a division of Market Engines. Affiliate networks link merchants with third-party websites that advertise links to the merchants' goods and services, driving traffic to them and receiving payments in return.

Many of these merchant sites claim to be owned and operated by MP3 Networks Ltd, a company listed in Malta. The company, which also has an address in the Caribbean, was set up in July 2004, five months before Market Engines started business. Its director and major shareholder is Charles Assouline. We attempted several times to contact MP3 Networks Ltd on its Maltese number, which was never answered.

Dadoun found his callcentre staff's comments "very concerning" as he did with complaints posted to several internet forums by customers who felt they'd been fooled. "If that's the way they feel, they can get a refund. That's why we're here," he said. We emailed him details of the comments and agreed to speak again at a prearranged time, but he failed to return calls.

Ten dollar bill

Creating an account on a site supported by Market Engines cost us $27, including an optional (but pre-selected) $10 anti-spyware download. The site gave us access to various P2P clients including Limewire, WarezP2P, Exeem, and 360Share. Support staff refused when we asked for help to get a soundcard working, saying they could only support the P2P software. A list of interactive demos also failed to load. We obtained a refund under the company's seven-day money-back guarantee, but the firm retained a $10 "processing fee". The fee was mentioned in terms and conditions during customer registration, but only if the customer opened a popup window.

The Centre for Democracy and Technology (CDT) works to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties online. It is mostly concerned with websites that explicitly advertise their downloading software as totally legal, says in-house lawyer David Sohn. "They will often say these services are 100% legal, which creates the false impression that anything you do with these services is legal, and consumers might well believe that to be the case because they have paid a fee," he says. But pursuing companies through the courts can be too expensive for small software firms.

The CDT prompted the US Federal Trade Commission to take action against two such websites last year. "Often we can threaten those sites that we'll turn them over to the FTC and they will stop the bad practices, but they pop up somewhere else," Sohn complains.

Market Engines' merchant, MP3 Networks Ltd, is more guarded about the legality of its files. After paying for membership we were directed to a "stay legal" file that included information copied from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's site, along with a link to a page, which did not exist, explaining how to turn off file sharing. When asked how to tell which online files were legal to download, support staff directed us to the website of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Sponsored links promoting software download sites such as those supported by Download-It-Free.com are still appearing on search engines such as Google. Enter "P2P" and one of the sponsored links will display terms such as - "All Legal," "No Download Fees" and "Find P2Ps". This infuriates industry commentators. "It's funny that Google has this 'do no evil' policy but they're allowing lots of consumers to follow these links," said the chief technical officer of one P2P client company.

Customer service

"We do respond to customer complaints. If there is an area where a customer or advertiser or the owner of a product can start a dialogue with us, then we will take action," says Google UK ad sales manager Richard Gregory, although he adds that "they're not doing anything illegal, they're probably just not providing the best consumer experience in the world."

BitTorrent's president and chief operating officer Ashwin Navin says that the company has complained repeatedly to Google, but the search engine maintains its relaxed stance towards these revenue-generating Adwords users. On the other hand, Google doubtless faces the same problem litigators do: there are too many sites to tackle. Unlike the bloggers at http://blog.siteadvisor.com, we could not get FreeDownloadHq.com to appear as a sponsored Google ad, suggesting the company has now filtered it out.

While other such websites still appear on search engines, P2P software producers such as Jonathan Milson are suffering, thanks to users who do not understand who they are paying for support. "A lot of people will contact us and say 'I bought your product and I'm not getting the service I requested'," complains Milson, a representative of the team behind the Shareaza client.

So what is the precise legal position regarding these websites? "We'd prefer it if the guy disappeared," says David Turner, GPL (General Public License) compliance manager at the Free Software Foundation. "But we're not sure there's much we can do."

In some cases, the distribution of free software for a fee seems clearly legitimate. L3 Publishing, a company selling copies of the GIMP open source photo-editing software on eBay, was quick to respond to our queries. "Yes! The source code and binaries are included on the media as per the terms of the GPL. Also, the CD is plainly labelled as powered by the GNU Image Manipulation Program," said the company." Nevertheless, like sites charging for free downloads, L3's auction generated lengthy online debates over ethics.

It is harder to assess the legality of many download sites, especially those that lie to potential customers, but if nothing else they are ethically dubious. Posing as a potential merchant, BitTorrent's lawyer was sent an email in November by an affiliate network promoter pointing to a guide on his website. "Another key component of sales in this niche is finding the newbies [sic] user. More savvy users only ask for a refund or, worse, chargeback the subscription," said the guide, now deleted. "New users are generally those who type in 'Google' in Google or 'Yahoo' into Yahoo. Finding a reliable pool of these folks is the game."

And for internet users, not being one of these folks is priority one. "Go and visit a related forum for a few minutes first to see what others are saying," warns Austelle, who eventually managed to get a refund. "Enter your doubts into the search engine: 'xyz membership a scam?' or something."

When charging for free software, the product being traded is not the software itself, and often not even the service, but user ignorance. The market in naivety remains profitable, and the supply is unlimited. For many, that will clearly remain an attractive business model for a long time to come.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...715254,00.html





On the road again

Wi-Fi to Go: The Hot Spot in a Box
David Pogue

YOU know what would be so cool? A portable Wi-Fi hot spot. Whenever you wanted Internet access, you wouldn't have to hunt for a wireless coffee shop or pay $24 a night to your hotel.

