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

[JackSpratts]

"She's been chancellor of Stanford, she's got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She's African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that." – Dave Lenihan


"The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders—and the technology companies that distribute their content—the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates. Fortunately, repeal of the DMCA would not lead to intellectual property anarchy." – Timothy B. Lee


" This is an not an attempt to close the business, but an attempt to see it is run in a lawful manner." – Chief State's Attorney Christopher Morano


"When people are aware the cameras are on, they are more apt to watch their behavior." – Detective Lt. James Fisher


"We will always be subject to government subpoenas, but the fact that the judge sent a clear message about privacy is reassuring." – Nicole Wong


"Unashamedly 'disposable' cheap goods, you could argue, are turning us into traders rather than curators of our possessions. It is another victory for capitalism: we have internalised the unsentimental stock control of the modern retailer." – Andy Beckett


"I'm very flattered by all the positive light this is being shown in internationally, it's not every day the world has nice things to say about [France], but I must point out that IT enthusiasts over here are miserably decrying this law, and would probably be in the streets themselves if they weren't already chocablock with students demonstrating :-( ." – Exaton






































March 25th, ’06






Study: P2P Users Buy More Music; Apathy, Not Piracy, The Problem
Ken Fisher

When the movie or music industry commissions a study, it's usually to serve either a public relations purpose or lobbying need (or both). Sometimes, however, the study produces results that fall short of meeting the needs of the industry. That is what looks to have happened with a recent study commissioned by the Canadian branch of the RIAA, the Canadian Record Industry Association. While the study still shows that piracy is indeed a problem for the industry, it also shows that P2P users buy more music than is typically conceded; when people aren't buying music, P2P isn't the primary cause; and among those who use P2P, legitimate methods of obtaining music still dominate.

P2P users buy music

Three out of four P2P users admitted to purchasing music after downloading it online, with 21 percent of P2P users saying that they have bought tracks they have also downloaded on more than 10 occasions. 25 percent admitted to purchasing previously- downloaded tracks only once or twice, while an additional 27 percent claimed to have done it less than 10 times, but more than twice. The end result is clear: people are buying music after downloading it on P2P, meaning that the industry has failed to recognize the marketing- like effects of P2P. Just as important, this should caution the industry against assessing each and every download to a "loss" to piracy, since the statistics clearly show that those engaging in P2P do buy music in not- insignificant numbers.

The industry's biggest cause of lost sales: apathy

But what of declining album sales? Of those polled, those claiming to have purchased less music over time have cited myriad reasons for doing so. Apathy is the major culprit, with 14 percent citing no interest, 9 percent saying that their music collections are sufficient already, 7 percent saying that the radio is enough, and another 4 percent citing no reason. Thus, more than a third (34 percent) of the respondents were just not that interested. That number can be inflated when we consider that 13 percent said that they had no time to listen to music, while another 6 percent cited changes in their own music preference. Where does P2P sit in this mix? Only 10 percent of those people buying less music say that they do so because they can get materials off of P2P networks. This number is smaller than the 16 percent who cited the cost of new music as the reason for their declining purchases.

Yarr Matey, what be on your computer?

And what of these pirates? Users who admit to downloading music from P2P services nonetheless have music collections primarily composed of music obtained legally, either via ripping CDs (36 percent of the average collection), buying songs online (20 percent), or obtaining them from artists' websites (7 percent). Music tracks obtained from P2P networks (33 percent) or family and friends (9 percent) were significantly higher, however. With the average number of music files per computer sitting at 500, this suggests that the average P2P downloader in the study had roughly 210 songs obtained from these unauthorized channels.

None of this suggests that P2P is entirely harmless, or that the music industry should embrace P2P like a long- lost friend. It does demonstrate, however, that the rhetoric from the industry doesn't match reality, at least in Canada. Michael Geist, who raised awareness of the study's existence, aptly noted the irony of having the CRIA provide evidence against itself; far from a doomsday scenario, the situation appears to be almost the opposite of what we've been told. Furthermore, Geist noted that it is the teenagers specifically who are leading the way in buying music. This runs contrary to the tale that kids these days don't bother buying anything they can pirate. Individuals aged 13- 24 years bought roughly 11 CDs and DVDs in the last six months compared to only 4 or less for persons aged 55 and older. The hotter 25- 34 demographic was actually outshone by the older 35- 44 crowd, turning in 8.5 purchases compared to 9.7, respectively.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060320-6418.html





Launch Of New P2P Technology For Television
M&C

Press release

The Workshop on Technical and Legal Aspects of Peer-to-Peer Television is being held in Amsterdam on Friday 17 March 2006 and deals with a revolutionary manner of distributing TV programmes via the Internet. The new peer-to-peer Tribler system, based on open-source software, will be launched in the course of this workshop.

Various public broadcasting corporations, commercial TV stations and cable and telecommunications companies are all showing keen interest in the distribution of television programmes via the Internet. While the current method makes use of centrally located computer systems, research is now being conducted at Delft University of Technology (among other institutes) into TV distribution through peer-to-peer systems. This type of distribution is carried out through large groups of (normal) PCs operated by normal users.

This method enables TV programmes to be broadcast at almost no cost and opens the way to new TV stations operating through the Internet. Moreover, this method guarantees a much more direct linking of the programme makers with the viewers. “If the public broadcasting corporations were to make use of peer-to-peer technology, then the high costs of data distribution, such as was recently the case during the Olympic Games, would be a thing of the past”, says Johan Pouwelse, a researcher involved in the development of the Tribler software.

When using this method of transmission it is crucial that the rights to the visual material be carefully handled and protected. The use of Creative Commons licences presents one possible solution to a number of legal sticking points. In the workshop the current state of this promising technology will be discussed by researchers, domestic and foreign TV producers and experts in the field of licensing.

The organisers of the workshop are active participants in the (state funded) I-Share project, which forms part of the Freeband BSIK programme, and in Creative Commons Nederland/ Kennisland, an Amsterdam-based foundation for knowledge projects.

For more information on the Tribler software see http://Tribler.org
http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.js...0ea7ce&lang=en





French Lawmakers Approve Bill To Open iPod, iTunes
Larry Angell

French lawmakers have voted to approve the online music interoperability bill that would force Apple to open its copy-protection technology and break the exclusive tie between downloads from the iTunes Music Store and the iPod. As reported earlier today, “the draft law—which also introduces new penalties for music pirates—would force Apple Computer Inc., Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. to share proprietary anti-copy technologies so that rivals can offer compatible services and players.” The French Senate will give a final vote on the bill in coming weeks.
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/new...n-ipod-itunes/





FCC Chief: AT&T Can Limit Net Bandwidth
Preston Gralla

FCC Chief Kevin Martin yesterday gave his support to AT&T and other telcos who want to be able to limit bandwidth to sites like Google, unless those sites pay extortion fees. Martin made it clear in a speech yesterday that he supports such a a "tiered" Internet.

Martin told attendees at the TelecomNext show that telcos should be allowed to charge web sites whatever they want if those sites want adequate bandwidth.

He threw in his lot with AT&T, Verizon, and the other telcos, who are no doubt salivating at the prospect at charging whatever the market can bear.

He did throw a bone to those who favor so-called "net neutrality" -- the idea that telcos and other ISPs should not be allowed to limit services or bandwidth, or charge sites extra fees. He said that the FCC "has the authority necessary" to enforce network neutrality violations. He added that it had done so already, when it stepped in to stop an ISP from blocking Vonage VoIP service.

But Martin's interpretation of "net neutrality" is far too narrow, and almost besides the point. By siding with telcos who want to be able to offer adequate bandwidth to sites that pay up, and to limit bandwidth to sites that don't, he'll help kill off new sites that can't afford to fork over the money.

That could help end Internet and network innovation, and we simply can't afford that.
http://www.networkingpipeline.com/bl...ief_att_c.html





Right-Wing Think-Tank Hates DRM
Cory Doctorow

The Cato Institute, an ultra-libertarian, right-wing think tank, has released a white paper damning the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on breaking the anti-copying systems used to cripple digital media, like DVDs and iTunes songs.

It's amazing to watch crippleware come under attack from all points of the compass -- Marxists and anarchists hate DRM. Libertarians hate DRM. Media studies people, economists, and musicians hate DRM.

But it takes sharp free-market types like the Cato characters to bust out elegant critiques like this one:

The movie industry has every right to segment the worldwide market for DVDs, but it should bear the costs of doing so. Those costs might include requiring no-resale contracts with distributors and monitoring sales in low-price countries to make sure DVDs were not being resold outside their intended market. Deciding whether those costs would be worthwhile might be difficult. The industry’s desire for market segmentation is not, however, a good reason to outlaw the sale of unofficial DVD players. The role of government is not to ensure that a private business’s pricing strategy succeeds, and consumers, who have not agreed to help enforce the DVD cartel’s segmentation scheme, are under no obligation to respect it.

I've heard for years that the Cato Institute was divided on DRM and copyright, so it's good to seem them taking a stand now. I think they've only scratched the surface, though. Of special interest to free-marketeers should be the way that DRM lets Apple hijack the music companies' copyright monopoly and turn it into a tax on Apple customers who switch from an iPod to a competing product. You can keep your MP3s if you switch from Windows to Mac, but if you switch from iPod to Creative, kiss your iTunes goodbye. Talk about anti-competitive!

And how about TiVo updating its devices to cripple them after their customers have already paid for them? Or Macrovision using its monopoly over DVD anti-analog tech to jack up its licensing prices to the movie industry? If you like free markets, DRM are a nightmare from top to bottom.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/21...hinktank_.html





Policy Analysis

Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Timothy B. Lee

Timothy B. Lee is a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute in St. Louis. He holds a degree in computer science from the University of Minnesota and is the science and technology editor of the online magazine Brainwash and a contributor to the Technology Liberation Front website.

Executive Summary

The courts have a proven track record of fashioning balanced remedies for the copyright challenges created by new technologies. But when Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, it cut the courts out of this role and instead banned any devices that "circumvent" digital rights management (DRM) technologies, which control access to copyrighted content.

The result has been a legal regime that reduces options and competition in how consumers enjoy media and entertainment. Today, the copyright industry is exerting increasing control over playback devices, cable media offerings, and even Internet streaming. Some firms have used the DMCA to thwart competition by preventing research and reverse engineering. Others have brought the weight of criminal sanctions to bear against critics, competitors, and researchers.

The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders—and the technology companies that distribute their content—the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.

Fortunately, repeal of the DMCA would not lead to intellectual property anarchy. Prior to the DMCA's enactment, the courts had already been developing a body of law that strikes a sensible balance between innovation and the protection of intellectual property. That body of law protected competition, consumer choice, and the important principle of fair use without sacrificing the rights of copyright holders. And because it focused on the actions of people rather than on the design of technologies, it gave the courts the flexibility they needed to adapt to rapid technological change.
http://cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6025





Marvel Comics: Stealing Our Language
Cory Doctorow

Marvel Comics is continuing in its bid to steal the word "super-hero" from the public domain and put it in a lock-box to which it will control the key. Marvel and DC comics jointly filed a trademark on the word "super-hero." They use this mark to legally harass indie comic companies that make competing comic books.

A trademark's enforceability hinges on whether the public is likely to associate a word or mark with a given company -- in other words, when you hear the word "super-hero," if you think "Marvel and DC," then Marvel will be able to go on censoring and eliminating its competition.

One way of accomplishing this dirty bit of mind-control is by adding a ™ symbol after the word "Super-Hero." That TM lets the world know that you claim ownership over the word it accompanies. If you can get other people to do it, too, eventually you may in fact get the world to believe that the word is your property -- and then, it becomes your property.

"Super-hero" isn't Marvel's property. They didn't invent the term. They aren't the only users of the term. It's a public-domain word that belongs to all of us. Adding a ™ to super-hero is a naked bid to steal "super-hero" from us and claim it for their own.

The latest trick in its move to steal the word is using the ™ symbol in the bump for its California science centre show -- they've recruited a science museum to help them steal "super-hero."

Here's a proposal: from now on, let's never use the term "super-hero" to describe a Marvel character. Let's call them "underwear perverts" -- as Warren Ellis is wont to -- or vigilantes, or mutants. Let's reserve the term "super-hero" exclusively to describe the heros of comics published by companies that aren't crooked word-thieves.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/18...cs_steali.html





Universal Launches Film Downloads
Tim Castle

Universal Pictures has launched a new service in Britain that will sell digital downloads of movies such as "King Kong" along with a DVD copy, tapping into the online video market now dominated by Apple's iTunes.

From April 10, consumers will be able to download two digital copies of selected movies -- one for a computer and one for a portable device -- and receive a DVD in the mail.

Universal's partner, Lovefilm, already has a movie download service that provides films from Warner Brothers on a rental basis. The new service announced on Thursday is download-to-own, meaning that the downloads will not expire.

"It gives instant access, it gives portability and it gives much greater flexibility for the consumer to consume his product any way they want," said Universal Pictures UK Chairman Eddie Cunningham. Universal Pictures is part of General Electric's NBC Universal unit.

Hollywood studios have been reluctant to sell digital versions of their blockbusters for fear they would be copied and pirated online.

The new service will use Microsoft's digital rights management technology, which is designed to prevent consumers from duplicating the movies, burning them to disc or uploading them to the Internet.

Lovefilm Chief Executive Mark Livingstone said he expected Warner Brothers and other Hollywood studios to follow Universal's lead in the download-to-own market.

Universal will start the service with "King Kong" as part of an initial collection of 35 movies, including "Pride and Prejudice" and "Serenity." "King Kong" will sell for 19.99 pounds, roughly equal to the retail price.

The download-to-own service will also be available through AOL, whose UK online movie service is operated by Lovefilm.
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=456792006





Police Blotter: Judge Orders Gmail Disclosure
Declan McCullagh

"Police blotter" is a weekly News.com report on the intersection of technology and the law.

What: In a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, a subpoena is sent to Google for the complete contents of a Gmail account, including deleted e-mail messages. This is unrelated to the Department of Justice's own subpoena to Google for search terms and excerpts from its search database.

When: U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte in San Francisco ruled on Jan. 31 and March 13.

Outcome: Judge grants subpoena and orders that all e-mail messages, including deleted ones, be divulged.

What happened, according to the court: In November 2003, the Federal Trade Commission sued AmeriDebt and founder Andris Pukke on charges that the company deceived customers about credit counseling and failed to use customers' money to actually pay their creditors.

AmeriDebt settled, but the courts are still trying to uncover the location of Pukke's apparently sizeable assets. (A Washington Post article in September said the IRS is seeking $300 million from Pukke. His attorney at the venerable firm of Jones Day charges a hefty $575 an hour.)

Pukke's missing money has been linked to a Belize developer called Dolphin Development, which counts a fellow named Peter Baker as a shareholder. The court-appointed receiver in the FTC case, Robb Evans & Associates, sent a subpoena to Google on Nov. 1 asking for the complete contents of Baker's Gmail account.

Baker objected to the subpoena, saying it could disclose confidential information, including attorney-client conversations.

The subpoena asks for not only current e-mail but also deleted e-mail: "All documents concerning all Gmail accounts of Baker...for the period from Jan. 1, 2003, to present, including but not limited to all e-mails and messages stored in all mailboxes, folders, in-boxes, sent items and deleted items, and all links to related Web pages contained in such e-mail messages."

Google's privacy policy says deleted e-mail messages "may remain in our offline backup systems" in perpetuity. It does not guarantee that backups are ever deleted. Baker estimated he may have tens of thousands of e-mail messages in his Gmail account.

In a Jan. 31 ruling, Laporte rejected Baker's request. She said his attorney could withhold "truly protected" information but must "err on the side" of disclosure.

Baker asked the judge to reconsider. On Monday, Laporte reiterated her decision, saying the argument about confidentiality "is baseless" because her earlier order creates an exception for such e-mail messages.

Excerpt from Laporte's Jan. 31 opinion: "Conspicuously absent from Baker's briefs is any denial that he is linked to the (Gmail) account, Pukke and/or Pukke-controlled entities. On the contrary, Baker relies entirely on formalistic objections and never once attacks the substance of the receiver's theories or facts. And, ironically, while he argues that the receiver has not submitted any admissible evidence to support its contentions, the only evidence Baker submitted are declarations by his attorneys that only support his claim that some documents may be protected by the attorney-client privilege but do not address his other claims about privacy interests."

Excerpt from Laporte's March 13 opinion: "(Baker) argues that being forced to pay his attorneys to screen these documents and to create a privilege log would 'necessarily involve an exorbitant amount of attorney time, resulting in the incurrence of thousands of dollars of attorneys' fees for which Mr. Baker will not be reimbursed...Within five court days of this order, Baker shall immediately turn over all documents to the receiver, withholding only those documents that are shielded from discovery by the attorney-client privilege, or those which are truly protected by a legitimate privacy interest."
http://news.com.com/Police+blotter+J...3-6050295.html





Labor Will Make ISPs Filter Porn On Net

Labor's plan to protect children from online pornography and graphic violence has been backed by family groups, but dismissed by the government and internet industry.