Instead, you'd travel with a little box. Plug it into a power outlet — or even your car's cigarette lighter — and boom, you and everyone within 200 feet could get onto the Internet at high speed, without wires.

Actually, such boxes exist. They come from companies like Kyocera, Junxion and Top Global, and they're every bit as awesome as they sound. (Unfortunately, the category is so new that it has no agreed-upon name. "Portable hot spot" is descriptive but unwieldy. "Cellular gateway" is a bit cryptic. Kyocera's term, "mobile router," may be as good as any.)

Before you start thinking that you've died and gone to Internet heaven, however, you should know that these boxes don't work alone. Each requires the insertion of a PC laptop card provided by a cellular carrier like Verizon, Sprint or Cingular. The card provides the Internet connection, courtesy of those companies' 3G ("third generation") high-speed cellular data networks. The box just rebroadcasts that connection as a Wi-Fi signal so that all nearby computers — not just one privileged laptop — can go online.

With those PC cards, you can go online anywhere there's a cellular signal: in a taxi, on a bus, in a waiting room or wherever. In major cities, the speed is delightful, like a D.S.L. or slowish cable modem (400 to 700 kilobits a second). In other areas, you can still go online, but only slightly faster than with a dial-up modem. (Also note that uploading is far slower than downloading.)

All right, go ahead, ask it: If you can already outfit your laptop with one of these miraculous cards, why do you need a mobile router that translates the cellular connection into a Wi-Fi one?

First, not all computers have the necessary card slot. ( Apple's iBooks and new MacBook Pro laptops come to mind.) Second, a mobile router can accommodate machines with no wireless features at all — like desktop computers — thanks to standard Ethernet network jacks on the back. (The Kyocera has four, the Junxion two and the Top Global one.)

Above all, Wi-Fi lets lots of computers share the same Internet signal. Cellular PC-card service is very expensive: $60 a month for unlimited use ($80 if you don't also have a voice plan). That's a lot to pay for a single computer to go online. A mobile router opens up that signal to any computer within about 200 feet; $60 a month is a lot more palatable when 10 or 20 of you are sharing it.

MOBILE routers have become essential equipment for traveling groups. Bus and train companies are experimenting with these boxes to see if having high-speed Wi-Fi on board appeals to passengers. These boxes are also becoming standard amenities for the casts of TV shows and movies and for rock bands, so that they can check e- mail or surf the Web between takes or whenever they're on location or on the tour bus.

But a mobile router might make sense even in stationary environments. Small businesses can use one as a backup connection when the power goes out. (A mobile router can draw its power from a car or battery pack.)

Other people are canceling their home D.S.L. or cable modem service altogether. Instead of paying twice for Internet access — for a cable modem and a cellular laptop plan — they use the cellular card at home and on the road and save a lot of money.

To use a mobile router, you insert your cellular laptop card (which must first be activated in a Windows laptop). Then you connect the router to your computer using an Ethernet cable (included). You type the box's numeric address into your Web browser, and presto: you're viewing its configuration page. Here's where you indicate which brand of PC card you have (Novatel, Sierra Wireless or whatever), turn on password protection, and fiddle with pages and pages of network and security settings, if you're into that sort of thing.

The Junxion box is a biggish slab of folded sheet metal, unimpressive except for its bright green paint job, measuring 6.3 by 10.3 by 1.1 inches and costing $600. As you can tell from the price, Junxion seeks corporate buyers, not individuals. Yet only a few of its features cry out "corporate." (One of them lets a network geek configure a fleet of Junxion boxes by remote control, from the comfort of company headquarters.)

For $600, you might expect more than two measly status lights, and geeks might expect the wireless signal to be 802.11g instead of the older "b" variant. On the other hand, the Junxion has some neat features, including the ability to greet colleagues with a splash screen. ("Welcome to Dave's free Wi-Fi highway! Click Connect to continue, and don't forget to thank Dave by dropping off cash or baked goods at his cubicle.")

The new Kyocera KR1, developed jointly with D-Link, is more attractive for a couple of important reasons. First, it costs only a third as much ($200 after rebate). It's also much smaller and better-looking (8.5 by 5.3 by 1.3 inches) and feels more like a finished commercial product.

Note, however, that the KR1 works only with Verizon and Sprint cards — or as the techies might say, it works only on EV-DO networks. Its rivals, by contrast, can accommodate almost any card from any service, including the new BroadbandConnect service from Cingular (so far available in 16 cities).

On the other hand, only the KR1 can draw its Internet connection from certain EV-DO cellphones instead of a PC card. That is, you can connect the Samsung A890 or Audiovox 8940, for example, with a U.S.B. cable. The phone becomes a sort of Internet antenna for the router.

If the Junxion box represents the complete absence of industrial design, then Top Global's 3G Phoebus represents the height of it. This mobile router is a white, gray or black plastic pyramid (7 by 7 by 5.5 inches) that makes no attempt to look like a piece of networking equipment. You either love that approach or you don't.

Design aside, the Phoebus has a lot to recommend it. It's the only model with an on-off switch — a clicky chrome marble on the front. It's also the only model that when used with Sprint or Verizon cards, automatically configures itself; you can skip the setup steps involving the Ethernet cable and Web browser. You literally plug the thing in, insert the card, and start surfing. That feature, and its super-clear browser-based Web setup page, makes the Phoebus the simplicity champion.

The only causes for pauses are the single Ethernet jack in the back, the price ($400) and the difficulty of finding a place to buy the thing. (Homemade-looking Web sites like americanevdo.net carry it.)

There's no overstating the joy of carrying around your own Wi-Fi hot spot, ready for your whole gang to enjoy wherever you can find a power outlet or even a car's cigarette-lighter socket.

Not everyone is happy about this product category, however. Verizon, in particular, strongly objects.

"Broadband access is designed for individual customers," said Brenda Raney, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman. "When customers use unauthorized devices to share the service, they are in violation of their service agreements."

Yet this objection should sound distinctly familiar to anyone who remembers the dawn of the cable modem era. The cable companies originally hoped to charge $40 a month for each computer in your home, and did everything in their power to dissuade people from hooking up network routers that could share the signal. In the end, of course, common sense won, the cable companies lost, and now just about every home D.S.L. or cable modem signal is shared among two or more computers.

If you like the idea of a mobile router, any of these hot-spots-in-a-box will do the trick. But considering its polish and low price, the Kyocera KR1 has the edge (provided you're a Sprint or Verizon customer). Until the United Nations finally gets around to blanketing the earth with an uninterrupted cloud of Wi-Fi coverage, these gadgets are the next best thing to finding a wireless connection everywhere you go.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/te...=1&oref=slogin





It Rings, Sings, Downloads, Uploads. But Can You Stand It?
Ken Belson

Greg Harper is your classic gadget freak, with the latest cellphones and strong opinions about each of them.

You would think that he'd be wildly enthusiastic about the new third-generation, or 3G, cellphones that play video and music. But instead, he seems less than impressed — a reaction that could spell trouble for Sprint, Verizon Wireless and other providers that have spent billions of dollars upgrading their networks to lure customers to their high-speed 3G systems.

"I'm no longer worrying about hot spots or being out of touch," said Mr. Harper, a business consultant who carries a Motorola phone from Verizon for talking, a Sprint Pocket PC smart phone for e-mail and an iPod for music. "The big problem is how hard it is to navigate the stuff," he said. "And they hit you with these extra charges, so you don't want to use it."

Mr. Harper's advanced phones enable him to watch TV segments, send e-mail messages and photos, download music and games, and search the Web about five times faster than with a standard cellphone. But the 3G service for his phones and laptop PC adds as much as $60 a month to each of his cellular plans. Figuring out how to use all the features on the handsets is also a chore.

If the nation's biggest cellular carriers are not impressing early adopters like Mr. Harper, it may be years before ordinary consumers start signing up in sizable numbers for the new services, which were introduced about a year ago.

American carriers combined have spent about $10 billion in the last three years to upgrade their networks. Verizon Wireless now offers 3G services in 181 markets, while Sprint expects to match Verizon's coverage in the coming months. Cingular uses a different 3G technology that is available in 52 cities. (T-Mobile, the fourth-largest carrier, plans to introduce 3G services next year.)

With individual subscribers spending less on standard voice-only plans, the carriers are banking on consumers to move rapidly to more expensive 3G services and do more than talk on their handsets. But the experience of carriers that introduced 3G services in Japan, Korea and elsewhere is sobering. In those countries, it took years before phones and plans were cheap enough to entice consumers to use the new data features, and even longer before carriers saw any return on their investment.

American carriers have not released separate figures for 3G cell subscribers. But industry analysts say there may be fewer than five million 3G phones in use, or less than 3 percent of the market, and only two million of those are connected to a 3G data plan.

"The biggest impediment is not pricing or technology, but consumer behavior," said Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Most people still look at these things as phones."

To be sure, the amount that consumers spent on data services has nearly doubled in the past year, and revenue from those services now makes up nearly 10 percent of overall sales at the largest carriers. Last Wednesday, Sprint Nextel said that its customers had downloaded one million songs from its music site since it opened in October (some were promotional giveaways; others sold for $2.50 a song). Verizon said that in the fourth quarter, its customers sent 7.4 billion text messages and 135 million photos with their handsets.

But thus far, the bulk of the data being swapped on phones — short messages, ring tones and photos — can be handled by the current generation of phones. Only about one-quarter of Verizon Wireless's handsets are even capable of providing 3G services, though the company is steadily adding more models to its lineup.

The carriers are trying to keep prices for the new phones in line with other high-end handsets, lest they scare away customers. Verizon Wireless's LG 8100, which lets customers watch television clips, play games and listen to music, costs $150 after rebates.

Verizon's 3G data service, called V Cast, which allows users to watch CNN, CBS News and MTV segments, among other programs, costs an additional $15 a month.

Sprint has a $15-a-month plan that lets subscribers watch segments of ABC News and other programs, listen to a Sirius radio channel and roam the Web. For $20 or $25 a month on Sprint, users can watch extra programming from ESPN, Animal Planet and other channels that have been reformatted for the small screen.

While watching video on cellphones may be novel, the experience is hardly overwhelming. As Mr. Harper and others have found out, downloading a video clip can often take as long as watching it. The program clips on V Cast are updated only a few times a day and often there are only a handful for each category, some of which are sports, news and entertainment.

"All the services are lacking," Mr. Harper said. "Verizon's V Cast is better than Sprint's, but it ain't there yet."

Cingular has introduced a more complete TV experience called MobiTV, which gives subscribers 25 channels of live television, including CNBC, Fox Sports and Discovery, on their phones for $9.99 a month in addition to their data and voice plans.

Verizon also plans to introduce a similar type of video service created by Qualcomm called MediaFLO that will provide access to live television broadcasts.