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley said a Labor government would force internet service providers (ISPs) to block violent and pornographic material before it reached home computers.

Under the "clean feed" system, pioneered in Britain, users would be unable to access any content banned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) because it contained graphic sexual or violent material, rated R or higher.

Mr Beazley said all households would be included in the policy unless they opted out.

He said the current system, which required ISPs to offer all subscribers cheap or free filter software for their own computers, was not working.

"The reality is that cost and poor computer literacy mean almost two-thirds of parents don't have internet filters on their family computers," Mr Beazley said.

"That is not good enough when research suggests that the exposure of children and others in the community to this sickening content can lead to aggression towards women and child abuse."

Communications Minister Helen Coonan said PC-based internet filters, which ISPs must offer to subscribers at a cheap price, were better and had been taken up by more than one in three families using the net.

"PC-based filters are more effective at blocking all manner of offensive content, provide greater control to parents of the content their children are exposed to and do not affect the performance of the internet for all users," Senator Coonan said.

She said a recent study by internet safety body NetAlert found the kind of filtering proposed by Labor could slow connection speeds by up to 78 per cent without being as effective as a filter on a home computer.

But Family First leader Senator Steve Fielding said blocking all porn at the ISP level, then allowing adults to "opt in", was a good solution.

"Parents feel powerless," Senator Fielding said.

"We know we have to let our kids roam the internet for study, yet we can't be watching over their shoulders all the time to monitor what they are seeing."

However, Internet Industry Association executive director Peter Coroneos said the current system in Australia, which involved three enforceable codes of practice, was world-class.

"No child in Australia need be exposed to harmful and offensive content," Mr Coroneos said.

"A family who takes advantage of (filter programs) will have a far greater degree of confidence in limiting the kind of material their children are likely to access than would occur if we adopt the limited clean feed model."

Mr Coroneos said the problem lay in educating parents and teachers about the use of filter systems.

The ACMA is currently auditing the top 25 ISPs, which cover about 95 per cent of internet users in Australia, for compliance with the codes of practice.

Any ISPs found in breach of the codes could face fines of up to $27,500 a day.
http://smh.com.au/news/National/Labo...703333305.html




WB Censors Its Own Drama for Fear of F.C.C. Fines
Bill Carter

Concerned about the recent decision by the Federal Communications Commission to fine television networks for material deemed indecent, the WB network will broadcast a new drama next week that it has censored over the objections of the program's creator.

But first, the network will offer the uncut version of the pilot episode on its Web site, starting today — a further example of the new strategies network television may be pursuing, both to escape government-imposed restrictions and to find alternative ways of reaching viewers. It is the first time a network has offered on another outlet an uncut version of a program it has been forced to censor.

The show, "The Bedford Diaries," was created by Tom Fontana, whose long résumé includes award-winning shows like "St. Elsewhere" and "Homicide" for network television and the far more graphic prison drama "Oz" for HBO, a pay-cable channel with no content restrictions.

The pilot episode of "The Bedford Diaries," which concerns a group of college students attending a class on human sexuality, had already been accepted by WB's standards department. After the F.C.C. decision last week to issue millions of dollars in fines against broadcast stations, the network's chairman, Garth Ancier, contacted Mr. Fontana and asked him to edit a number of specific scenes out of the show, including one that depicted two girls in a bar kissing on a dare and another of a girl unbuttoning her jeans.

"I said no," Mr. Fontana said in an interview Wednesday. "I told him I found the ruling incomprehensible. He said the censor would do the edit."

The decision, several network executives said yesterday, could represent a further step in the spread of alternative means for television programs to reach viewers, including iPods and computers. It could also increase the risk that network television will be seen as passé by some of its audience, especially younger viewers.

"The message here is that they'll be forced to go alternative ways of looking at shows if they want to see the real thing," Mr. Fontana said. "It's like they're telling people that broadcast television now has much less interesting stuff than you see on the Web or cable."

WB executives acknowledged that the decision to censor Mr. Fontana's new show was entirely driven by concerns raised by the fines the F.C.C. levied last week against television stations for broadcasting programs it called indecent. The commission ordered by far the biggest fine, $3.6 million, for 111 stations affiliated with or owned by CBS, for an episode of the crime drama "Without a Trace" that contained a scene depicting teenagers engaged in sex. CBS protested the fine and said the show was not indecent.

Mr. Fontana praised Mr. Ancier for being "a thorough professional and complete gentleman" about the issue. He said he had no problem at all with WB's decision, conceding that the network had to do what it believed was necessary to avoid being fined.

But he added, "In more than 20 years in the business, this is the most chilling thing I've ever faced."

In a statement, Mr. Ancier said: "The WB takes its responsibility as a broadcast network very seriously and we have always been mindful of the F.C.C.'s indecency rules. While we believe that the previous uncut version of 'The Bedford Diaries' is in keeping with those rules, out of an abundance of caution, we decided to make some additional minor changes to the premiere episode of the series, which is set to debut next Wednesday, March 28. We also decided to make the original version available on the Internet at TheWB.com, which allows those interested in seeing the producer's creative vision to do so while at the same time recognizing the special rules that apply to the broadcast medium."

In a telephone interview, Mr. Ancier said the network respected the effort Mr. Fontana had made to produce a show that was both creatively interesting and socially responsible. "Our feeling was that Tom had worked very hard with our standards people and they came up a final edit of the show which we all had found acceptable," he said.

The uncut version of the "Bedford Diaries" pilot will be available on the WB site beginning at 3 p.m. Eastern time today, a network spokesman said. The decision to offer it on the Web was less complicated for WB because it has twice before offered previews of new series on the Internet — though in both those cases the network versions of the shows were identical to the Web versions, not censored.

Those previews were offered for promotional value, and the network considered them highly successful in generating initial interest in the two series, "Jack and Bobby" and "Supernatural."

Promotional value is all the network can realize from streaming the uncut episode of 'The Bedford Diaries" on its Web site, because it will run without commercials. The Hollywood creative guilds do not permit a commercial use of the program online.

Network executives said yesterday that the industry was still working through what impact the threat of heavy fines from the F.C.C. will have on the content of coming shows. One senior network program executive said it would now be unlikely that a show with the subject matter of "The Bedford Diaries" would be ordered by a network.

Asked whether this might lead to the diversion of more network programming to other distribution outlets, Mr. Ancier said: "It's a really good question. I just don't know."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/arts/23bedf.html





Online News Popular On Broadband, Study Finds
AP

Americans with high-speed Internet connections at home are far more likely than dial-up users to go online for news, a new study finds.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project says 43 percent of broadband users turn to the Internet to get news, compared with 26 percent for dial-up users. Broadband users are also more likely to read a national newspaper, but less likely to turn to local television.

"Local TV, in particular, takes a hit ... when people start spending more time with online news," said John Horrigan, Pew's associate director for research.

Still, local television is the leading source of news, used by 65 percent of dial-up users and 57 percent of broadband users. National television and radio are also popular sources across the board.

Among dial-up users, the local paper is the next leading source, but among broadband users, the Internet has a slight edge — 43 percent vs. 38 percent. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for questions asked only of broadband users.

The study also finds Americans largely unwilling to pay for news — only 6 percent of Internet users have bought video clips, articles or other news items online — but more than half have registered at free news sites by providing information about themselves.

The study of 3,011 U.S. adults was conducted Nov. 29 to Dec. 31 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNew...22?hub=SciTech





Justices Reach Out to Consider Patent Case
Andrew Pollack

For the first time in a quarter-century, the Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday a case involving the basic question of what type of discoveries and inventions can be patented.

Both sides say the case, which involves a blood test for a vitamin deficiency, could have a wide-ranging impact on the development of diagnostics, perhaps threatening many of the underlying patents for genetic and other medical tests.

But the array of companies filing supporting briefs — including American Express, Bear Stearns and I.B.M. — indicates that intellectual property in other fields might also be affected.

Some patent specialists say they think the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, against the advice of the United States solicitor general, to rein in patenting.

"The Supreme Court reached out and grabbed this case," said Edward R. Reines, a patent attorney at Weil, Gotshal & Manges who is not involved in the case. "These circumstances suggest that some members of the court believe there are too many patents in areas where there should be none."

At issue is whether relationships between a substance in the human body and a disease — for example, the familiar association between high cholesterol and a higher risk of heart attacks — can be the basis of a patent, or whether such relationships are unpatentable natural phenomena.

This case, LabCorp v. Metabolite Laboratories, stems from a 1990 patent awarded to scientists at the University of Colorado and Columbia University. They found that a high level in the blood of homocysteine, an amino acid, indicated a deficiency of either vitamin B12 or another B vitamin called folic acid.

Much of the patent describes a specific way to measure homocysteine, and those claims are not at issue. But the 13th claim of the patent is more general: it covers a way of determining vitamin deficiency by first testing blood or urine for homocysteine by any means and then correlating elevated levels with a vitamin deficiency.

The patent is owned by Competitive Technologies, a publicly traded patent management firm in Fairfield, Conn., and licensed to Metabolite Laboratories, a tiny company based at the University of Colorado. LabCorp, one of the biggest clinical testing companies in the nation, with 2005 revenues of $3.3 billion, sublicensed the test from Metabolite.

At first, LabCorp, whose full name is Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, tested for homocysteine using the specific method described in the patent and paid royalties to Metabolite and Competitive Technologies. But in 1998 it switched to a newer and faster test developed by Abbott Laboratories.

Metabolite and Competitive sued, charging LabCorp with violating Claim 13 of the patent. In 2001 a federal jury in Denver ruled against LabCorp, and the company was eventually ordered to pay $7.8 million in damages and attorneys' fees. The appeals court that handles patent cases affirmed the lower court decision in 2004.

In asking the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court decisions, LabCorp is arguing that Claim 13, because it does not specify how testing is to be done, patents nothing more than the natural relationship between homocysteine and vitamin B deficiencies, blocking other inventors from developing better tests.

"The present-day implications of such a holding are limitless — and dangerous," LabCorp wrote in its brief. "Anyone who discovers a new medical correlation could stifle medical treatment through a 'test plus correlate' claim."

But Metabolite and its allies argue that such correlations are the basis of diagnostics and that not allowing patents would stifle development of new tests. There are tests, for instance, that look at mutations in particular genes to predict a high risk of breast cancer or to predict which AIDS drugs will not work.

"Hundreds, if not thousands, of patents would at once be called into question" if the ruling goes against Metabolite, said a brief jointly submitted by Perlegen Sciences, a company developing genetic tests, and Mohr Davidow Ventures, a venture capital firm that backs diagnostics companies.

Another question in the case is whether doctors could infringe the patent merely by looking at a test result for homocysteine and then thinking about vitamin deficiency. Indeed, the lower courts said LabCorp had not directly infringed but rather had induced doctors to infringe by performing the correlation.

Partly with that in mind, the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association and AARP have submitted briefs in support of LabCorp, arguing, in the words of the heart association, that the patent could have "devastating effects on patient health care."

Millions of homocysteine tests are done each year because high levels of the amino acid are associated with an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, birth defects and other diseases; people often take B vitamins to lower homocysteine and reduce the risk. (Clinical trial results announced last week, however, suggested that taking B vitamins did not prevent heart attacks.)

Court precedents have held that laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas cannot be patented. "Einstein could not patent his celebrated law that E = mc2; nor could Newton have patented the law of gravity," the Supreme Court wrote in a 1980 decision. '

But in a 1981 decision in Diamond v. Diehr — the last time the Supreme Court considered the issue — the court upheld a patent on a method of curing rubber that made use of a well-known equation governing chemical reactions. The court said that the equation was only part of a broader invention.

Glenn K. Beaton, an attorney for Metabolite, said that as in that 1981 case, "it's not the correlation itself that is patented here," but rather "the use of that correlation to determine B12 and folate deficiencies."

In recent years, controversial patents have been granted on software and on business methods, such as ways of managing investment portfolios or of allowing people to order merchandise on Amazon.com with one click of a mouse.

Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and the Computer and Communications Industry Association filed briefs urging the court to use the LabCorp case to restrict such business method patents, or at least not expand them. Other companies, including American Express and I.B.M., say the LabCorp case is not relevant to business method patents.

The solicitor general, in urging the court not to hear the case, said there was not enough of a record from the lower courts on the question of patenting natural phenomena. That is because LabCorp did not raise that argument in the lower courts, instead trying to get the claim invalidated on other grounds. If LabCorp wins the case in a way that weakens patents on diagnostic tests, it could be one of the bigger losers. The company, based in Burlington, N.C., is counting on high-priced, patented genetic tests to fuel its growth.

Bradford T. Smith, executive vice president for corporate affairs at LabCorp, disputed that. "We think this case can be decided very narrowly," without undermining other patents, many of which rely on more than just correlations, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/bu...20patent.html?





Amazon Says Technology, Not Ideology, Skewed Results
Laurie J. Flynn

Amazon.com last week modified its search engine after an abortion rights organization complained that search results appeared skewed toward anti-abortion books.

Until a few days ago, a search of Amazon's catalog of books using the word "abortion" turned up pages with the question, "Did you mean adoption?" at the top, followed by a list of books related to abortion.

Amazon removed that question from the search results page after it received a complaint from a member of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, a national organization based in Washington.

"I thought it was offensive," said the Rev. James Lewis, a retired Episcopalian minister in Charleston, W.Va. "It represented an editorial position on their part."

Patty Smith, an Amazon spokeswoman, said there was no intent by the company to offer biased search results. She said the question "Did you mean adoption?" was an automated response based on past customer behavior combined with the site's spelling correction technology.

She said Amazon's software suggested adoption-related sources because "abortion" and "adoption" have similar spellings, and because many past customers who have searched for "abortion" have also searched for "adoption."

Ms. Smith said the "Did you mean adoption?" prompt had been disabled. (It is not known how often searches on the site turn up any kind of "Did you mean..." prompt.)

Customers, however, are still offered "adoption" as a possibility in the Related Searches line at the top of an "abortion" search results page. But the reverse is not true.

Ms. Smith said that was because many customers who searched for abortion also searched for adoption, but customers who searched for "adoption" did not typically search for topics related to abortion.

Still, the Rev. Jeff Briere, a minister with the Unitarian Universalist Church in Chattanooga, Tenn., and a member of the abortion rights coalition, said he was worried about an anti-abortion slant in the books Amazon recommended and in the "pro-life" and "adoption" related topic links.

"The search engine results I am presented with, their suggestions, seem to be pro-life in orientation," Mr. Briere said. He also said he objected to a Yellow Pages advertisement for an anti-abortion organization in his city that appeared next to the search results, apparently linked by his address.

Web software that tracks customers' purchases and searches makes it possible for online stores to recommend items tailored to a specific shopper's interests. Getting those personalized recommendations right can mean significantly higher sales.

But getting it wrong can cause problems, and Amazon is not the first company to find that automated online recommendations carry risks.

In January, Walmart.com issued a public apology and took down its entire cross-selling recommendation system when Web customers who looked at a boxed set of movies that included "Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream" and "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson" were told they might also appreciate a "Planet of the Apes" DVD collection, as well as "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and other irrelevant titles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/te...20amazon.html?





'South Park'-Scientology Battle Rages On
Erin Carlson

"South Park" has declared war on Scientology. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of the animated satire, are digging in against the celebrity-endorsed religion after a controversial episode mocking outspoken Scientologist Tom Cruise was yanked abruptly from the schedule Wednesday — with Internet rumors it was covert warfare by Cruise that led to its departure.

"So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun!" the "South Park" creators said in a statement Friday in Daily Variety. "Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies... You have obsructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail!"

Internet bloggers accused Cruise of threatening to not promote "Mission Impossible 3," a surefire summer blockbuster, if the offending episode ran. Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, as is Paramount, which is putting out "MI:3."

But Cruise's representative, Arnold Robinson, told The Associated Press Friday that the mega-star made no such demands.

"Not true," Robinson said. "I can tell you that he never said that."

A call by The Associated Press to a Paramount representative was not returned Friday.

The episode in question, "Trapped in the Closet," which first aired last November, shows Scientology leaders hailing Stan, one of the show's four devilish fourth graders, as a savior. A cartoon Cruise locks himself in a closet and won't come out. An animated John Travolta, another famous Scientologist, enters the closet to try to get him out.

In another dig at the famously secretive religion, the credits at show's end are filled with names like "John Smith" and "Jane Smith."

The battle began in earnest earlier this week when Isaac Hayes, another celebrity Scientologist and longtime show member — voicing the ladies' man Chef — quit the show, saying he could no longer tolerate its religious "intolerance and bigotry."

Stone and Parker didn't buy that either.

On Monday, Stone told The Associated Press, "This is 100 percent having to do with his faith in Scientology...He has no problem — and he's cashed plenty of checks — with our show making fun of Christians."

A Comedy Central spokesman said Friday that the network pulled the controversial episode to make room for two shows featuring Hayes.

"In light of the events of earlier this week, we wanted to give Chef an appropriate tribute by airing two episodes he is most known for," the spokesman said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060317/.../tv_south_park





Defense: 'Da Vinci' Prosecution in Tatters
Thomas Wagner

A lawyer for the publisher of "The Da Vinci Code" wrapped up the defense's case Friday by telling London's High Court that two authors' claim for copyright infringement was "in tatters."

Setting out closing arguments as the three-week trial nears its end, defense attorney John Baldwin said it was clear that Dan Brown's best-selling thriller had not copied from work by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.

Baldwin said that while many of the incidents in "The Da Vinci Code" had been described before, "no one has put them together, and developed and expressed them, in the way Mr. Brown did. That is why he has a best seller.

"The claimants' case is now in tatters," said Baldwin, who represents publisher Random House.

Baigent and Leigh are suing Random House for copyright infringement, claiming Brown "appropriated the architecture" of their 1982 nonfiction work, "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail."

During three days of testimony that ended Wednesday, Brown acknowledged that he had reworked other writers' material but rejected claims that he copied Baigent and Leigh's work for his sensational and controversial page-turner, first released March 18, 2003. The novel has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and remains high on best seller lists upon its third anniversary of publication.

Both books explore theories — dismissed by theologians — that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, the couple had a child and that the bloodline survives.

Baldwin said it was clear "that Mr. Brown did not copy ('The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail') as alleged by the claimants.

"However, even if Mr. Brown had taken these ideas from (the book), the claimants will still fail. The ideas are of too general a nature to be capable of copyright protection," he said. "The claimants' claim relates to ideas at a high level of generality, which copyright does not protect."

Baldwin's four-hour closing argument indicated how seriously Random House takes the fundamental issue of copyright law regarding basic issues such as plot, themes, historical information and interpretations used in novels.

Before he addressed the court, Baldwin presented it with a 95-page copy of his closing argument, including 127 footnotes.

Judge Peter Smith, who often questioned Baldwin, said that Baigent and Leigh had been original in their examination of several issues, such as Jesus' bloodline, and they believe that Brown used a substantial part of their themes in "The Da Vinci Code."

The issue, Smith said, is whether that amounted to a copyright violation.

If Baigent and Leigh succeed in securing an injunction to bar the use of their material, they could hold up the scheduled May 19 film release of "The Da Vinci Code," starring Tom Hanks. Sony Pictures says it plans to release the film as scheduled.

Brown has acknowledged that he and his wife, Blythe Brown, read "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" while researching "The Da Vinci Code," but said they also used 38 other books and hundreds of documents, and that the British authors' book was not crucial to their work.

Asked about passages from "The Da Vinci Code" that were similar to those in "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," Brown acknowledged "reworking of the passage — that's how you incorporate research into a novel."

But Brown, who traveled from his New Hampshire home for the trial, denied copying. The author, who has made few public appearances over the past year, did not attend Friday's court session.

Random House lawyers argued that many of the ideas in "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" do not feature in Brown's novel, which follows fictional professor Robert Langdon as he investigates the murder of an elderly member of an ancient society that guards dark secrets about the story of Jesus and the quest for the Holy Grail.

The prosecution will present its closing argument Monday, with a verdict possible next week.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060317/...RrBHNlYwM3NjI-





Government Orders Spoof Site Shut
Louisa Hearn

A spoof John Howard website that featured a soul searching "apology" speech for the Iraq war has been shut down under orders from the Australian Government.

Richard Neville, an Australian futurist and social commentator was "mystified" to discover his satirical website johnhowardpm.org had been blocked on Tuesday with no explanation from either his web hosting company, Yahoo or the domain name registrar, Melbourne IT.

He said that after two days of silence, a customer service representative from Melbourne IT today informed him by telephone that the site had "been closed on the advice from the Australian Government".

Mr Neville's satirical "apology" speech ran on a mocked-up version of a spoof website that resembled Mr Howard's own, and after going live on Monday, received 10,500 visits within 24 hours.

Bruce Tonkin, the chief technology officer at Melbourne IT, said the site had been shut down in response to a request from the Prime Minister's office on basis that it looked too similar to its own site.

"If we receive a complaint from an intellectual property basis claiming that a website directly infringes the rights of another site we would check it, and if it is a direct copy we would suspend the site," he said.

He said the issue of whether or not the content was satirical was of no consequence to Melbourne IT. "To us it looks like a phishing site," he said.

Mr Neville contests that there are any similarities between a satirical website and a phishing operation, which would typically carry an intent of data or financial theft.

"I don't see how you can make judgements that ignore the content or intention of the site. To give the satire more impact it was important to make it look like an official speech. Obviously there was no hacking of the original site, and I did not choose to make it too close to the actual design, and my name and address were readily accessible," he said.

He added that one of the reasons he had chosen Yahoo's hosting service was because it did not have any obvious policies that restricted the nature of content that could be published.

"If there were objections to the content on the site, isn't there a democratic tradition that I be informed of it," he said.

Mr Neville describes the parody as an act of satire and culture jamming, and is now running a link to a PDF copy of the speech on his website.

He has been involved in satirical publishing since the 1960's when he edited Oz magazine, which covered contentious issues of the time. However some of the subject matter led to obsenity charges for him and his colleagues, that were later overturned.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/...098638843.html





Hacking Made Easy

Automated Tools Gather Victims' Keystrokes, Upload Passwords to Illicit Database
Brian Krebs

When Graeme Frost received an e-mail notice that an expensive digital camera had been charged to his credit card account, he immediately clicked on the Internet link included in the message that said it would allow him to dispute the charge. As the 29-year-old resident of southwestern England scoured the resulting Web page for the merchant's phone number, the site silently installed a password-stealing program that transmitted all of his personal and financial information.

Frost is just one of thousands of victims whose personal data has been stolen by what security experts are calling one of the more brazen and sophisticated Internet fraud rings ever uncovered. The Web-based software employed by ring members to manage large numbers of illegally commandeered computers is just as easy to use as basic commercial office programs. No knowledge of computer programming or hacking techniques is required to operate the software, which allows the user to infiltrate and steal financial information from thousands of PCs simultaneously.

The quality of the software tools cyber criminals are using to sort through the mountains of information they've stolen is a clear sign that they are seeking more efficient ways to monetize that data, experts say.

"We believe this to be the work of a group, not a single person," said Vincent Weafer, senior director of security response at Cupertino, Calif.-based computer security giant Symantec Corp. "This type of sophistication really shows the ability that [criminals] have to do 'data mining' on where all this stolen information is coming from."

Frost's data, along with information stolen from thousands of other victims, made its way to a Web site hosted by a Russian Internet service provider. The site is currently the home base of a network of sites designed to break into computers through a security hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser. The data thieves use the IE flaw to install programs known as "keyloggers" on computers that visit the specially coded Web pages. The keyloggers then copy the victims' stored passwords and computer keystrokes and upload that information to the database.

The central database feeds the stolen data back to Web sites running the hacking software, where hackers can sort it by any number of variables, such as financial institution or country of origin -- powerful tools for anyone trying to squeeze as much income as possible out of their illegal activities.

To Weafer, the software appears to have been professionally designed for sale or rent to organized criminal groups. His team was tracing the origins of a new password- stealing program in February when it spotted at least three of the hacking Web sites.

The software -- viewed by a reporter on one of the sites, which washingtonpost.com is not naming because it remains active -- displays detailed graphs showing the distribution of victims by country. At time of this publication, the site harboring Frost's information was receiving a stream of illicit data from a network of roughly 3,000 infected PCs mostly located in Spain, Germany and Britain.

The hacking software also features automated tools that allow the fraudsters to make minute adjustments or sweeping changes to their networks of hacked PCs. With the click of a mouse or a drag on a pull-down menu, users can add or delete files on infected computers.

They can even update their spyware installations with new versions tailored to defeat the most recent anti-virus updates. With one click on the Web site's "Add New Exploit" button, users can simultaneously modify all of the keylogger programs already installed on their networks.

Symantec and other security experts also have spotted earlier versions of the software installed on at least two other Web sites, one of which is still active and has harvested password information from nearly 30,000 victims, the bulk of whom reside in the United States and Brazil.

Watching While You Type

Keyloggers are fast becoming among the most prevalent and insidious online threats: More than half of the viruses, worms and other malicious computer code that Symantec now tracks are designed not to harm host machines but to surreptitiously gather data from them. In fact, none of the victims interviewed for this story were aware their computers had been seeded with the invasive programs until contacted by a washingtonpost.com reporter.

These keylogger-control Web sites follow a trend toward automation in other realms of online fraud, such as virus-creation programs, spamming software and pre- packaged toolkits to help fraudsters set up "phishing" sites -- Web pages designed to trick people into giving away their personal and financial data at what looks like a legitimate e-commerce or banking site.

"This type of plug-and-play, click-and-hack software simply represents the commercialization of criminal activity, and in many respects lowers the technical knowledge barrier of entry to this type of crime," Weafer said.

Microsoft released a patch in January to fix the software flaw that hackers used to break into Frost's computer, which involves the way IE processes certain types of digital images. As early as two weeks before the patch's release, online criminals were already hacking into thousands of small-merchant Web sites and embedding code that would silently install keyloggers when users browsed the sites with IE.

Frost blames himself for the theft of his personal information. He said the Web site that launched when he clicked on the link in the fraudulent e-mail belonged to a legitimate online camera store, and that the woman he spoke with at that store even told him that her site had been hacked and that it had probably downloaded "some kind of virus to his computer."

Frost also admits he ignored her warning and put off installing the latest patch, something he said he plans to rectify after re-installing the operating system on his computer. Meanwhile, he's had to arrange new online login credentials for his bank and reset his eBay and Paypal passwords, all of which were found on the hacking Web site.

Still, one detail is gnawing on Frost's mind: The timestamp on the text files containing his password information indicate his data was stolen on Feb. 22, yet neither his bank nor eBay nor PayPal has since reported any suspicious activity on the account. "I'm relieved to know it could have been a lot worse."

Eric Sites, vice president of research and development at Sunbelt Software, an anti-spyware company in Clearwater, Fla., said it is likely that Frost's data had not yet been sold or transferred to other criminal syndicates who specialize in laundering money in Frost's geographic region.

"This sorting process allows the bad guys to zero in on the countries that they have experience with and sell the data to criminals who can make the most of it in that country," Sites said. "We have seen this type of data being sold before, and some of the stolen information will filter all the way down to criminals on the street using a [counterfeit] credit card."

John Bambenek, a security incident handler at the Bethesda, Md.-based SANS Internet Storm Center, which monitors hacking trends, agreed.

"The reason there is often a delay is that a lot of the people who actually install a lot of these keylogger programs are not that sophisticated," Bambenek said. "In most cases, they're teenage hackers who flip the information to more organized criminal groups for some quick cash."

The scourge of keylogger programs is pervasive and growing, Bambenek said. He recently conducted an analysis for SANS estimating that nearly 10 million U.S. households own a computer that is infected with some type of keystroke logging program. Although not every PC user whose keystrokes are being logged has experienced financial losses -- perhaps because hackers are busy sifting their illicit logs for rare kinds of data -- Bambenek estimates that organized-crime groups have access to roughly $24 billion in bank assets from accounts associated with the owners of those infected machines.

Point, Click, Hack

Sunbelt began tracking one of the keylogger control Web sites back in August 2005, when the criminal group behind the site was using an earlier known Internet Explorer flaw to break into Windows PCs and collect data from thousands of victims.

washingtonpost.com is not naming that site because it too is still online. The company that hosts the site, District of Columbia-based HopOne Internet Corp., did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Larry Johnson, special agent in charge of the criminal investigative division at the U.S. Secret Service, said the agency is keeping close tabs on the keylogger sites, which he said offer invaluable intelligence on the workings of online financial fraud groups.

"We know where these guys are and what they're doing, and we could probably take them off of that hosting site, but it just becomes a Whac-a-Mole problem, where we lose them for a while and then may not know what they're doing," Johnson said.

Johnson stopped short of saying whether the Secret Service had opened an investigation into the matter. "We do have a few things going on right now that we feel will disrupt some of these types of operations," Johnson said. "We're not interested in just sitting idly by."

Sunbelt's Sites said the proliferation of keylogger-driven fraud signifies that the hackers and criminals using malware to steal peoples' personal information are seeking a better system to manage the stolen data because they are so successful at stealing it.

"The amount of stolen data has become overwhelming to security researchers who find it while tracking down the bad guys," Sites said.

Keyloggers programs have been around for years, but only recently have security experts begun finding large online troves of keylogged information organized in large back-end databases for remote Web sites.

Last week, Sites discovered another currently active keylogger control Web site registered to an individual in Russia. One of the files on that site was a large text document containing the raw keylogged data from hundreds of computers infected with "Winldra.exe," a popular keylogger program. Winldra is attributed to the owners of Ratsystems.org, a Russian site that sells a variety of malicious software and identity theft services.

Kingsland, Ga., resident Justin Rollins, 28, was among those whose private data was stored on the Russian server. Rollins said he's not sure how the keylogger got onto his Windows XP computer, but he confirmed that the information found in the text file included the user names and passwords he had stored in IE for his eBay, Paypal, credit union and Hotmail accounts. The text file indicates the keylogger began uploading his account information on Valentine's Day.

"I guess it's one of the down sides of the Internet that it makes things more convenient, and then you have people design stuff like this to make things miserable for people," Rollins said.

Some of the more advanced keylogger programs in use today can even take snapshots of the image on the computer screen when the victim visits a Web site that requires a user name and password. Experts say this "screen scraping" functionality originally was built into many keystroke loggers to defeat anti-keylogger security measures -- used mainly in Britain and South America, where the threat is the worst -- that require online customers to log in by using a mouse to click on a keyboard image on their screens rather than type on their actual keyboards.

Vulnerability Can Be Contagious

The following account, pieced together by tracing the trail of keylogged data, illustrates how even companies that follow all of the best precautions on computer security can fall victim to cyber crime when their business partners have been compromised.

One massive trove of keylogged data on a Web site discovered by Sunbelt included screen grabs for several victims, including an employee of Blueox Corp., an Oxford, N.Y., heating, air conditioning and fuel delivery service. Blueox's data was inside a folder titled "United States," which included user names and passwords from at least a hundred other infected computers around the country. Other folders on that site contained password data from victims in more than 60 other nations.

Just after noon ET on March 10, a keylogger was planted on the computer used by the company's controller, according to the time stamp and name at the top of the text file that contained her data.

The keylogger on her computer had recorded and transmitted to the attackers' Web site the user name and password for Blueox's corporate bank account, as well as the credentials that the company uses to purchase fuel supplies online from Gulf Oil. Along with the text file containing the stolen login data were two screen shots that the attackers apparently took at the moment she logged into each account.

That same keylogger Web site held sensitive password data belonging to BPP Management, a company that oversees a string of gas stations in the White Plains, N.Y., area. The attackers had installed a keylogger on the computer used by BPP's controller, compromising the credentials the company uses to access its accounts at a major New York bank.

Earlier this week, both companies discovered how the attackers broke in: The intruders had compromised Gulfoil.com, a site which employees of both Blueox and BPP Management visit regularly as wholesale buyers.

Graham Spinney, director of information technology at Gulf Oil, confirmed that sometime on March 10, hackers broke into the company's Web site and planted code that redirected visitors to another site. The false site informed visitors that they needed to install a security update to continue logging in to their Gulfoil.com accounts.

The "security update" was in fact a keystroke logger. The attackers' site also installed a software tool used to remotely view, add or delete files on victims' computers.

David Martin, who oversees all of Blueox's computer operations, called the keylogger infestation "his worst fears come true" after verifying the company's login information with a reporter.

"You know, you think you've covered all your bases security-wise, and then something like this happens," Martin said. The company is still in the process of checking whether the attackers used the information to steal any money.

"I thought we had our arms around the computer situation," Martin said, "but apparently we don't."

One reason keyloggers are becoming so prevalent and stealthy is that far too many Windows users rely on anti-virus programs to stop attacks while continuing to ignore safe-computing advice, according to Ken Dunham, director of rapid response for Reston, Va.-based iDefense, a security subsidiary of VeriSign.

That advice has changed little since the first computer viruses appeared: Stay up to date on security patches and be extremely wary of clicking on links and attachments that arrive unbidden in instant messages and e-mail.

"The number one thing the majority of the malicious code we're seeing now does is disable or delete anti-virus and other security software," Dunham said. "In a lot of cases, once the user clicks on that attachment, it's already too late."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031600916.html





Calling All Eyes

E. Orange Seeks Volunteers To Tell Of Crime Via Web
Kevin C. Dilworth

The East Orange Police Department is getting ready to greatly enlarge its public safety ranks, with what's being called the Virtual Community Patrol, Police Director Jose Cordero said yesterday.

Soon-to-be-chosen residents will get access to a a Web site that provides panoramic views of their block, allows them to type in general complaints, pinpoint a problem location, immediately send that information to police headquarters, and simultaneously activate hidden police surveillance cameras, Cordero said.

With its potential to include a vast number of crime-fighting community participants, the Virtual Community Patrol may be the first such project of its kind in the nation, Cordero said.