Still, for business users like Mr. Harper, few phones have all the functions he needs. Many business executives still buy devices like the Treo or the BlackBerry because their larger screens make it easier to read e-mail and open large attachments. Adding a 3G data plan makes sending and receiving those messages faster as well.

One bright spot for the carriers is that many companies are starting to buy their broadband PC cards, which plug into laptops to enable them to connect wirelessly to a 3G network.

Doris Mosblech, the network manager at Embarcadero Systems, which provides technology to shipping companies, is using PC cards from Sprint Nextel to let her company's workers access their e-mail with their laptops. The cards, priced at around $250 retail, can send data up to 10 times faster than older PC cards. With the new PC card, a user still needs to subscribe to a monthly 3G plan.

"As time has gone on, the applications we use require more broadband," Ms. Mosblech said, referring to larger e-mail attachments, videoconferencing and Internet phones. "The new cards felt almost like the speeds we get on our desktops."

In time, carriers may cut the prices for the cards and the PC data plans, which now cost between $40 and $80 a month. That was the pattern in other countries where 3G services were introduced.

American carriers, while late to 3G, have also learned from what has succeeded and flopped overseas. Verizon and Sprint have relied heavily on Samsung and LG, two companies with experience making 3G handsets in South Korea. Other manufacturers have ironed out many of the kinks — like poor battery life and bulky size — that plagued the first 3G phones released in Japan in 2001.

The carriers are also introducing flat-rate data plans; the Asian providers learned that consumers did not like having to pay by the piece for the data they sent.

Still, though customers are upgrading their phones and plans in Japan, the amount that individual subscribers spend has declined, a trend that may make American carriers think twice about expecting any windfalls from their 3G networks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/te...=1&oref=slogin





Chicago Gears Up for Wireless Broadband
Dave Carpenter

The nationwide rush to go wireless appears poised to extend to its biggest city yet. Chicago is launching an effort to offer wireless broadband, city officials said Friday, jumping on the Wi-Fi bandwagon as similar initiatives proceed in Philadelphia, San Francisco and smaller cities.

Chicago has hundreds of Wi-Fi hotspots in places like coffee shops, bookstores and libraries, where anyone can walk in, sit down and connect to the Web. Hoping to extend that wireless blanket to all 228 square miles, the city plans to ask technology companies this spring to submit proposals for the project.

While it's too soon to say how the system would operate, the goal is to make Internet access "broad and affordable" for residents and heighten Chicago's appeal for businesses and tourists alike, according to Chris O'Brien, the city's chief information officer.

The city did not specify goals for how much the system would charge for access. In Philadelphia, EarthLink Inc. (ELNK) is building a citywide network that will charge a wholesale rate of $9 a month to Internet service providers that would then resell access to the public at an undetermined price.

"We think it's important for residents of the city and tourists and businesses to have lots of different ways to connect," O'Brien said. "For a city as big as Chicago, with the vibrant business community and diverse citizen base that we have, you want to make sure all kinds of technology are available to them as they work and enjoy entertainment options."

If all goes smoothly, the system could be running as soon as 2007, O'Brien said. That would all but certainly leave the city behind Philadelphia, which hopes to have its entire system in place late this year or early next year. But the size of a Chicago network would dwarf Philadelphia's planned 135-square-mile network or anything now in place.

Currently, the biggest municipal Wi-Fi network is the all-free MetroFi in the south San Francisco Bay area at 35 square miles, according to Wi-Fi expert Glenn Fleishman. By spring, that title will be passed to one covering nearly 110 square miles in the neighboring Phoenix suburbs of Tempe and Chandler, Ariz., he said.

Cities' race to get into municipal broadband is being increasingly embraced by Internet service providers, since most cities are enlisting private companies to help build the wireless systems rather than doing it on their own. EarthLink created a division last year to solicit deals similar to Philadelphia's with the 50 largest cities.

Cities besides Philadelphia that have put Wi-Fi projects out for proposals in the last four months alone, according to EarthLink, include Portland, Ore.; San Francisco, Anaheim, Pasadena and Long Beach, Calif.; Denver and Aurora, Colo.; Minneapolis; Milwaukee; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Pittsburgh; Arlington, Va.; and Brookline, Mass.

Rather than viewing the cities' efforts as competition, said Don Berryman, president of EarthLink's municipal networks division: "This allows us to build our own network and provide broadband service anywhere we want and not have to work through the Bell company or the cable company, so it gives us a lot of freedom."

Chicago's main phone company, AT&T, says it similarly would not be opposed to a city-initiated effort.

"AT&T always has believed that the best approach is to stimulate investment in broadband," spokesman Rick Fox said. "As long as you're working with the private sector, that's a good thing."

The idea of a citywide Wi-Fi network got a big thumbs-up from several Chicagoans who were sitting in cafes with their laptops Friday.

"I'm always searching for Internet hotspots," said Beibei Que, a law student getting in some work at a coffee shop. "I like to have the Net at my fingertips wherever I go."

Katy Harper, who works mostly out of her home, said she would welcome the chance to get online elsewhere. "It's nice to be able to go out and sit somewhere and get connected," she said.

Chicago officials haven't yet committed to specific goals for the project, but they don't want to spend city funds. They have been closely watching Philadelphia's project, including its priority on low user costs and its intent to ensure that more computers and training programs are available for low-income residents.

"Our main mission is to increase access and help overcome the digital divide," said Robert Bright, board chairman of the Wireless Philadelphia nonprofit group overseeing that initiative.