"We plan on giving the community control of a very powerful technology," Cordero said.

The program will be tested in two troubled neighborhoods -- Lenox Avenue, off South Arlington Avenue, and Amherst Street, off Central Avenue -- by the end of this month.

"We want to now give them shared virtual control of their community," Cordero said. "Essentially, when they see something that alarms them, they can go to the Web site, type in information, and hit send.

"We will then get an alert in our community center, and, automatically, video cameras will turn to what they (the neighborhood resident) are looking at, or what they are complaining about," Cordero said. "We'll see what they're seeing. We'll be able to respond quicker."

For example, an individual might see suspicious drug activity around a parked car, get on the Internet, type in a brief description of what's happening, use a cursor to pinpoint the trouble spot on one of six neighborhood still pictures that pop up, then transmit that information to the police command communications center, he said.

The police, after receiving that information, can view a live video feed of the suspicious or criminal activity, and dispatch officers and patrol cars accordingly, detective Andrew DiElmo said.

The Virtual Community Patrol is an outgrowth of the installation of surveillance cameras around the city, as well as an acoustic gunshot sensor system linked to the same camera network.

The other major initiative included the installation of police barricades along a two-block stretch of Lenox Avenue and of Amherst Street, to control who drives through the neighborhoods.

The surveillance cameras and barricades have produced dramatic drops in complaints of trouble from each of those locales, Cordero said.

Before those anti-crime initiatives were launched, the police department had been averaging 79 problem calls per month on Lenox Avenue, and 75 on Amherst Street. After, the complaints dropped to about 11 calls a month in each location, Cordero said.

With plans afoot to remove the barricades by the month's end, the Virtual Community Patrol effort, hopefully, will make the streets just as safe, and continue to help reduce the fear of crime, Cordero said.

Beginning next week, members of the police department's community services unit will hold meetings with both Lenox Avenue and Amherst Street residents to explain how the new initiative works, start soliciting volunteers, then pick program participants, Cordero said.

The cost to the city has been minimal, with only the cost of extra surveillance cameras being borne by East Orange, Cordero said.

The city's contracted video surveillance camera provider -- PackeTalk, a Manhattan company that provides broadband networks for law enforcement organizations -- jumped at the anti-crime initiative, when city police first came up with the idea four or five months ago, and voluntarily helped turn the dream into reality, Cordero said.
http://www.nj.com/search/index.ssf?/...ger?nex&coll=1



Update:
David Pescovitz

Allen Knutson points out how closely the Virtual Community Patrol resembles the notion of Neil Stephenson's Global Neighborhood Watch as envisioned in a 1998 Wired article. Link.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/15..._citizen_.html





Google Avoids Surrendering Search Requests
Michael Liedtke

A federal judge on Friday ordered Google Inc. to give the Bush administration a peek inside its search engine, but rebuffed the government's demand for a list of people's search requests — potentially sensitive information that the company had fought to protect.

In his 21-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James Ware told Google to provide the U.S. Justice Department with the addresses of 50,000 randomly selected Web sites indexed by its search engine by April 3.

The government plans to use the data for a study in another case in Pennsylvania, where the Bush administration is trying to revive a law meant to shield children from online pornography.

Ware, though, decided Google won't have to disclose what people have been looking for on its widely used search engine, handing a significant victory to the company and privacy rights advocates.

"We will always be subject to government subpoenas, but the fact that the judge sent a clear message about privacy is reassuring," Google lawyer Nicole Wong wrote on the company's Web site Friday night. "What his ruling means is that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies."

Attempts to reach a spokesman for the Justice Department late Friday weren't immediately successful.

The government had asked for the contents of 5,000 randomly selected search requests, dramatically scaling back its initial demands after Google's vehement protests gained widespread attention.

When the Justice Department first turned to Ware for help in January, the government wanted an entire week's worth of Google search requests — a list that would encompass queries posed by millions of people.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060318/...NlYwN5bmNhdA--





Are You Liable If Someone Does Something Illegal On Your WiFi?
from the you-shouldn't-be... dept

For years, whenever the press has written one of their fear-mongering stories about open WiFi, they almost always include some tidbit about how if someone uses your network to do something illegal, you can be arrested for it. It's one of the popular open WiFi horror stories -- but is it true? Well, of course, you can be arrested, but it's unlikely that there would be any legal grounds for the arrest.

The latest debate on this issue comes from a tech writer at the Houston Chronicle who is taking Tim Lee to task for an op-ed piece Tim wrote in the New York Times about open WiFi. The Chronicle writer says Tim is missing the real security issue, about how the RIAA can go after you if someone downloads music on your open WiFi. While it is true that they can go after you, there are valid legal defenses for this -- as has been discussed for years. If you are legally sharing your WiFi, then you are a service provider, and under current laws you are not liable for what others do with the service. That's what it says in the Communications Decency Act, and it clearly applies here. In fact, we've even heard stories of people purposely leaving their WiFi open for this very reason -- as it gives them a legal defense should the industry ever come after them.

Of course, it's worth noting two things. First, the entertainment industry likes to pretend this defense doesn't exist, even though it's pretty clear in the law -- and they could convince some judges to ignore it. Second, none of this takes into account whether or not your service provider allows you to share your connection via WiFi -- as most do not. However, that doesn't take away from the defense that you aren't responsible for what others do with your connection. You may be investigated for it -- but the use of your network does not automatically make you guilty, and there's a very reasonable defense against it.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060320/1636238.shtml





Fined For Using Someone Else's WiFi
from the where's-the-loss? dept

While many, many people still feel there's absolutely nothing wrong with piggybacking on someone's open WiFi, the police don't always agree. We've had a few stories in the past about people getting arrested for using someone else's WiFi, or even threatening to arrest people for simply using a cantenna.

The latest such story, sent in by Steve, involves a guy in Illinois who was fined $250 for "theft of services" after a police officer spotted him sitting in a car, using the open WiFi of a non-profit agency in the middle of the night. The police go on about how you could get a year in jail for this. Again, though, it's not clear why this is a crime. If the guy were trespassing, that's one thing. However, if he's sitting on public property, using an open WiFi signal that went beyond the property boundaries... it should have been up to the agency to secure their WiFi. Also, there's no way anyone can claim any real loss in this situation. It was the middle of the night. No one else was using the broadband connection.

The police are quoted warning others to beware that they, too, can get arrested and spend a year in jail if spotted using a laptop in a car. Can't wait until someone using an EVDO or HSDPA cellular data card in their car gets arrested by a police officer who doesn't recognize the difference.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060323/0930256.shtml





Lexar JumpDrive Music
thrall

Lexar makes very popular Thumbdrives. They also have a line of small MP3 players called “JumpDrive Music”.

I got one of these a year ago, It’s a nifty little device and can be used as a music player or a thumbdrive. DRM never crossed my mind because I had no problem just putting MP3’s on it and frankly , it was a lot better than my old DRM enabled players and software.

But recently I just updated it’s firmware and found out something interesting. Lexar’s update not only added some new features but it also updated the DRM technology. It has WMA DRM Technology from none other then Microsoft.

I did some hacking around with the DRM DLL’s and found Lexar implements the DRM into the firmware so it’s always availible. I even have a theory that it is constantly on (even with non DRM’d files). With the recent talk about DRM and battery life I decided to do some reverse engineering.

The first thing I did was of course check out the BIN file. I used a hexeditor and a program I used previously for Bin files. I found out the file had a very small amount of program and a ton of space (nothing but 0000’s). When I removed these the bin file went from 652kb to 52kb. And yes , The bin worked fine!

I then edited the DLL’s for the DRM and took everything out and had a blank file. I did this for all the DRM related files. I then did some reverse engineering on the updater and unblocked the settings tab of the updater (it was blocked previously). I checked some settings but nothing would help me update it with fake files. So I did some editing and was able to run the program from OLLYDBG bypassing the stupid checksum check.

When I updated the device with the empty DLL’s and edited Bin file I turned the device off. The next thing I found out amazed me. The player booted up 10 seconds faster. It not only opened up faster but it plays music files with far less battery usage on non DRM’d files.

The only problem is that WMA files don’t work anymore. But I don’t think that will be an issue.

If anyone is interested I can post a tutorial of how to do this and/or an optimized version of the latest firmware.
http://damagedintransit.com/2006/03/...mpdrive-music/





Hard Disk Drive Organization Announces a New Sector Length Standard

IDEMA, the International Disk Drive, Equipment, and Materials Association, has announced the results of an industry committee assembled to identify a new and longer sector standard for future magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs). This Committee recommended replacing the 30 year-standard of 512 bytes with sectors having ability to store 4096 bytes.

Dr. Ed Grochowski, executive director of IDEMA US, says that adopting a 4K-byte sector length facilitates further increases in data density for hard drives which will increase storage capacity for users while continuing to reduce cost per gigabyte.

"Increasing areal density of newer magnetic hard disk drives requires a more robust error correction code (ECC), and this can be more efficiently applied to 4096 byte sector lengths," explained Dr. Martin Hassner from Hitachi GST and IDEMA Committee member. "Today, hard drives are a major storage product for essentially all computer and consumer applications, and increased capacities are required to meet customer needs for more storage."

The IDEMA Long Data Block Committee was composed of members representing the major hard drive developers, as well as electronics and software companies. The Microsoft Corporation participated in this Committee and plans to include a 4K-byte sector capability in their upcoming operating system named Windows Vista.

The Committee foresees the first hard drive products becoming available later this year or in 2007, and is asking the computer industry to recognize this new standard and prepare for its availability. Backward compatibility with existing 512-byte products, both in hardware and in software, will be defined and accommodated during the phase over period. It is projected that most disk drives will be eventually formatted for 4K-byte sectors.
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=6076





US Government Backs Apple Against French Law

US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez backed angry protests by Apple Computer over a new French law that would throw open Apple's popular online music store to competitors.

Speaking on the CNBC network, Gutierrez said he needed to make further study of the copyright law passed by the French parliament's lower house this week.

"But any time something like this happens, any time that we believe that intellectual property rights are being violated, we need to speak up and in this case, the company is taking the initiative," he said.

"I would compliment that company because we need for companies to also stand up for their intellectual property rights," Gutierrez said.

"If we all do that, have the government work with other governments, have companies defend and protect their own intellectual property, then we'll be able to make more progress on a worldwide basis."

The French legislative chamber on Tuesday passed a bill that would force Apple to make its downloads work on all digital music players and not just on the iconic iPod.

Analysts said Apple would have to choose between sharing the secrets of the exclusive online music technology that has helped make it a market leader -- or, more likely, stop selling music downloads from the iTunes store in France.

Supporters of the French legislation argue it will better protect the rights of musicians and other artists whose work is sold online.

But Apple has condemned the French bill, which has yet to be passed by the upper house, as no more than "state-sponsored piracy".

"If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers," it said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060323...E0BHNlYwN0bWE-





Sign This!





Georgia College Pushes For iPod Ingenuity
Greg Bluestein

The campus of Georgia College & State University boasts traditional college fare - spacious greens, historic architecture and a steady stream of students with the familiar white headphones of iPods dangling from their ears. But here in the antebellum capital of Georgia, students listening to iPods might just as well be studying for calculus class as rocking out to Coldplay - after the school's educators worked to find more strategic uses for the popular digital music and video players.

At least 100 of the rural school's employees are turning iPods into education or research tools - impressive for a college with only about 300 faculty. But it's more than simply making class lectures available - a practice now routine at many colleges and even a few high schools.

History professor Deborah Vess asks students to download 39 films to their video-capable iPods so she doesn't have to spend class time screening the movies. Psychology professor Noland White has found a new-age answer to office hours: a podcast of the week's most asked questions.

And the 5,500-student campus has organized a group of staff and faculty to conjure up other uses for the technology. Called the iDreamers, the team bats around ideas that could turn iPods into portable yearbooks and replace campus brochures with podcasts.

"The more you free up your classroom for discussion, the more efficient you are," said Dorothy Leland, the school's president.

Campuses throughout the nation have transformed the gadgets into education tools, a trend iPod maker Apple Computer Inc. hopes to capitalize on with "iTunes U," a nationwide service that makes lectures and other materials available online. And GCSU isn't the only school that wants the music players to be more than just a tool for catching up on missed lectures.

At North Carolina's Duke University, where incoming freshmen have been handed the devices as welcoming gifts, foreign language students use iPods to immerse themselves in coursework.

Administrators at Pennsylvania's Mansfield University want to use podcasts - broadcast messages that can be downloaded to iPods and other players - to recruit high schoolers to the 3,000-student campus. The school also used a podcast to address student and faculty concerns after a New York man who had contracted anthrax visited campus with a dance troupe.

Yet few campuses have embraced the new technology as doggedly as GCSU, which was rewarded for its iPod ingenuity when it was chosen to host Apple's Digital Campus Leadership Institute in November.

The school has been a leader in "integrating the iPod into the curriculum to enhance teaching and learning in creative ways going all the way back to the original iPod," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of iPod product marketing.

After Leland and Jim Wolfgang, the school's chief information officer, began seeing iPods around campus in 2002, they decided to explore educational applications for the devices. They started by farming out 50 donated iPods to faculty who offered the best proposals.

Soon Wolfgang's office was flooded with applications from educators suggesting new uses. Now some 400 college-owned iPods are floating around campus - some loaned to students in certain classes, others available for checkout at libraries.

The iPods run the technology gamut, from the bulky first-generation devices to the latest video-capable models.

Hank Edmondson, a government professor known around campus as "The Podfather," was among the first to use iPods to supplement his course lectures. Edmondson now makes lectures, language study programs, indigenous music and thumbnail art sketches available for download to the iPods of students in a three-week study-abroad program he leads.

During a recent visit to the Prado in Madrid, he recorded a 20-minute lecture on the museum's artwork. Downloading it in advance will let students spend their time at the museum exploring, not listening to Edmondson talk.

"You want to pack everything in, but you've got a lot of travel time," he said.

Vess said having her history students screen films on their iPods allows her to dedicate class time to discussion and analysis. Ditto for the weekly graduate course on historical methods that she teaches.

"Now I can devote my whole three hours to Socratic dialogue," she said with a grin.

While iPods can be useful tools for reviewing coursework, some critics argue donning a pair of earphones is not the same as actively engaging with material in a classroom.

"Learning is through interaction, discussion, critical questioning and challenging of assumptions," said Donna Qualters, director of the Center for Effective Teaching at Northeastern University in Boston. "Those cannot be duplicated on an iPod - you have to be there to experience that learning."

GCSU officials say the school makes sure its iPod lessons supplement classroom work.

"We don't have any project that repeats what's going on in the classroom," Wolfgang said. "All this is value-added."

He said the school's iPod ingenuity is helping promote GCSU's decade-old effort to remake itself as Georgia's only public liberal arts college. Long a school that attracted a regional crowd of students who often left for other schools after a year, Wolfgang believes the focus on iPods is helping retain more students.

This school year, it started iVillage, a virtual community that encouraged incoming students to start communicating before the start of classes. The first dozen freshmen recruited for the effort were asked to think up innovative uses for the iPods.

The team is creating an iPod-based freshmen survival guide that includes advice on classes, dorms and nightlife in this sleepy community 100 miles south of Atlanta.

Bobby Jones, a freshman from Rome, said he's found life in a "virtual community" surprisingly satisfying.

"(You) think it will never get the same sense of community living together, but we definitely found that sense of belonging," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





How Pop Sounded Before It Popped
Jody Rosen

FOR a couple of months now my iPod has been stuck on Stella Mayhew's "I'm Looking for Something to Eat." It's a lurching little waltz-time pop tune, drawled over brass-band accompaniment. The lyric is hilarious, the lament of a gal on a diet who can't stop eating, and it climaxes with a glutton's soul cry: "I want some radishes and olives, speckled trout and cantaloupe and cauliflower/ Some mutton broth and deviled crabs and clams and Irish stew." I can't get it out of my head — so far, it's my favorite record of 2006.

As it happens, it's also my favorite record of 1909. It is an Edison Phonograph Company wax cylinder, recorded 97 years ago by Mayhew, a vaudeville star who liked to poke fun at her considerable girth. In certain ways, the song is up to date: the satire on dieting is plenty relevant in the early 21st century, and Mayhew's slurred talk- singing is a bracingly modern sound. But the noisy, weather-beaten recording is unmistakably a product of the acoustic era — the period from about 1890 to the mid- 1920's, before the advent of electric recording — when musicians cut records while crammed cheek-by-jowl-by-trombone around phonograph horns in rackety little studios.

Mayhew's record is just one of several thousand cylinders, the first commercially available recordings ever produced, that have recently become available free of charge to anyone with an Internet connection and some spare bandwidth. Last November, the Donald C. Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, introduced the Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project Web site (cylinders.library.ucsb.edu), a collection of more than 6,000 cylinders converted to downloadable MP3's, WAV files and streaming audio. It's an astonishing trove of sounds: opera arias, comic monologues, marching bands, gospel quartets. Above all, there are the pop tunes churned out by Tin Pan Alley at the turn of the century: ragtime ditties, novelty songs, sentimental ballads and a dizzying range of dialect numbers performed by vaudeville's blackface comedians and other "ethnic impersonators."