Fleishman said building a municipal Wi-Fi network as big as the ones envisioned in Philadelphia and Chicago could be troublesome. He cited issues surrounding the need for high-powered antennas and interference from existing Wi-Fi networks.

"Once you get into dense urban environments, it's not that it won't work but it's more problematic," he said. "Nobody's built a network of this size."
http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20060217/D8FR5HTO0.html





San Francisco Gets Proposals for Free Citywide Wi-Fi Net
Matt Richtel

Google and EarthLink have teamed up to offer to build a free citywide wireless network here — one of six proposals by companies and nonprofit groups vying to become the municipality's access provider.

San Francisco joins Philadelphia, Anaheim, Calif., and other cities to push for widespread wireless access.

What makes San Francisco different is that it could become the first major city to offer free access to all its residents. At least two of the six proposals submitted to the city would provide free access: the one from Google and EarthLink, an Atlanta-based Internet access company; and one from SF Metro Connect, a collaboration between Cisco Systems, I.B.M. and SeaKay, a nonprofit group.

Jennifer Petrucione, a spokeswoman for Mayor Gavin Newsom, said that a panel of experts planned to evaluate all the proposals by April and make a recommendation to the mayor.

Under the proposal from Google and EarthLink, Google said it would provide free access over the 47-square-mile city, but that access would be at modest speeds of 300 kilobits per second. Megan Quinn, a spokeswoman for Google, said that the company had not yet determined how and whether it would subsidize the free access.

"At this point, we don't know exactly how we will monetize this service," Ms. Quinn wrote in an e-mail message. She declined to speculate whether Google planned to pay for the service by delivering paid advertisements to users. "However, like Web search, our goal is to create services that satisfy the information needs of users while also creating new markets for advertisers and local businesses," she said.

In addition, EarthLink said it planned to offer higher-speed access of 1 megabit per second for $20 a month, a fee that would support the $15 million cost to build and maintain the system over 10 years.

Under the proposal from SF Metro Connect, the organization said it would provide free access at speeds of at least 1 megabit or higher, and would allow commercials on the network.

The other proposals came from Communications Bridge Global, MetroFi, NextWLAN and Razortooth Communications.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/te...gy/23wifi.html





Tech CEOs Urge US Find More Wireless Airwaves

Chief executive officers of some leading technology companies plan to call on Thursday for the U.S. government to find more wireless airwaves for use as new applications emerge.

The Technology CEO Council said on Wednesday it will issue a report urging Congress to order the Bush administration to analyze which airwaves are not being used best, and how they might be re-allocated.

Additionally, the organization plans to urge the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to consider allowing government airwaves that are underutilized to be used for other purposes.

"Our nation's wireless needs are too often governed by 1970s regulations that hinder economic progress and innovation," Motorola Inc. CEO Edward Zander said in a statement obtained by Reuters. He serves as chairman of the technology organization.

The group pushing for the changes also includes executives from Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research), IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Intel Corp. (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research), Dell Inc., EMC Corp. and Unisys Corp., among others.

Wireless companies have been hungry for more airwaves as they deploy new services like high-speed Internet and video content.

The executives also plan to suggest the FCC ease restrictions on wireless licenses so companies have more flexibility to use the airwaves for new services. They also will recommend making more unlicensed spectrum available that could be used for a variety of purposes.

The organization also plans to recommend Congress and regulators ensure that public safety organizations have the airwaves they need. Safety officials have complained about poor communications during disasters like the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.

The FCC is slated to start auctioning some airwaves June 29, including some airwaves that government agencies are vacating.

Other airwaves are expected to be sold in 2008 ahead of the 2009 move by U.S. television broadcasters from analog wireless airwaves to other airwaves for their digital television signals.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...ELESS-CEOS.xml





Copyright Ruling Against Google

Google's image search service violates the copyrights of an x-rated magazine and Web publisher, Perfect 10, by displaying thumbnail-size photographs on its site, a federal judge has ruled.

In the ruling, Judge A. Howard Matz of United States District Court for the Central District of California ruled that Google's use of thumbnail photos made it a customer of Perfect 10, particularly because Perfect 10 produces small images for mobile telephones.

A Google lawyer, Michael Kwun, said Google expected to appeal any injunction against it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/te...=1&oref=slogin





Kazaa Heads Back To Court
Jim Welte

Found guilty of encouraging its users to infringe copyright, file-sharing service's appeal will be heard in Federal Court in Australia.

The legal battle between Kazaa and the music industry begins its next chapter today as the file-sharing service heads back to court to appeal a judge's ruling that found it guilty of inducing copyright infringement.

The controversial, Australia-based peer-to-peer (P2P) service hopes to avoid being shut down by convincing a full bench of the Australian Federal Court in Sydney to reverse the ruling from last September.

But the Australian recording industry--some 30 record labels--also found some parts of the prior decision unfavorable to its argument and is also appealing the decision.

Kazaa is owned by Sydney-based Sharman Networks.

"Sharman Networks is determined to resist the record companies' appeal in this case and bring its own appeal presenting arguments against the record companies' position," the company said today in a statement. "We are confident that the ultimate outcome of this case will be positive for Kazaa."

The case has taken quite a few twists since its February 2004 inception, and even more turns since the ruling last September.

When Kazaa announced its intention to appeal the case, Federal Justice Murray Wilcox agreed to delay the shutdown on the condition that Sharman install a keyword-filtering system by December 5 that would block access in Australia to some 3,000 popular artists such as Kylie Minogue, Madonna, and Eminem.