For decades, these records languished unheard by all but a few intrepid researchers and enthusiasts. Now, thanks to the Santa Barbara Web site and the efforts of a small group of scholars, collectors and independent record labels, acoustic-era popular music is drifting back into earshot, one crackly cylinder and 78 r.p.m. disc at a time. These old records hold pleasant surprises, but they also carry a larger lesson about gaping holes in the story of American pop.

While historians have exhaustively investigated blues, jazz, rock and their offshoots, the mainstream pop music of the early 20th century has received only glancing treatment, the victim of a variety of prejudices entrenched in popular music culture. Listeners accustomed to the crispness of modern studio recording have been put off by the primitive sound of the old records, with their limited frequency response and harsh bursts of noise. Pop-song purists have scorned the music as the height of Tin Pan Alley's factory-produced pap — the gruesome stuff that came before Jerome Kern, Cole Porter et al. swooped in to transform popular music into a legitimate art form. Nearly everybody has been repelled by the content of songs that date from a time when coarse racial caricature was one of America's favorite sources of amusement.

Then there is the anti-pop sentiment that has dominated rock-era historiography, the tendency to trace rock's roots exclusively to folk sources — Delta bluesmen, Appalachian balladeers and other romantically hard-bitten bumpkins — while dismissing as inauthentic anything with a whiff of Broadway about it. But turn-of-the- century pop was roots music in its own right, and the period that gave us the very first star singers and hit records deserves a central place in the historical narrative.

"Acoustic-era music is the historical underdog," said Richard Martin, the co-owner with his wife, Meagan Hennessey, of Archeophone Records, a label that specializes in acoustic-era pop. "These are scratchy records, with 19th-century aesthetics, with racist material all over the place, with artists you've never heard of. This stuff is completely unknown, and it's a treasure trove."

Today, a flurry of activity is reviving those antique musical treasures, and strengthening the challenge they present to critical orthodoxy. Archeophone (archeophone.com), a tiny mom-and-pop label based in St. Joseph, Ill., has released dozens of superb compilations chronicling the careers of the period's top recording artists, including Henry Burr, a prolific warbler of sentimental ballads, and the acoustic era's biggest star, Billy Murray, who wrapped his reedy pipes around virtually every hit of the day, including George M. Cohan's "Yankee Doodle Boy" (1905) and Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911). The label's current top seller is a two-disc feat of audio archaeology, "Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891-1922," released in conjunction with a groundbreaking book by the historian Tim Brooks.

Meanwhile, the Internet is crammed with specialists sharing knowledge and posting audio files of their own collections. By far the biggest online resource is the Santa Barbara site. It took $350,000 and several painstaking years for archivists to digitize the university's vast cylinder collection — the third-largest after the Library of Congress's and Syracuse University's — using a newly invented electric cylinder player that extracts information from the ancient grooves with startling clarity. The response has been overwhelming, with more than 750,000 songs downloaded and streamed in the four months since the site went up.

"I thought the site would be used primarily for scholarly research," said David Seubert, the project's director. "I had no idea that so many people would want to hear the records."

Spend a little time browsing the site and a lost musical world opens to you. The range of music is staggering: whistling soloists, xylophonists playing polkas, John Philip Sousa leading his band through famous marches. Hacks abound — tone-deaf songbirds mauling treacly ballads — but there are also some real virtuosi. There are dozens of catchy records by Harry Lauder, the Scottish music hall star with a lustrous vocal tone and a flair for comedy. There's the banjoist Vess Ossman, whose fleet- fingered renditions of cakewalks and rags reveal that rhythmically dynamic improvisation entered American music years before the rise of jazz. Pop vocalists like Murray don't exactly swing, but there is a briskness and cheer in their singing that is infectious — the sound of American pop shrugging off its Victor Herbert-light opera complex and becoming something definitively Yankee Doodle.

It is a commonplace that sitcoms and stand-up comedy are contemporary extensions of vaudeville, but we have lost sight of pop music's vaudeville roots. The popular theater was the main performance outlet for Tin Pan Alley's tunes, and you can hear that vaudeville lineage on acoustic-era records, in the singers' booming, shout-down- the-rafters vocal styles and in lyrics packed with punch lines. It was a time when pop music and comedy were virtually one and the same, and one of the delights of the period's big hits is the glee and unpretentiousness with which they aim for the funny bone. That emphasis on jokes and novelty has done the music no favors with historians who equate art with gravity.

But the best of these novelties were artful, with indelible melodies and flashes of wit, and many have endured: "Give My Regards to Broadway," "Yes, We Have No Bananas," "Shine On, Harvest Moon," "The Darktown Strutters' Ball," "Carolina in the Morning." Period recordings of these standards can be revelatory. Consider "Take Me Out to the Ball Game": it's one of the most frequently sung songs in the United States, but few people know the verses on Edward Meeker's 1908 record. It turns out "Take Me Out" was a comedy number about shifting gender roles, starring a baseball-crazed young woman.

Katie Casey was base ball mad.

Had the fever and had it bad

Just to root for the home town crew

Ev'ry sou Katie blew.

These lines, belted out by Meeker with an audible twinkle in his eye, carry us back the social tumult of the Progressive era, to an America moving swiftly and anxiously into a post-Victorian phase. Songwriters were obsessed with topicality, charting every fad and invention and bubble in the melting pot, and the recordings from the period are unusually rich artifacts — far more historically evocative, for instance, than the 32-bar variations on the theme "I Love You" that dominated popular song for years afterwards.

Yet most public archives and record companies have been cavalier about conserving these valuable artifacts. (The preservation of silent film reels has been a far bigger priority, although the very earliest records, delicate brown wax cylinders from the 1890's, are far more imperiled.) The most notorious episode occurred in the early 1960's, when RCA dynamited the Camden, N.J., warehouse that held the masters for Victor Records' thousands of acoustic-era 78's. The rubble was bulldozed into the Delaware River and a pier was built atop it: a huge part of our musical heritage, entombed in a watery grave.

And while scholars and critics have lavished attention on early roots music recordings — no rock snob's record collection would be complete without Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" and an Alan Lomax field recording or two — they have almost completely ignored this other recorded legacy. Pop critics are currently in the throes of post-"rockist" revisionism, thinking through their longstanding biases against commercial pop music. Maybe it's time to look at how those same prejudices, projected back into history, have distorted our vision of pop's distant past.

The truth is, beneath their quaint rhythms and lyrics about "spooning" under stretching boughs, acoustic-era songs are thematically quite similar to rock and even hip-hop, awash in sex and dancing and a cheery anti-authoritarianism. (Little wonder that moralists of the day thundered against Tin Pan Alley's "suggestive" songs and the pernicious moral effects of ragtime.) You hear that spirit in the Columbia Quartet's 1911 recording of Irving Berlin's "Everybody's Doing It Now," in the salacious relish with which the singers deliver the lines "Everybody's doing it/ Doing it?/ Doing what?" Berlin's song is nothing less than an anthem of youth rebellion, an ode to kids going nuts doing racy dance moves — precisely the kind of song that, according to conventional wisdom, did not crack the pop mainstream until sometime around 1954.

Of course, the biggest obsession of songwriters during this period was ethnic pastiche, and you won't get too far into the Web site without bumping up against "How Can They Tell That I'm Irish?," "I'm a Yiddish Cowboy" or "Ching-a-Ling's Jazz Bazaar." And then there are the ubiquitous "coon songs" — hundreds upon hundreds of them, filled with racial epithets, chomped watermelon and other grotesqueries. No period in American music has been as bound up with the question of racial representation, and it is embarrassment about minstrelsy more than anything else that that has kept this stuff tucked in the darkest corners of sound archives.

"Some of it was probably better forgotten for a while," Mr. Seubert said. "I think coon songs would have been a pretty hard thing for a folklorist to try to resurrect during the civil rights era."

Now, though, minstrelsy is a hot scholarly topic, and much of the current interest in the acoustic era revolves around blackface and black performers. By far the most talked-about figure is the brilliant vaudeville singer Bert Williams, the first African-American pop star, who specialized in blackface material. (Archeophone has released three volumes of Williams's recordings.) But if we really want to know acoustic-era pop music, we need to look at the white minstrels, ask some hard questions and rein in our instincts to dismiss their acts as racist trash, full stop.

Some of the most compelling voices of the period belong to female "coon shouters" — Mayhew, May Irwin, Sophie Tucker — who eventually washed the burnt cork off their faces and graduated to a thrillingly insouciant singing style. That style owed everything to minstrelsy but was no longer explicitly "black."

Then there are even trickier cases, like that of Al Bernard, a blackface comedian and female impersonator who specialized in fiercely swinging ragtime and minstrel numbers. Are we ready to admit that unequivocally racist songs, delivered by white singers in the thickest possible dialect, might not only be historically significant music, but great music?

Students of pop history will be mulling over such questions for some time to come. In the meantime, there are thousands of new records to be listened to — some of them more than a century old. "Some of this stuff is dreadful, you'd really rather not listen to it," Mr. Martin allowed. "But there's some really enjoyable stuff along the way."

One enjoyable record, which distills the period's pleasing mix of pop hooks, belly laughs and sheer strangeness, is the vaudevillian Eddie Morton's "Don't Take Me Home," a jaunty ragtime novelty about a husband who runs off to war to hide out from his henpecking wife. Morton sings the verses pretty straight, but in the fiendishly catchy chorus — "Don't take me home!/ Pleeeease, don't take me home!" — his voice ripples across the frantic oompah beat, a long sobbing phrase that's halfway between an Irish tenor's flourish and the yelp of a dog whose tail has been stepped on. It's unclear what impact the record made when it was released in 1908. In 2006, it sounds like a hit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/ar...=1&oref=slogin





Weekends With Dad, Courtesy of D.S.L.
Lynette Clemetson

WITH work and the school week behind them, Charles A. Mason III and his daughter, Arielle, who live more than 1,500 miles apart, prepared for their scheduled weekend visit. There was no packing involved, no plane tickets, no car rides or drop-offs. All it took was some instant messaging on their home computers and a little fidgeting in front of their respective Webcams, and father and daughter were chatting, playing checkers and practicing multiplication tables.

"It's funner than talking on the phone, because I can see him," said Arielle, 10, who lives with her mother in Longmont, Colo., but has regular "virtual visits" with her father as part of the custody arrangement her parents worked out after her mother moved eight years ago. "It's just like being in front of him, but with games and computer stuff added."

As for Mr. Mason, who lives in Warrenton, Va., the video chats are a vast improvement over telephone calls, during which his daughter — like many children her age — is often monosyllabic and easily distracted.

"I can barely hold her attention on the phone for five minutes," he said. "When we can play checkers and look at one another, I can keep her talking about school and life for an hour or more."

As divorce has remained a constant, custody arrangements have evolved over the last half-century. Increased awareness of the toll divorce can take on children and fathers' increased involvement as parents, combined with the demands of working parents who often have to move in order to get and keep jobs, have made for increasingly creative and sometimes complex custody agreements.

As the legal system begins to acknowledge the potential benefits of technology in bridging the physical and emotional distance caused by divorce and separation, more families are experimenting with computer-assisted custody sharing.

Although any separating couple can opt for virtual visits in their custody agreement, debate surrounding the issue is unfolding on the state level as advocates push to have the option spelled out in state laws in order to broaden awareness of the practice and enable judges to grant such visits where they see fit.

In January the Wisconsin Legislature passed a measure allowing judges to grant virtual visits in custody agreements. If Gov. James E. Doyle signs the bill, Wisconsin will become the second state officially to allow such visits, following Utah, which entered virtual visits into its state code in 2004.

Efforts to push similar legislation are in various stages in several states, including Virginia, Illinois, Missouri, Florida, California and New York.

But not everyone gives virtual visits a ringing endorsement. In addition to concerns that it may be used to limit in-person visits, some lawyers and noncustodial parents also worry that it may be used to bolster the case for a custodial parent's contested relocation.

In 2001 an appeals court in New Jersey overruled a lower court decision denying a custodial parent's request to move out of state, reasoning that the court did not consider computer-assisted visits as an option for the noncustodial parent who objected to the move.

A Massachusetts court ordered video visits in 2002 in another contested relocation dispute. The father in the case, who argued that video visits were being imposed to replace in-person visits with his children, lost his appeal to stop the move.

"The danger is that it will become a substitute for real time," said David L. Levy, chief executive of the Children's Rights Council, based in Hyattsville, Md., which advocates for children affected by divorce and separation. "Virtual time is not real time. You can't virtually hug your child or walk your child to school. We don't want this to be seen as an excuse to encourage move-aways."

The Utah and Wisconsin regulations specify that virtual visits should be used as a supplement to, not a substitute for, traditional visits. The Wisconsin bill also specifies that virtual visits should not be used to justify a custodial parent's relocation. The laws define "electronic communication" as contact by video conference, e-mail, instant message, telephone or other wired or wireless technology.

"I think that most judges understand that children require physical one-on-one contact with the absent parent," said Cheryl Lynn Hepfer, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

Mr. Mason, who sees Arielle in person over spring and summer breaks and alternating holidays, said virtual chats allow him to maintain a comfortable rapport with his daughter between visits. At one point during a recent call, Arielle repositioned the camera toward her piano keyboard and played him a few songs she had learned.

"I have always wanted to attend my daughter's recitals," said Mr. Mason, 42, a director of information systems for the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts. "And here it was, Sunday afternoon, and I was getting a private recital just for me. It makes me feel closer, like I have some input."

Some parents fear that incorporating a Webcam into their children's computer activities will make them vulnerable to online predators. Those who allow virtual visits say the equipment involved requires the same parental supervision as any other technology in the home.

Vada Dreisbach, Arielle's mother, said she maintains control of the Webcam and the passwords for logging on to the necessary computer programs. She also has the computer set up so that Arielle can receive instant messages from only her father. She logs her daughter on and off before and after each visit.

"It's a very isolated connection," said Ms. Dreisbach, 43, a meteorological systems engineer. "There is a lot of coordination involved, but the more comfortable a person is with the technology, the less scary it is."

Despite the demand for long-distance custody arrangements, those who support virtual visitations say it is an option that is still relatively unknown. Some lawmakers and lawyers said legislation is needed, if only to raise awareness among lawyers.

"Lawyers and judges tend to be behind the technology curve," said Brian M. Hirsch, a family lawyer in Reston, Va., who represented Mr. Mason in his custody case. "We tend to look at something new and immediately think, 'How can this be abused?' And the judges I have asked to do this have had a very negative reaction to it."

Judge James C. Hallock, an associate judge in Kane County, Ill., who supports virtual visit legislation, said many judges need the parameters of such measures spelled out for them. "Some judges my generation and older never even turn on a computer," he said. "That makes it difficult to understand how this could be a good supplement to a relationship."

State Senator Jay O'Brien of Virginia said he introduced virtual visiting legislation this year after witnessing a divorced relative's difficulty with trying to see his children. His bill failed to pass Virginia's Senate Courts of Justice Committee, which decided that since there was nothing expressly barring virtual visits, there was no need to permit it officially.

Senator O'Brien said he plans to work on the language of his bill and reintroduce it. "In my own life I have seen a family member struggle with this, and if his requests weren't specifically permitted by the code, it was not going to be granted in his case," he said. "I think it is necessary to inform courts and attorneys to ask for this where it is appropriate."

John M. Speer, a financial consultant in Palm Valley, Tex., says he could benefit from state involvement. Though technically permitted by the terms of his custody agreement to visit with his three children every other weekend, such visits have become financially prohibitive since he moved from the Chicago area, where his children live, to Texas in 2001.

"Flying all three children here so often, or flying myself there and paying for a hotel, as much as I want to, I just can't do that all that often," Mr. Speer said. "Having another way to see one another and communicate would prevent the distance from growing between us during the months we're apart."

Because his ex-wife, he said, has yet to approve his requests for Web visits, having the option of such visits written into Illinois statute would allow a judge to approve the visits over her objections.

Michael Gough, who successfully lobbied for the Utah provision after his ex-wife and daughter, who was 4 at the time, moved to Wisconsin in 2003 and led the advocacy effort for the Wisconsin legislation, is working with lawyers and noncustodial parents around the country to push for similar legislation in other states.

Mr. Gough, a computer security consultant, runs a Web site called www.internetvisitation.org, which tracks legislation, offers divorce resources and gives user testimonials. He also runs a how-to site called www.videocalltips.com that walks users through the mechanics of video conferencing and rates software and Webcams.

Still, some families have found virtual visits more hassle than they're worth. When Alex Tomaszczuk moved to California in 2004, he bought a Webcam for himself and one for his ex-wife and children, who remained in Virginia. The image on the screen broke up if the kids moved around too much, and coordinating visits around the three children's busy schedules proved difficult.

"In some respects it's just easier to pick up the cellphone when I'm on the freeway and talk to them for 45 minutes," said Mr. Tomaszczuk, 50, a government contracts litigator who still works from Virginia part time and sees his children in person at least twice a month.