But instead of implementing filters, the company blocked network access to all Australian users, a measure Sharman said complied with the court order pending the outcome of the appeal.

The music industry, however, did not agree, saying the blocking of network access only prevented new users from committing copyright infringement--not existing ones. The industry then filed a motion asking Wilcox to find Sharman CEO Nikki Hemming and Kevin Bermeister, CEO of Kazaa technology partner Altnet, in contempt of court.

The appeal hearing is expected to last five days.
http://www.mp3.com/stories/3366.html





In Europe, Microsoft Faces a New Antitrust Complaint
Paul Meller

Microsoft's antitrust battle in Europe intensified Wednesday when some of its biggest rivals filed a new complaint against it, accusing the company of a wide range of antitrust abuses.

I.B.M., Oracle, Sun Microsystems and six other companies submitted a formal complaint to the European Commission on Wednesday, claiming that Microsoft continues to abuse its dominant position in the software market in spite of a 2004 European antitrust ruling against it.

The complaint opened a new chapter in Microsoft's long-running battle with competition regulators. The European Commission says Microsoft has not complied with its antitrust ruling, and is threatening to fine the company as much as 2 million euros ($2.4 million) a day. Microsoft paid 497 million euros in fines after the 2004 ruling.

The commission's apparent inability to get Microsoft to comply with the ruling had frustrated many of Microsoft's rivals, but the threat of daily fines has restored the commission's credibility, and spurred the competitors to further action.

"Today's complaint brings to the European Commission's attention anticompetitive Microsoft practices in a growing number of areas," said Simon Awde, chairman of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a trade association representing the nine companies that filed the complaint.

The other companies behind the complaint are Nokia, Red Hat, RealNetworks, Opera, Corel and Linspire.

The complaint focuses on the Microsoft Office bundle of applications, which includes the PowerPoint software, made for use in public presentations.

The commission's spokesman for antitrust issues, Jonathan Todd, said competition officials would examine the new complaint carefully. Microsoft said it had expected the new complaint. "We have come to expect that as we introduce new products that benefit consumers, a few competitors will complain," it said in a statement.

It dismissed the trade association as "a front for I.B.M. and a few other competitors," adding that when faced with innovation, "they choose litigation."

The association said it believed that the issues raised in its complaint were vital to restoring competition in software. The Office bundle of software applications are especially important to businesses and its inability to work smoothly with applications like those in Star Office software, has prevented rivals from gaining a foothold in the market for desktop operating systems.

Open-source desktop operating system manufacturers have "effectively been kept at bay by the lack of interoperability of the Office applications," said Thomas Vinje, a partner in the Brussels office of the law firm Clifford Chance.

The lack of interoperability of Office applications was never part of an antitrust case in the United States, though the state of Massachusetts raised the issue in a discussion with Microsoft over public procurement. The state government said it would only order Office software if it worked well with open, interoperable software formats.

Microsoft agreed, and said it would open up Office. The new version, Office 12, which is to be released before the end of the year, will use extensible markup language, or XML, an industrywide standard, said Tom Brookes, the company's spokesman in Brussels.

Microsoft has submitted Office 12 to Ecma International, the industry standards body, to be registered as a standard software format interoperable with all rivals.

The trade association however, dismissed the move. "We are well aware of the XML standardization initiative, and we reached the conclusion that it doesn't solve the problem we are complaining about," Mr. Vinje said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/te...=1&oref=slogin





iPod Takes Japan by Storm
The Godzilla of digital-musical players far outsells rivals from local consumer-electronics giants like Sony. After all, it's so kawaii (cute)

Shibuya retail and fashion conclave, and you will doubtless see electronic shops galore hawking MP3 players such as Sony's (SNE ) Walkman, Toshiba's Gigabeat, and the Panasonic D-Snap brand. Yet a determined young couple on hand recently -- Megumi Mizuno, 22, and Takaaki Tokuyoshi, 17 -- bypassed them all, making a straight shot to the Apple (AAPL ) outlet. Why? They've been infected by the near-global iPod obsession.

"The iPod design is cool," says Mizuno, a college student majoring in psychology, who wants a replacement for her aging mini-disk player. Tokuyoshi, meanwhile, is looking for a step up from his DoCoMo (DCM ) mobile phone, which he currently uses to listen to music. "iPod's sound quality is better, and the cell-phone battery doesn't last long enough to enjoy listening to music," he says. "The prices are reasonable, too." The iPod nano, with 4 gigabytes of memory, retails for about $230 in Japan.

It seems iPod mania is alive and well in Japan -- one of the most competitive consumer-electronics markets on the planet. Despite an array of well-entrenched Japanese rivals, such as Sony and Matsushita (MC ), the iPod had cornered 51.3% of the digital-music player market as of the end of 2005, up from about 32% in 2004, according to research firm BCN. Sony was a distant second with 16.2%, while Panasonic grabbed just 8.2% of the market.

SLICK MARKETING CAMPAIGN. Others have exited the market entirely. In November, Olympus (OCPNY ), maker of the m:robe music player, pulled its product. D&M Holdings, owner of the Rio brand, exited the stage in August. Apple's killer market-share grab is even more impressive when you consider that the overall Japanese market for music players shot up 50% to 4.2 million units in 2005. "Suffice to say, iPod has been a huge success," says Hiroshi Kamide, an analyst at KBC Securities in Tokyo.

Japanese consumers, much like their U.S. counterparts, are jazzed by iPod's sleek and hip design, easy-to-use functions, and first-class software -- something local rivals have yet to match. "Apple has focused on developing a seamless, end- to-end experience for the consumer when it comes to portable music," says Jon Erensen, a senior research analyst at Gartner Dataquest. "Other companies, including the Japanese consumer-electronics giants, have been focused on one or two pieces of the equation." Sony, for example, has received plaudits for design and sound quality, but criticism for its Connect software.

Slick marketing has helped, too. In January the Nikkei Marketing Journal named Apple's TV advertising campaign for iPod the best of 2005. Another big boost has been the August rollout of a Japanese version of Apple's iTunes Music Store. The company also opened the brick-and-mortar store in Shibuya -- Tokyo's vibrant youth center. A month later it introduced its best-selling, ultra-slim iPod nano to Japan.

MOBILE-PHONE THREAT. Still, iPod's continuing dominance in Japan isn't a sure thing. For starters, Sony isn't giving up the chase. Its new Walkman, which will be released in the U.S. this year, has been well-received in Japan. Analysts say Sony's working hard to improve the software.

What's more, downloads from Mora, a Japanese download service backed by Japan's major music labels, including Sony, grew rapidly in 2005. Last December, for the first time, it topped 1 million downloads in one month. That's a 190% increase over the year-ago period. One advantage Mora has over the iTunes Music Store is access to Japanese pop talent. Apple doesn't have tie-ups with some of the biggest local record companies, such as Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) and Warner Music Japan.

A bigger threat is the growing sophistication of mobile phone-based music in Japan. Cell phones are frequently discussed as potential iPod killers, and Japan's carriers are pushing the hardest to make that a reality. AU, a unit of KDDI, is particularly aggressive. Since November, 2004, AU customers have been able to download full songs from the carrier's 3G networks, using a service called Chaka Uta Full. As of mid-January, more than 33 million songs had been downloaded, and 5.9 million phones can access the service.

STEPPED-UP QUALITY. In January, AU unveiled a new service called LISMO, which allows subscribers to supplement tracks downloaded over its 3G networks to cell phones with songs uploaded to their PCs. It also debuted some impressive musical handsets. One of them, made by Toshiba (TOSBF ), includes a 4- gigabyte hard drive capable of storing 2,000 songs. And in April, AU is adding an online music site called DuoMusic Store, which will enable subscribers to download tracks to their PCs or phones. Apple claims iTunes is the leading supplier of downloadable music via PCs in Japan.

The music quality on mobile phones is improving as well. Tracks downloaded from AU's 3G network, for example, are compressed using the HE-AAC format, which stands for high-efficiency advanced audio coding, and is generally considered a step up from the MP3 format. On the latest products, "the music experience is very similar on a handset player," says Mark Kirstein, an analyst at research firm iSuppli.

For now, though, the iPod absolutely rules Japan's digital-music player market -- pretty amazing when you consider that Japan is home to some of the toughest competitors imaginable in the global consumer-electronics game.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...223_774050.htm





A Milestone for iTunes; a Windfall for a Downloader
Claudia H. Deutsch

It may well have been the best 99 cents Alex Ostrovsky ever spent.

Early yesterday, he paid that amount to download "Speed of Sound," a song on the Coldplay album "X&Y," from the iTunes Music Store, the Internet music shop that Apple Computer started less than three years ago.

He did not know it, but it was the billionth song the site had sold, and Apple was not about to let that go unnoticed.

So at 12:45 a.m., Mr. Ostrovsky's phone rang. It was an Apple employee, telling him that in addition to the song, Apple was giving him a 20-inch iMac, 10 iPods and a $10,000 gift card for the iTunes store. It is even establishing a scholarship at the Juilliard School in his name.

Mr. Ostrovsky, 16, was still trying to absorb it all yesterday. His phone had been ringing all day, alternating between reporters wanting to know his reaction and friends wanting to congratulate him.

At one point Mr. Ostrovsky, who lives in West Bloomfield, Mich., went to an Apple store to look at iMacs. "Everyone there knew who I was, too," he said. "It's just surreal."

He has pretty concrete ideas about how he will use the prizes, though. The iMac stays with him — "I'd been asking my parents for a new computer for a while, so this was a dream come true," he said. He will keep an iPod, and family and friends will get the rest. But the $10,000 gift card has him a bit flummoxed.

"My sister has already called from New York to talk about divvying it up," he said, "and I'll probably buy some music for friends."

But he will also buy more for himself. Until now, Mr. Ostrovsky has not been a frequent user of the iTunes store. "I've downloaded maybe 50 songs, but I was always more likely to borrow CD's from my friends," he said. "I'm certainly going to download more songs now."

That would certainly be music to Apple's ears.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/te...=1&oref=slogin





Razorback2 Bust Fails to Dent eDonkey Traffic
John P. Mello Jr.

"Copying of music and movies is more prevalent today than it was in 2001 when Napster was at its height," said Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "All the lawsuits against thousands of individuals as well as people maintaining sites like Razorback2 don't appear to be making a serious dent in peer-to-peer file sharing."

Despite some chest beating by the entertainment industry Wednesday over the shutdown of one of the biggest index servers on the eDonkey network, a raid by Belgian and Swiss police seems to have had little impact on file-sharing traffic.