Jim Buie and his son Matthew struggled with myriad technical problems when they began experimenting with video visits in 1999. Matthew, then in high school, was living with his mother in North Carolina, and Mr. Buie was living in Maryland. But as the technology improved, Web visits became a cherished link between father and son, and they continue them, even though Matthew is now 22.

Matthew, who directs audio systems for a cruise line, took a break in a cafe in Aruba during a recent Caribbean cruise to check in with his dad via Webcam.

The two chatted about Matthew's forthcoming cruise schedule and joked about the bold Caribbean shirt he was wearing. Mr. Buie remarked that he still had not met his son's new girlfriend and asked him to bring her along for an introduction on their next virtual visit.

"This way of communicating has become something special that we share," said Mr. Buie, 51. "Of course it's not as good as seeing him in person. But at least I can see him. It has kept us close."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/fa...r=1&oref=login





Microsoft Takes on Craigslist in the Battle for Classified Ads
Bob Tedeschi

CRAIGSLIST has taken on many giants. Can it survive a challenge from Microsoft?

The software behemoth late last month started Windows Live Expo (expo.live.com), another node in its growing network of Internet services, and a direct stab at Craiglist's vital organs: free, local classified ads.

In doing so, Microsoft is treading on ground that has swallowed many other companies, and one that Google has also recently begun to explore. But Microsoft is taking a more comprehensive approach than others, using its instant messaging, mapping and blogging services to help people sell items among groups of local friends and acquaintances.

Craigslist has no such weapons in its arsenal, but it is expanding quickly from its San Francisco base into new markets, making it harder for competitors to generate enough classified listings to attract an audience. Whether it is establishing a defensible position quickly enough, though, is an open question.

"It's going to be tough for anyone to compete with Craigslist in the Bay area," said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research. "But I think it's still wide open in many other places."

At first glance, Expo looks like countless other Craigslist pretenders, with a list of categories on the home page, which users can localize by ZIP code or city. Users may also search for specific items. When users post new listings, they are asked to tag their listing by ZIP code, and they may also include their exact address for advertising garage sales or for listing real estate for sale or rent. Then, when prospective customers click on the ad, they can see a satellite image of the home.

More important, perhaps, is the feature that allows Expo users to choose to view only listings from people in their MSN Messenger contact list or personal e-mail groups. MSN Messenger users will see a pulsating star next to the name of anyone on their list who has recently placed a new item for sale on Expo or made a new posting on MSN Spaces, Microsoft's popular blogging service.

With 205 million people signed up as Messenger users, and another 40 million users of MSN Spaces (and 100 million Spaces visitors in the last 16 months), the company already has a strong network of potential classifieds customers, said Garry Wiseman, Microsoft's product unit manager for Windows Live Expo.

"I've seen some sites attempt to create these kinds of services, but they have to build it up, which takes forever," Mr. Wiseman said. "We already had this massive network."

Mr. Wiseman said Microsoft would not charge for classified listings in the short term, but might charge businesses to post job or auto listings, as Craigslist does. He also said Microsoft was exploring a way to distribute the ads in print publications owned by other companies, and share in the revenue.

Ms. Li, the Forrester analyst, said Microsoft was wise to use the array of services within Windows Live to help users sell goods and services more easily. "It's a fantastic idea," she said. "People love eBay so much because it's about community. Expo has the potential to have it, whereas classifieds don't have that soul."

Fans of Craigslist — many of whom bare their most intimate thoughts on the site's discussion boards — would disagree, and perhaps reel at the notion of Microsoft having more soul than their beloved, humble servant of a Web site, with its staff of 19.

Whatever the label, Microsoft may find that the wheels of commerce will roll more even quickly among people who are more closely connected than the like-minded strangers who congregate on Craigslist.

Of course, Microsoft's idea has been tried before, back when Friendster was the future star du jour. Tribe.net, a social networking site, received backing from three major newspaper chains in 2003 on the logic that it might help them win back some of the classified advertising revenue that has migrated online in recent years.

But social networking sites have so far failed to generate nearly as many classified advertising listings as Craigslist, analysts said, partly because users have seen those sites more as places to hook up for romance or friendship than for local commerce — an area Craigslist has increasingly ruled in the last year.

Just as eBay has built a sizable lead against competing services because it has exponentially more merchandise to offer, so too has Craigslist become a go-to site for anyone looking for housing and other products and services in markets like San Francisco and New York. Likewise, sellers now flock to the site in those markets because that's where the buyers are.

According to comScore Networks, an online consultant, 8.5 million people visited a Craigslist Web site in February, up from 3.7 million a year earlier. The closest competitor was the Trader Publishing Company, a Norfolk, Va.-based publisher of classified ad magazines and Web sites largely devoted to certain categories of goods, like boats, automobiles and luxury homes. Tribe, meanwhile, attracted 740,000 users. The stakes are high for the category winner. Forrester predicts that online classifieds will generate $3.1 billion in sales this year — a 17 percent jump from last year — and will reach $4.7 billion by 2010. Newspaper classifieds, by contrast, will reach about $15 billion, up just 5 percent from last year.

Craigslist, which is privately held, does not disclose revenue. Its growth has come from its expansion into new locations — as of last week, it had 205 sites covering cities in every state, as well as cities in 35 foreign nations.

Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, said the company was concentrating more on starting multilingual sites than other features or services.

"We can't match them resource for resource, even if we were so inclined," Mr. Buckmaster said of his competitors. "But we don't try to match them in technology bells and whistles, since that's not the kind of thing our users request."

Craigslist has, Mr. Buckmaster said, sustained its growth rate despite Google's recent introduction of Base, which many people have used to post classified ads (Base's numbers, which Google would not disclose, are still small enough not to register on commonly used Internet statistics), and the introduction in foreign cities of classified sites by eBay's Kijiji unit. (Ebay own a 25 percent stake in Craigslist). "The need for this kind of service is so vast that many companies can address it together," he said. "I don't think it has to be a zero sum game."

Still, Mr. Buckmaster suggests he could be wrong.

"Now at least we'll get to see whether our philosophy and way of running things is as important as we think it is," he said. "Who knows? Maybe incremental technological bells and whistles mean a lot. But the experiment has begun."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/te...y/20ecom.html?





Exploit Unleashed for IE Hole
Ryan Naraine

Microsoft has issued a pre-patch advisory with workarounds for a "highly critical" vulnerability that could put millions of Internet Explorer users at the mercy of malicious hackers.

The advisory confirms the existence of a code execution hole that was discovered and publicly reported by Secunia Research of Copenhagen, Denmark.

"When Internet Explorer displays a Web page that contains certain unexpected method calls to HTML objects, system memory may be corrupted in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code," the software maker said.

Separately, the SANS ISC (Internet Storm Center) warned that a proof-of-concept code has already been unleashed that could be easily modified into a dangerous exploit.

The ISC's threat meter has been raised to "yellow" to sound alarm bells for what is deemed a "significant" new threat./p>

Secunia said in an alert that the vulnerability is due to an error in the processing of the "createTextRange()" method call applied on a radio button control.

"This can be exploited by a malicious Web site to corrupt memory in a way that allows the program flow to be redirected to the heap," Secunia said in the alert, warning that successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code whenever the target visits the rigged Web site.

The vulnerability was confirmed on a fully patched system with IE 6.0 and Microsoft Windows XP SP2. It has also been confirmed in IE 7 Beta 2 Preview, Secunia said.

The MSRC (Microsoft Security Response Center) said in a blog entry that users of the new refresh of the IE7 Beta 2 Preview announced at Mix '06 are not affected.

Lennart Wistrand, a program manager in the MSRC, recommended that IE users turn off Active Scripting to prevent a possible attack.

"Customers who use supported versions of Outlook or Outlook Express aren't at risk from the e-mail vector since script doesn't render in mail [being read in the restricted sites zone]," Wistrand added.

The latest warning comes just 24 hours after the discovery, and public release, of a denial-of-service bug in the dominant Web browser.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1941507,00.asp





Microsoft's Next Browser

Finally, an armored Explorer

Back in the mid-1990s, security experts warned Microsoft that integrating a Web browser deeply into Windows was a mistake. A decade and countless security vulnerabilities later, Microsoft is tacitly conceding the critics had it right. The new version of Internet Explorer to be released as part of the Vista version of Windows this fall -- and separately for Windows XP -- loses much of the privileged relationship with Windows that the Microsoft browser has long enjoyed
http://www.businessweek.com/mediacen...u_03_09_06.htm





60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten
David Richards

Up to 60% of the code in the new consumer version of Microsoft new Vista operating system is set to be rewritten as the Company "scrambles" to fix internal problems a Microsoft insider has confirmed to SHN.

In an effort to meet a dealine of the 2007 CES show in Las Vegas Microsoft has pulled programmers from the highly succesful Xbox team to help resolve many problems associated with entertainment and media centre functionality inside the OS. The team are also working closely with engineers from the Intel Viiv team. and it is now expected that the next version of Viiv could be delayed to line up with the launch of the consumer version of Vista at the 2007 CES Show in Las Vegas.

One of the key components of the consumer version of Vista is the Media Centre code. This will be an optional package in the same way that Microsoft currently sell a Professional and Home version of XP. With Vista there will not be a seperate Media Centre SKU.

Microsoft has also admitted that it has major problems in it's Windows division and has has immediatly initiated a total restructure of the division, a move that comes after a costly delay in rolling out its Vista program.

The company has said that it is restructuring its Platforms & Services Division and 'enhancing' the leadership team. At the heart of the changes is the elevation of Steven Sinofsky to senior vice president of the Windows and Windows Live Group. 'Steven`s leadership, management and technical skills are well documented and evident in the kinds of products he ships and the type of work environment he creates,' said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft`s chief technology officer.

'I`m looking forward to working with Steven and his team in delivering software-based services that extend the value of our offerings by providing a more seamless connection between our desktop products and the Web.' Analysts estimate that Microsoft`s delays in releasing the next generation of its operating system, known as Vista, have cost it about $500 million.
http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Computi...forms/R7G5G6U4





Microsoft Vista: Not 'People Ready'
Daniel Lyons

The new version of Microsoft Windows, called Vista, has slipped again. It was originally going to ship in 2003. Then 2005. Then 2006. Now in early 2007. I'm not surprised, having seen a demo of Microsoft's new programs at an "event" for tech buyers in New York last week.

The new programs are phenomenally complex, with scores of buttons and pull-down menus and myriad connections among various applications. A Microsoft VP zipped through a demo, moving information from Outlook to Powerpoint to Groove to some kind of social networking program that lets you see how your colleagues and your colleagues' colleagues rate various Web sites.

Meanwhile, 500 tech buyers sat there in the dark, their eyes glazing over from the sheer mind-numbing pointlessness of most of this stuff. The audience laughed out loud when the Microsoft guy showed off a kludgey system that lets you fetch Outlook e-mail messages using voice commands from a cell phone.

The system has all the charm of those automated phone systems you encounter when you call customer service: Your call is very important to us. And while it is cool and futuristic to have a computer "read" your e-mail to you, uh, dude--we all have BlackBerrys anyway. In fact, many in the audience weren't even watching the voice-activated e-mail demo--they were checking mail on their BlackBerrys.

Even more ironic is that Microsoft has ginned up a new slogan, "People Ready," which apparently is meant to describe its software, or maybe it describes companies that use its software, or whatever. Who knows? It's one of those phrases that means anything, and so means nothing. Who makes this stuff up? Do they actually pay this person? And is Microsoft just figuring out now that its programs are used by--gasp--people?

Microsoft execs also talked about "Impacting People," then they dragged out fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, who seemed very "impacted" as he sang praise for Microsoft programs. Actually, he was reading meaningless statements from a TelePrompTer. Here is one of his quotes, verbatim: "When you combine people and technology, you have a very powerful combination." Think about that. Just let it sink in for a minute.

And then there were the hacks. The press folks. Corralled down in back. Some were just talking out loud during SteveBallmerSteve Ballmer's keynote speech, not even bothering to keep their voices down. Yeah. It was that kind of show.

Worse yet was the grumbling afterward in the press room. Why the hell did they drag us here? we wondered. We'd been promised big news and some earth-shattering announcements by Microsoft flacks who insisted this was something we shouldn't miss. Instead, we got a demo that was about as compelling as a root canal followed by a 15- minute press conference with Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive who seems incapable of speaking at any level softer than a bellow. Ballmer took a few potshots at IBM, claiming the computer giant doesn't innovate anymore.

No one mentioned the fact that in 1997, Microsoft held a similar event in New York City to declare that IBM's "big iron" was dead, because Windows NT--remember Windows NT?- -was going to "scale up" and replace the mainframe. I wonder if Ballmer ever feels like the guy in Groundhog Day, reliving the same press conference, over and over. I know I do.

Oddly enough, some of the language of the Microsoft event was eerily similar to language about innovation in the new huge advertisements that IBM started running a few days later in newspapers. Did Microsoft somehow get wind of the ads? Who knows. But the event seemed thrown together to blunt the new ad campaign from IBM.

Worst of all, I can't believe Microsoft actually held this big nonevent "event" only a few days before announcing another screw-up in Vista. If Ballmer knew he was about to announce a delay and still had this event, he's crazy. If he didn't know Vista was about to slip again, then Microsoft is in worse shape than anyone realizes.

Microsoft can't afford to screw up like this. There are free alternatives to everything Microsoft sells, like the Linux operating system and the Open Office application suite. Rivals like Novell, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and, yes, IBM are pushing those programs big time.

Given Microsoft's delays I can't believe open-source stuff still hasn't caught on for desktop computers. It's amazing, but people will wait months and months for products that are so complicated that no ordinary person can figure out how to use them.

Why not at least switch to an Apple Computer Mac? Apple's new operating system is stable, reliable and easy to use. The applications are simple, gorgeous and work well together. And they're here. Today. Steve Jobs must be waking up a happy man this morning.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...microsoft.html





Patriot Act Game Pokes Fun At Government
Wayne Parry

In this send-up of "Monopoly," players don't pass "Go" and they don't go directly to jail - they go to Guantanamo Bay.

Instead of losing cash for landing on certain squares, they lose civil liberties. And the "Mr. Monopoly" character at the center of the board is replaced by a scowling former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"Patriot Act: The Home Version" pokes fun at "the historic abuse of governmental powers" by the recently renewed anti-terrorism law.

But while it may be fun, creator Michael Kabbash, a graphic artist and Arab civil rights advocate, is serious about how he feels the law has curtailed Americans' freedom.

The object of the game is not to amass the most money or real estate, but to be the last player to retain civil liberties.

"I've had people complain to me that when they play, nobody wins. They say `We're all in Guantanamo and nobody has any civil liberties left,'" he said. "I'm like `Yeah, that's the point.'"

The real Patriot Act, passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and renewed earlier this month, gave law enforcement new investigative and prosecutorial powers. Critics say it unacceptably impinges on civil liberties, but the government defends the law as a vital tool that has helped prevent another terror attack.

Kabbash decided to keep Ashcroft as the visual focus of the game, even though he stepped down in January 2005, because "he really is the icon that people associate with the Patriot Act."

In a nod to President Bush's prewar comments, the "Go" space in is renamed "Bring It On!" Players roll the dice to determine how many civil liberties they start out with, accumulating them from a variety of categories: U.S. citizens get 5; non-citizens 1. Whites and Asians get 5; Arabs 1. Ultra right-wingers get 6; Democrats 3 or 4.

Instead of landing on, say Oriental Avenue, players land on a color-coded spaces corresponding to the national terror alert. A player who lands on a red space loses one civil liberty, as does anyone else within five spaces. A player who lands on an orange space gets to designate another player to lose one civil liberty.

"Chance" cards are now "Homeland Security Cards," with orders such as, "FBI wants you for questioning; Lose one turn;" and "You provide the local authorities with speculative information on your next door neighbor; Collect one civil liberty from each player."

Kabbash, of Green Brook, created a few full board sets but is also distributing the game free over the Internet, with the game board and playing cards all printable. More than 2,000 copies have been downloaded since it debuted in 2004.

"I wanted it to be not only a parody but a teaching tool," said Kabbash, 38, who teaches graphics at the College of New Jersey. "This is my way of putting my political ideas forward, hoping people will wake up. There's a lot of apathy, and we have to realize that we're in a democracy, that we're all allowed to say something."

Ashcroft had no comment on the game when asked about it Saturday during a crime conference in Miami Gardens, Fla., but he laughed when told "jail" had been replaced with Guantanamo Bay. U.S. Justice Department public affairs did not immediately return a call Saturday seeking comment.

Kabbash says his next project will probably have something to do with the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program. He is reasonably certain "there's a file on me somewhere."

Asked if the FBI keeps a file on Kabbash, a bureau spokesman refused to comment.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...t/14131885.htm





Local news

Strip Club Must Install Cameras
John Pirro

Lights. Camera. No action.

At least that's what city officials are hoping will happen after a judge ordered the owner of the GoGo Joint bar to install a video surveillance system so police can monitor activity inside the Shelter Rock Road strip club.

State and local authorities expect the cameras – and the signs that owner Vincent Mavilia must post advising customers about them – will curb the blatant acts of prostitution that led to the closure of the club last week.

"When people are aware the cameras are on, they are more apt to watch their behavior," said Detective Lt. James Fisher, head of Special Investigations Division of the Danbury Police Department.

Judge Douglas Mintz this week extended the temporary restraining order keeping the GoGo Joint closed through at least Monday. But the bar can't reopen until police inspect the video system and certify it's operational.

Local police and personnel from the Office of the Chief State's Attorney shut down the club, which previously operated under the names Bada Bing Bar and Wiggles, under the state's nuisance abatement law last week.

"This is an not an attempt to close the business, but an attempt to see it is run in a lawful manner," Chief State's Attorney Christopher Morano said. "This location has been the subject of multiple complaints over the past two years."

In the past seven months, undercover police officers and SID detectives have arrested seven GoGo Joint dancers on prostitution charges. Most of the arrests occurred last August, when investigators witnessed multiple incidents of sexual activity taking place around the club's rectangular bar and were approached by dancers who offered to have sex with them for money.

Mintz said installation of the cameras must be supervised by police to ensure the system "yields clear enough images for investigative purposes."

The images will be transmitted to a video recorder located in an area of the club not accessible to the public, and the tapes must be labeled by date and retained for three weeks for possible police inspection.

"That's pretty standard in nuisance abatement cases throughout the state, and has been used in other abatement cases in Danbury," Fisher said.

Mintz also said club employees must undergo criminal records checks and barred the seven women previously arrested for prostitution from working at the GoGo Joint again.

In addition, he ordered Mavilia to reimburse police for the costs of the investigation, up to a maximum of $10,000.

Attempts to contact Mavilia on Wednesday were unsuccessful. No one was at the bar and a phone number listed in his name in Brookfield was no longer in service.

Mayor Mark Boughton said he "was very pleased" with Mintz's ruling, and predicted the restrictions ordered by the judge "would have a huge impact on behavior."

Boughton also said Mavilia has indicated to city officials he wants to sell the business, which the mayor said "would be the best thing."

Court order.

http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....&channel=Local





Anti-War Artists Give Benefit Concert
Paul Burkhardt

Michael Stipe, Susan Sarandon, Cindy Sheehan and others marked the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with a concert to benefit groups campaigning against the war.

Organizers of Monday night's "Bring 'Em Home Now!" concert said 3,000 tickets were sold.

"I was raised by peace activists," Moby announced to the crowd at Hammerstein Ballroom from a stage flanked by two oversized peace symbols. He then accompanied Laura Dawn in a rendition of Buffalo Springfield's Vietnam-era song, "For What It's Worth."

Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, gained international attention last summer with her monthlong protest outside President Bush's Texas ranch.

"It's awesome to me because there are more and more kids getting involved," Sheehan said before the concert.

Sarandon said artists were playing their part in the anti-war effort by attending the concert and through the movies Hollywood is producing.

"Look at `Syriana,' look at `Good Night, and Good Luck,'" Sarandon said of two recent films that deal with issues of war and censorship.

The actress, who said she was in talks to portray Sheehan in a film, said the activist "gave a face to all that was going on."

Profits from the ticket sales will go to anti-war groups including Gold Star Families for Peace, which counts Sheehan among its founding members, and Veterans Against the War.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





By George?

A Guest Blogger, and an Unwritten Law
Tom Zeller Jr.

ONE could almost imagine George Clooney, robed and slippered, taking to the veranda of his Italian lakeside villa and hunkering over a laptop for his maiden voyage into the blogosphere, which appeared in the form of a passionate left-wing call to arms at HuffingtonPost.com last week.

"We can't demand freedom of speech then turn around and say, 'But please don't say bad things about us,' " the Oscar-winning actor wrote, adding his voice to dozens of other luminaries that Arianna Huffington, the columnist, former candidate for governor of California and freelance liberal gadfly, has drawn to her blog fold since starting The Huffington Post nearly a year ago. "You gotta be a grown-up and take your hits," Mr. Clooney concluded. "I am a liberal. Fire away."

But just as the great digital chinwag was taking note of the newcomer ("If Clooney blogs, does that make it sexy?" wondered the wits at Gawker), Mr. Clooney dropped a bomb, asserting that although the sentiments in the post were his, they were cobbled together from past interviews with Larry King of CNN and The Guardian, a British newspaper.

And more important, the blog was not written by him.

So was born Clooneygate, which began the week looking like a minor collision between a celebrity's handlers and a celebrity pundit's ambitions for her Web site, and ended amid knotty questions of journalistic integrity and the nature of blogs.

The basic facts are not in dispute. Ms. Huffington wanted Mr. Clooney — an outspoken critic of the war and American foreign policy — blogging on her site, but the actor, she said, wasn't familiar with the form.

So she culled some published Clooneyisms — essentially answers to questions he'd been asked in previous interviews — fashioned them into an essaylike blog entry, and added a few flourishes of her own, including the punchy "I am a liberal. Fire away" bit.

She then e-mailed it to one of his representatives, Lisa Taback. (The original post has since been removed from HuffingtonPost, but it can still be viewed here: snipurl.com/ClooneyBlog.)

"Lisa, here is a blog put together from different interviews George has given," Ms. Huffington wrote in a Feb. 17 e-mail message, which she shared to help clarify what happened. "Would love to get his approval with any changes he wants and then we'll post it on HuffPost and send to Yahoo."

Ms. Taback responded the same day, saying "I will get it to him and get back to you as soon as I hear anything," and then three days later: "Of course this is fine, Arianna! Thank you."

The scant 360-word blog posting that Ms. Huffington had put together was untouched, and that's how it appeared at The Huffington Post — packaged like every other posting there, topped with a pithy headline ("George Clooney: I Am a Liberal. There, I Said It!"), and accompanied by a picture of the author and a short biography.

The ensuing bluster signified different things for different people.

For Mr. Clooney and his representatives — and for a growing brood of loyal "HuffPo" fans who proved, over the course of the week, to be even more loyal to blog purity — it was a simple matter of honesty. Indeed, as early as Tuesday, Mr. Clooney had issued a statement that cut directly to the heart of the matter.

"These are not my writings — they are answers to questions and there is a huge difference," Mr. Clooney said.

But that difference seemed to be lost, at least at first, on Ms. Huffington, who repeatedly pointed to the clear breakdown in Mr. Clooney's public relations machinery, and then later suggested, in a post on her blog, that in any case, "the medium isn't the message; the message is the message."

And that's where, it seems, Ms. Huffington disconnected from many of her readers, blog purists and media critics — all of whom seemed to know, tacitly or otherwise, that the medium carries a message, too.

At The Huffington Post, the colors, logos, headshots, bios, rubrics and timestamps visually unify all of the blog postings and say "we are of a kind." And it is to Ms. Huffington's credit that the quirks of each individual's posting at the site — Mr. Clooney's name and picture, as well as his syntax, his supposed choice of paragraph breaks and punctuation and his gathering rhetorical pitch — have the same implications as those of any reputable publication.

They say, "Hello, I'm the person responsible for putting these ideas together in this way. I then posted them to this blog. Or I e-mailed them to Arianna. Or I scribbled them onto a cocktail napkin and sent them to her by carrier pigeon. But at some point I crafted this train of thought in this way, and now I'm sharing it with you here."

It's not printed anywhere, of course, but the medium — the blog — carries that message.

It was a point that an increasing number of Ms. Huffington's readers and fellow bloggers — from Elizabeth Snead at The Los Angeles Times to Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine — were looking for her to acknowledge by week's end.

"Say you're sorry, Arianna," Ms. Snead wrote at The Envelope blog (theenvelope.latimes.com). Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine.com and has served as a consultant to The New York Times on Web matters, condemned the puppetry of assembling a blog post for Mr. Clooney.

"If you're not really writing your blog, if you're having or allowing someone else to do it for you," Mr. Jarvis wrote on Friday morning, "then you're gaming me, lying to me, insulting me."

And dozens of Huffington Post readers agitated for an apology. "I think that the whole George Clooney thing was appalling on your part," one commenter wrote. "Regardless of the communication that you had with George's people, you misled your readers."

On Saturday morning, admirably, Ms. Huffington came to agree, admitting in a post titled "Lessons Learned" to a "big mistake" for failing to source the quotes and for writing the post for Mr. Clooney in the first place.

This will not happen again, she wrote, because "it diminishes the amazing work of bloggers who day in and day out put their hearts and souls into writing their blogs."

Ms. Huffington also suggested that, going forward, when she comes across a published interview, or when someone prominent says something to her that she thinks is "really important and should have as wide an audience as possible," she will quote it in her own section of the blog — much as James Boswell documented the comings and goings of Samuel Johnson, she said.

Indeed, she intends to name the form for Boswell: "BozBlogging."

Or, you could just call it journalism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/business/20link.html





TiVo Has Been Cutting Out More Than Just the Commercials Lately
Eric A. Taub

The first episode in the new season of "The Sopranos" ended in a classic cliffhanger moment, with Tony on the floor after being shot by his uncle Junior. But some viewers who recorded the show on their TiVo digital video recorders to watch later might not know how close Tony came to being whacked.

Because of a software glitch in some machines, TiVo customers have been discovering over the last few months that some of the shows they had set to record were cut off before the programs ended.

"I lost the last 15 minutes of 'Lost,' as well as 'C.S.I.,' " said Monica Sharma, a marketing solutions manager in Piscataway, N.J. "Regrettably, the big things happened at the end."

The first notice of the problem came in November, when a few befuddled TiVo users posted complaints on TiVo's Web site. Customers also wrote about the glitch more recently at tivocommunity.com, an independent site for TiVo aficionados. A TiVo employee who monitors the sites posted a response there saying the company was on the case.

One of the main selling features of digital video recorders is their ability to record programs without the viewer having to enter start and stop times. It was unclear why certain shows were cut short on the malfunctioning TiVo's. The company's engineers isolated the problem to Series 2 machines (TiVo units integrated into DirecTV receivers were not affected).

The engineers first suggested a temporary fix that is the high-tech equivalent of hitting the side of a TV: pull the plug on the machine and then power it back up. It seemed that the abrupt cuts happened only on machines that had been in use for a long time and had never been rebooted.

TiVo says it has since created an upgrade to its operating system — which is being downloaded automatically to all Series 2 TiVo boxes — and that it should solve the problem permanently.

Fortunately for TiVo, even people like Loretta Mears, a Manhattan chiropractor who never got to see the final minutes of recent episodes of "Boston Legal" and "Lost," do not seem to hold it against the machine.

"I absolutely love TiVo," Ms. Mears said. "It's made it possible for me to watch black-and-white movies that are on at 3 a.m."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/te...arzRx93TYsP53g





Podcast News: Podcasts Outnumber Radio Station Worldwide
SiliconRepublic.com:

There are now more podcasts than there are radio stations worldwide, matching a prediction made on an Irish blog site last year.

According to the article, there are 36,000 radio stations worldwide. (Book “I Am An Oil Tanker” cited). And we outnumber them!

Think about it for a second… The radio industry has been building radio stations for about 100 years now. They’ve branded their call letters (WKRP in Cincinnati?) in our head for years now!

On the other hand, Podcasting has been around for about 2 years. Actually, It’s just recently taken off over the past 3-6 months. But we’re already kicking radio’s butt!!!

So yeah, the “Pod People” are taking over…
http://www.podcastlikeachamp.com/blog/?p=15





Law Professor Bans Laptops In Class, Over Student Protest
AP

A group of University of Memphis law students are passing a petition against a professor who banned laptop computers from her classroom because she considers them a distraction in lectures.

On March 6, Professor June Entman warned her first-year law students by e-mail to bring pens and paper to take notes in class.

"My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing," Entman said Monday. "The computers interfere with making eye contact. You've got this picket fence between you and the students."

The move didn't sit well with the students, who have begun collecting signatures against the move and tried to file a complaint with the American Bar Association. The complaint, based on an ABA rule for technology at law schools, was dismissed.

"Our major concern is the snowball effect," said law school student Jennifer Bellott. "If you open the door for one professor, you open the door for every other professor to do the same thing."

"If we continue without laptops, I'm out of here. I'm gone; I won't be able to keep up," said student Cory Winsett, who said his hand-written notes are incomplete and less organized.

Law School Dean James Smoot said the decision was up to the professor, but the conflict has caused faculty to consider technology issues as the school prepares to move to a more advanced downtown facility in coming years.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...tm?POE=TECISVA

[JackSpratts]

Bringing Botnets Out of the Shadows

Online Volunteers Monitor Illegal Computer Networks
Brian Krebs

Nicholas Albright's first foray into some of the darkest alleys of the Internet came in November 2004, shortly after his father committed suicide. About a month following his father's death, Albright discovered that online criminals had broken into his dad's personal computer and programmed it to serve as part of a worldwide, distributed network for storing pirated software and movies.

Albright managed to get the network shuttered with a call to the company providing the Internet access the criminals were using to control it. From that day forward, Albright poured all of his free time and pent-up anger over his father's death into assembling "Shadowserver," a group of individuals dedicated to battling large, remote-controlled herds of hacked personal PCs, also known as "botnets."

Now 27, Albright supports his wife and two children as a dispatcher for a health care company just outside of Boulder, Colo. When he is not busy fielding calls, Albright is chatting online with fellow Shadowserver members, trading intelligence on the most active and elusive botnets. Each "bot" is a computer on which the controlling hacker has installed specialized software that allows him to commandeer many of its functions. Hackers use bots to further their online schemes or as collection points for users' personal and financial information.

"I take my [handheld computer] everywhere so I can keep tabs on the botnets when I'm not at home," Albright said in a recent online chat with a washingtonpost.com reporter. "I spend at least 16 hours a day monitoring and updating."

On a Sunday afternoon in late February, Albright was lurking in an online channel that a bot herder uses to control a network of more than 1,400 hacked computers running Microsoft Windows software. The hacker controlling this botnet was seeding infected machines with "keyloggers," programs that can record whatever the victim types into online login screens or other data-entry forms.

Albright had already intercepted and dissected a copy of the computer worm that the attacker uses to seize control of computers -- an operation that yielded the user name and password the hacker uses to run the control channel. By pretending to be just another freshly hacked bot reporting for duty, Albright passively monitors what the hackers are doing with their botnets and collects information that an Internet service provider would need to get the channel shut down.

Albright spied one infected PC reporting data about the online activities of its oblivious owner -- from the detailed information flowing across the wire, it was clear that one of the infected computers belongs to a physician in Michigan.

"The botnet is running a keylogger, and I see patient data," Albright said. The mere fact that the doctor's PC was infected with a keylogger is a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which requires physicians to take specific security precautions to protect the integrity and confidentiality of patient data. "The police need to be notified ASAP to get that machine off the network."

A little more than an hour and a few phone calls later, the doctor's Internet service provider had disconnected the infected PC from its network and alerted the physician. Albright sent an e-mail to the FBI including all the evidence he collected about the attack, but he wasn't terribly sanguine that the feds would do anything with it.

"Anything you submit to law enforcement may help later if an investigation occurs," he said. "Chances are, though, it will just be filed away in a database."

A Spreading Menace

Botnets are the workhorses of most online criminal enterprises today, allowing hackers to ply their trade anonymously -- sending spam, sowing infected PCs with adware
from companies that pay for each installation, or hosting fraudulent e-commerce and banking Web sites.

As the profit motive for creating botnets has grown, so has the number of bot-infected PCs. David Dagon, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech who has spent several years charting the global spread of botnets, estimates that in the 13-month period ending in January, more than 13 million PCs around the world were infected with malicious code that turned them into bots.

Botnets typically consist of Microsoft Windows machines that belong to small-business or home-computer users who failed to secure their PCs against hackers and viruses. Their machines are typically infected when the user opens an infected e-mail attachment. While firewall and anti-virus programs can help block such attacks, online criminals are increasingly developing programs that evade detection or even disable security software.

"What I've seen from my work with Shadowserver has blown me away," said André M. Di Mino, 40, a private technology consultant from Bergen County, N.J. Di Mino teamed up with the group in October after he left a job as a chief information officer at a business-services company.

"I know many users within my former organization who felt that anti-virus and spyware scanning would save them," Di Mino said. "However, now I see how many malicious files tied to major botnets remain undetected" by the most popular anti-virus programs.

Catching Viruses With Honey

When he's not manning the deli counter at a supermarket in Liverpool, England, 20-year-old Shadowserver member Dave Andrews is usually poring over new computer
virus specimens. (Unlike Andrews, the vast majority of the volunteers are located in the United States.) Like most other members, he began fiddling with computers and programming at an early age.

Four months ago, Andrews was on track to become a computer-systems engineer in the British military, but he said he was honorably discharged on account of a recurring physical injury. Most of the Shadowserver crew have backgrounds in computer security, and they are all volunteers who spend most of their free time on the project.