"We have seen no effect on the eDonkey traffic levels," Andrew Parker, chief technical officer at CacheLogic, a UK-based watcher of Internet traffic patterns, told the E-Commerce Times.

"On a technical level that isn't particularly surprising," he added. "The Razorback server is purely an eDonkey index server. It doesn't actually contain any of the illegal content itself, just the details of who is sharing what content."

Razorback2 was rubbed out Tuesday when, in a coordinated offensive, Swiss police arrested the server's operator and Belgian gendarmes seized his hardware in an Internet hosting center just outside Brussels.

Major Victory

Razorback2 was a very popular eDonkey server, used by an estimated one million file sharers, or about a third of all eDonkey users.

"This is a major victory in our fight to cut off the supply of illegal materials being circulated on the Internet via peer-to-peer [P2P] networks," proclaimed Motion Picture Association Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman in a statement.

"By shaving the illegal traffic of copyrighted works facilitated by Razorback2," he continued, "we are depleting other illegal networks of their ability to supply Internet pirates with copyrighted works which is a positive step in our international effort to fight piracy."

In a separate statement, the music industry's European arm, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, observed, "This is a very significant breakthrough in the fight against Internet piracy internationally, removing one of the biggest and most well known sources of illegal music files on the Internet."

Antique Technology

Although popular, Razorback2 was far from state-of-the-art in the current eDonkey world.

"Razorback2 uses the old eDonkey protocol, which is in some ways similar to the old Napster protocol in that it relies on central servers," Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco told the E-Commerce Times.

"For the last four to five years, peer-to-peer protocols have been decentralized," he continued. "So in some ways, by shutting down Razorback2, they're shutting down an antique in the peer- to-peer world."

Parker, of CacheLogic, explained that modern eDonkey clients, such as eMule, automatically download a list of index servers at startup. With Razorback2 out of the picture, eDonkey clients are just rerouting traffic to the more than 100 index servers still in operation.

Clever Algorithm

Moreover, he said, the eDonkey network can operate without any index servers due to a fully decentralized component called KAD, or Kademila.

The theory behind Kademila was developed by Petar Maymounkov, now a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass.

"It's an algorithm that avoids the need for a central server altogether," he told the E-Commerce Times. "It's a moderately clever algorithm that can find something by asking a small number of computers on the Internet.

"In the current state of the art, people don't want to hear about central servers any more," he added. "They're remains of the past. As you can see, they're being shut down one after the other."

P2P Keeps Sharing Along

Those shutdowns, though, don't seem to be crimping P2P growth, according to the EFF's von Lohmann.

"The number of users on peer-to-peer networks have been at record highs for several months," he said.

"It's true that they're shutting down some site operators," he acknowledged, "but when you have tens of millions of people using these networks, shutting down a few sites -- even a high profile one like Razorback2 -- is unlikely to substantially change reality.

"Copying of music and movies is more prevalent today than it was in 2001 when Napster was at its height," he contended. "All the lawsuits against thousands of individuals as well as people maintaining sites like Razorback2 don't appear to be making a serious dent in peer-to-peer file sharing."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/49007.html





Free Software? You Can't Just Give It Away

Who could be upset by a scheme that allows free use of software? Well, Gervase Markham has found one Trading Standards officer who is

Who could possibly be upset with the Mozilla Foundation for giving away itsFirefox browser?

One of my roles at the Mozilla Foundation relates to copyright licensing. I'm responsible for making sure that the software we distribute respects the conditions of the free software licences of the underlying code. I'm also the first point of contact for licensing questions.

Most of the time, this job involves helping people who want to use our code in their own products understand the terms, or advising project members who want to integrate code from another project into our codebase. Occasionally, however, something a little more unusual comes along.

A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:

"I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?" she asked.

"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted."

I felt somewhat unnerved at being held responsible for the disintegration of the UK anti-piracy system. Who would have thought giving away software could cause such difficulties?

However, given that the free software movement is unlikely collectively to decide to go proprietary in order to make her life easier, I had another go, using examples like Linux and theOpenOffice office suite to show that it's not just Firefox which is throwing a spanner in the works.

She then asked me to identify myself, so that she could confirm that I was authorised to speak for the Mozilla Foundation on this matter. I wondered if she was imagining nefarious copyright-infringing street traders taking a few moments off from shouting about the price of bananas to pop into an internet cafe, crack a router and intercept her e-mail.

However, the more I thought about it, providing a sensible reply to that question is somewhat difficult. How could I prove I was authorised to speak for the Foundation? We're a virtual organisation – we have three employees, one in Vancouver, one in Virginia and one in leafy North London, with no office or registered trading address in the UK. As far as the Mozilla part of my life goes, my entire existence is electronic.

In the end, I just had to say that the fact that I am capable of receiving and replying to e-mail addressed tolicensing@mozilla.org would have to be sufficient. She would just have to take it on trust that I was not a router-cracking banana merchant. She must have done so, as I never heard from her again.

While the identity verification aspect of this incident is amusing, what is more serious is the set of assumptions her e-mails implied. It demonstrates how the free software model disrupts the old proprietary way of doing things, where copying was theft and you were guilty until proven innocent.

In a world where both types of software exist, greater discernment is required on the part of the enforcers. I hope this is the beginning of the end of any automatic assumption that sharing software with your neighbour must be a crime.

Gervase Markham says that he works for the Mozilla Foundation, a non- profit organisation dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the internet. Of course, he may just be a banana seller. His blog is Hacking For Christ
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/ar...051196,00.html















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