Andrews's virus specimens were collected by an automated software tool designed to catch new pieces of computer code that criminals use to infect PCs and turn them into bots. Shadowserver locates bot networks by deploying a series of "honeynets" -- sensors that mimic computers with known security flaws -- in an effort to lure attackers, allowing the group to capture samples of new bot programs.

Most bots spread by instructing new victims to download the attacker's control program from a specific set of Web sites. By stripping out those links, Shadowserver members can begin to build a map of the attacker's network, information which is then shared with several other botnet hunting groups, security volunteer groups, federal law enforcement, and any affected ISPs or Web site hosts.

Each unique piece of intercepted bot code is run through nearly two dozen anti-virus programs to determine if the code has already been identified by security vendors. Shadowserver submits any new or undetected specimens to the major anti-virus companies. Andrews said he is constantly surprised by the sheer number of bot programs that do not get flagged as malicious by any of the programs.

"Generally, one or two [correct identifications] is considered good, but there are hundreds of bot programs that each anti-virus program doesn't catch on their own," Andrews said.

In Andrews's experience, by far the most common reason criminals create botnets these days -- other than perhaps to sell or rent them to other criminals -- is to install online ad-serving software that earns the attacker a few pennies per install.

"The majority of these [botmasters] are hardcore users who repeat over and over, because it can earn them money by the installation of adware," he said.

A Thankless Job

Even after the Shadowserver crew has convinced an ISP to shut down a botmaster's command-and-control channel, most of the bots will remain infected. Like lost
sheep without a shepherd, the drones will continually try to reconnect to the hacker's control server, unaware that it no longer exists. In some cases, Albright said, a botmaster who has been cut off from his command-and-control center will simply wait a few days or weeks, then re-register the domain and reclaim stranded bots.

"The botnets we've already shut down have a real possibility of popping back up again tomorrow," Albright said.

Such constant attacks and setbacks can take an emotional toll on volunteers who spend countless hours not only hunting down bot herders but in many cases notifying the individuals or institutions whose networks and systems the hackers have commandeered. This is largely a thankless job, because in most cases the victims never even respond.

David Taylor, a senior information security specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, knows all too well what botnet-hunting burnout feels like. Taylor was invited to join Albright and the Shadowserver crew following a story at washingtonpost.com detailing his conversations with a botmaster named "Diabl0." The hacker bragged about making money with his botnet through adware installations. (Diabl0 -- an 18-year-old Moroccan national named Farid Essebar -- was eventually arrested on suspicion of authoring the "Zotob" worm that infected hundreds of companies in a high-profile attack last fall.)

A few months ago, Taylor became obsessed with tracking a rather unusual botnet consisting of computers running Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Working a week straight, Taylor located nearly all of the infected machines and had some success notifying the owners of those systems, but the Taiwanese ISP the hackers used to host their control center repeatedly ignored his requests to shutter the site.

Since that incident, Taylor has distanced himself from bot hunting -- if only, he says, to make time for other interests. These days he spends most of his spare hours doing something far less stressful -- painting.

"Bot hunting can really take over your personal life, because to do this right you really have to stay on top of it -- it can't just be something you do on the weekends," he said. "I guess it takes a special type of person to be able to sustain botnet hunting. ... I don't know anyone who pays people to do this kind of work."

Recent media attention to the Shadowserver project has generated interest among a new crop of volunteers eager to deploy honeynet sensors and contribute to the effort. Albright says he'll take all the help he can get, but he worries that the next few years will bring even more numerous and stealthy botnets.

"Even with all the sensors we have in place now, we're still catching around 20 new unknown [bot programs] per week," he said. "Once we get more sensors that number will probably double."

Albright said that while federal law enforcement has recently made concerted efforts to reach out to groups like Shadowserver in hopes of building a more effective partnership, they don't have the bodies, the technology, or the legal leeway to act directly on the information the groups provide.

"Our data can't be used to gather a warrant," Albright said. "Law enforcement has to view the traffic first hand, and they are limited on what and when they can view."

"It's going to get a lot worse in the next two years. We need a taskforce or law enforcement agency to handle these types of intrusions ... and that needs to be all they do," Albright said. "Sadly, without more law enforcement support this will remain a chase-your-tail type game, because we won't ever really shut these networks down until the bot master goes to jail, and his drones are cleaned."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032100279.html





Pioneering US Computer Game Designer Proclaims Industry "Brain Dead"
AFP

The electronic game industry is dead, veteran computer software designers lamented in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Chris Crawford, whose experience creating electronic games dated back to when he went to work for Atari in 1979, sounded a death knell for the industry during a gripe session at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose.

"Nothing better can be done about the game industry, because it is dead," Crawford groused. "It is a body that has a beating heart, but is essentially brain dead."

Interactive story telling was the future, Crawford said.

"Games are about things, while story telling is about people," the game designer and author told an audience of 500 people during a session titled "Burn baby burn - Game developers rant."

Many in the audience of game designers and enthusiasts challenged Crawford, while others agreed and suggested ways the industry might be resurrected.

"People are things," someone shouted.

Crawford was backed by rants from five other game developers who, in a panel discussion, pointed out why the game industry seemed lifeless.

Seamus Blackley, a game developer with Creative Artist Agency, contended a lack of business sense by game developers was killing creativity because it left them relying on corporate publishers to market their ideas.

"We have great ideas," Blackley said. "What's happening is that we don't make a good business around the ideas. Think about money and consider how the audience is going to purchase independent games."

The game industry should be more like the movie industry where daring independent films such as "Brokeback Mountain" have a chance of being made, Blackley said.

Other panelists blamed a lack of innovation for the dying game industry. Jonathan Blow, an independent game designer, argued that most new games are just old games but with different graphics.

Games also need to capture people emotionally, Blow said.

"We need to make games that people care about so much that they can't not play them," Blow said. "We need to put feelings in games."

The ranting session, a tradition at the annual conference, was intended as a chance for game developers to address problems of the industry.

"No more ranting," chimed Robin Hunicke, who helped design the popular Sims series of games for Electronic Arts. "Lets go out there and do stuff."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060324...NlYwN5bmNhdA--





Starforce Enforces DRM By Instant Reboot (Without Warning)
Seán Byrne

Despite all the problems DRM has been causing lately, it seems like companies involved in copy protection just keep trying to create more dangerous copy protections. Originally, they were more of a nuisance causing compatibility issues, installing wanted software, etc. Next came Sony Rootkits which used cloaking to hide its DRM processes and files, but with the side affect of being able to cloak spyware & viruses, thus causing a serious security risk. More recently, the Settec Alpha-DVD protection has been reported to cause DVD writers to malfunction.

Now, Futuremark* has uncovered a very dangerous anti-piracy system Starforce is now using. This copy protection system installs a driver that runs at the highest level of access on the system, which gives it low level access to the PCs hardware and any drivers and processes. This driver runs regardless of whether the game runs; keeping an eye out for any suspicious activity such as attempting to copy a protected disc. If something suspicious is detected, it forces the PC to make an immediate reboot, regardless of any other applications running and whether or not the user has any unsaved work.

To make matters worse, this copy protection interferes with DPM readings from software that is designed to allow the playback of copied game discs, which means that any game backups that rely on this Data Protection Manager will no longer play with the Starforce protection driver in place. Finally, as the Starforce protection has been found to interfere with certain device drivers, some drivers will run in legacy PIO mode instead of DMA, which not only slows down the PC by hogging CPU resources, but also slows down the data transfer to the affected hardware.

This latest identified threat by Futuremark* is one that relates to a driver being installed on your computer that gains RING0 access (the highest level of access to your computer). The installation requires Administrator level access to install the driver, which runs all of the time regardless of whether or not you're playing a game with Starforce DRM.

With such a high level of processor access (sharing the same levels the operating system enjoys), the Starforce driver can do anything to your computer at any time. This very ability is demonstrated, since the Starforce driver will force a reboot (not a shutdown) when it thinks it has discovered suspicious activity related to copying. The reboot occurs instantly, and any and all unsaved data could be lost.

With the reported side effects of this copy protection system, this is one thing I would not trust on any system. For example, if one wanted to make a copy of a disc and didn’t realise they had a Starforce protected game in their DVD-ROM drive, their PC is rebooted without even being given a chance to save any work! Worse still, this is likely to give some people a major headache trying to figure out why one or more of their device drivers are acting up, certain hardware cause the PC to run sluggish when used and so on. However, for those who get affected or lose several hours of unsaved work due to an unexpected reboot, chances are that they are not going to get any compensation or sympathy from Starforce or the game publishers using the copy protection.

* Update: According to a news post by Futuremark, apparently they have not carried out any research or uncovered anything relating to StarForce, however this discovery was made by users who posted about this on their public discussion boards.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13212





China Forces Online Gamers To Disclose Identities
Xinhua

Chinese gamers will soon be forced to reveal their true identities in a bid to stop young players from spending too much time online, the official Xinhua news agenc reported.

Beginning in June, all Chinese Internet game manufacturers will be required to install technology in their games requiring players to reveal their real names and identification numbers, Xinhua said.

Seven companies participated in a pilot project last year that has helped make more than 100 domestically-produced games inaccessible to players unless they register, Xinhua said.

The companies work with the police to ensure the name and identification number given by players are genuine.

Currently, many players simply register fake IDs.

The new system is aimed at helping parents track how many hours teenagers have played and which games they play, Xinhua said.

Statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center show that China had 111 mln Internet users by the end of 2005, more than 20 mln of whom were online game players.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/fee...fx2611920.html





China Gives Skype Two Year Sentence For Reckless Telco Endangerment
Ryan Block

China's got some businesses to protect -- landline phone businesses, that is -- and it sounds like no Skype VoIP licenses (enabling, for example, SkypeOut calling) are to be issued for another two years over there per government intervention. That's bad, but what's worse is apparently China Telecom's declared the software "illegal" (we assume that claim carries over to other VoIP software, too -- and isn't law) and the government's experimenting with ways to entirely restrict Skype usage as they see fit (which is a little more difficult than flipping a switch on the Great Firewall, being that Skype runs on standard HTTP / HTTPS ports). Sure, VoIP is disruptive, and we all know it'd be best to let the carriers sort it out in the marketplace, but damned if this isn't one of the more visible hands, so to speak, that we've seen in a while.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/21/c...lco-endangerm/





Microsoft Takes Another Shot At Handheld Market
Dean Takahashi

In a bid to capture the huge audience for handheld entertainment gadgets, Microsoft is designing a product that combines games, music and video in one handheld device, according to sources familiar with the project.

The Microsoft product would compete with Sony, Nintendo and Apple Computer products, including the iPod. And Microsoft has some of its most seasoned talent from the division that created its popular Xbox 360 working on it.

Game executive J Allard leads the project, and its director is Greg Gibson, who was the system designer on the Xbox 360 video game console, sources said. Bryan Lee, the finance chief on the Xbox business, is leading the business side of the project.

By anchoring its entertainment device as a handheld game player, Microsoft is starting from its position of strength in the entertainment business that it hopes Apple cannot match, even with its iPod. Game industry publications, circulating rumors of this development, have dubbed it an ``iPod killer,'' but its functions would probably more closely resemble Sony's PlayStation Portable multimedia gaming device, sources say.

The product might not be ready for market for at least a year, and maybe two. While details are sketchy, the pedigree of the people in charge of the business show how strategic it is to Microsoft's future.

``That would certainly be an interesting development in the market,'' said Anita Frazier, a game industry analyst at the NPD Group.

The other competitors have huge leads on Microsoft. But the Xbox veterans have been underdogs for a while. Gibson, 35, is an electrical engineer who joined Microsoft in 1997 to help design computer mice and other hardware. He shifted to the Xbox division in 1999 to help design the innards of the original Xbox. In 2002, he became the system designer in charge of the overall design of the Xbox 360.

Allard, a 36-year-old programmer who became famous for prompting Bill Gates to take the Internet seriously, commanded much of the hardware and software teams who put together the Xbox 360. Lee, a longtime entertainment executive, joined Microsoft as finance chief for the Xbox a few years ago.

The approval of the project spurred the reorganization of the leadership team in the Home and Entertainment Division in December, sources said. In September, Robbie Bach, formerly the chief Xbox officer, was promoted to lead the Entertainment and Devices Group, which combined the Xbox with other mobile and entertainment businesses in one of four major product groups.

Then in December, the jobs of the top Xbox executives were broadened so that they could manage all of the businesses related to the broader Entertainment and Devices Group, which included the Xbox business, mobile devices, MSN, music and home productivity software. Allard, whose group designed the Xbox 360, was named to head ``experience and design'' for the entire group.

Sources said the reason for the reorganization was to bring Allard, Lee, Gibson and all of the relevant businesses into a single group, which is supervised by Bach. The participation of these highly regarded Xbox veterans suggests that Microsoft is very serious about catching up with Sony's PlayStation Portable handheld game player, Apple's iPod music players, and Nintendo's handheld GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS game players.

In the past, all of Microsoft's efforts to compete have fallen short. The company considered making an ``Xboy'' game player a few years ago but shelved the idea. It considered making a handheld at the same time it devised plans for the Xbox 360 in 2002 and 2003, but it again decided to delay its entry.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's efforts in PocketPC handhelds and Portable Media Players have fallen short in competition with the iPod. Last week, Microsoft unveiled Project Origami, a handheld Windows computer. But that device isn't targeted on pure entertainment as Microsoft's new product would be. The existence of these other projects suggests that there is still some infighting within Microsoft about its best approach to portable gadgets.

The handheld project is still in its early stages. Microsoft is still figuring out which strategy to pursue in music technology, according to sources familiar with the matter. The code name for its music service, which would be the equivalent of Apple's iTunes, is ``Alexandria.''

One benefit of waiting longer is that the handheld will probably have sufficient technology in it to run a lot of original Xbox games from a few years ago. Hence, it wouldn't be hard to create a new library of games for the handheld.

Signs of activity have surfaced. Transmeta, a maker of low-power chip technology, said last year that it had assigned 30 engineers to work with Microsoft on a secret project. Transmeta's engineers work on ways to take the power out of computing chips so that they can be used in handheld devices with long battery lives.

In an interview with Business Week in January, Xbox corporate vice president Peter Moore referred to a new product under development and said, ``It can't just be our version of the iPod.'' He said the Xbox brand ``is an opportunity'' if Microsoft decides to enter the mobile entertainment competition.

Moore declined to comment further recently on the rumor about the handheld. But sources familiar with the project confirmed its existence within the Xbox organization.

What remains to be seen is when Microsoft will launch the device. Gibson's group of hardware engineers only became free last fall, when most work on the Xbox 360 was completed.

It could be 2007 or 2008 before the device hits store shelves, sources said. That would give rivals such as Sony, Nintendo and Apple considerable time to consolidate their position and come up with their own new gadgets in the meantime.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...s/14141766.htm





OSx86 Project Offer $1 Bounty For A Vista Boot
Evan Blass

The ink is barely dry on narf/blanka's checks, and already the OSx86 project has launched a new contest for getting Microsoft Vista to dual-boot on an Intel Mac (although it seems copies of that particular OS may be rather scarce for awhile), but this time the prize will be a bit smaller- thousands of dollars smaller, actually. In order to prevent a large reward from "holding us back from sharing what we learn," the project coordinators have decided to forgo the donation pot from the XP contest in favor of a flat $1 bounty. "Plus, it's fun," they add sadistically. Clearly they were also having fun when codifying the rules of the contest, as the very lax restrictions only require that entrants have a computer, be carbon-based life forms, and prove a hatred of Nancy Sinatra for eligibility.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/21/o...-a-vista-boot/





Patents as Thought Control
Nate Anderson

Can basic scientific research be patented? If the answer is no (and it generally is), then can a correlation between two scientific facts be patented? That second question has stirred up a legal battle that will be heard today by the US Supreme Court and could have broad implications for patent policy in this country.

The patent in question is No. 4,940,658, granted in 1990 and now owned by a company called Metabolite. The patent covers a specific test that looks for elevated homocysteine levels in humans—a legitimate and non-controversial invention. But the patent goes on to argue that it covers the correlation between two facts: elevated homocysteine levels and a vitamin B deficiency. Patenting this correlation means that doctors who test for elevated homocysteine levels and find them cannot use this information to infer that their patient needs more B vitamins unless they pay royalties to Metabolite. It's not a patent on basic facts, but it comes close.

Everyone knows that the American patent system needs help and that far too many dubious patents are granted that later cause all sorts of headaches before finally being overturned. Most of our coverage has focused on technology, but science is facing the same complex problems. Where's the line to be drawn between a fact and an invention? Discovering certain facts, after all, can sometimes require incredible ingenuity and new scientific techniques. Michael Crichton points out that this uncertainty has lead to a situation where the human genome (among other things) can now be owned.

"For example, the human genome exists in every one of us, and is therefore our shared heritage and an undoubted fact of nature. Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned. The gene for diabetes is owned, and its owner has something to say about any research you do, and what it will cost you. The entire genome of the hepatitis C virus is owned by a biotech company. Royalty costs now influence the direction of research in basic diseases, and often even the testing for diseases."

Crichton is not a fan of such patents, arguing that "we grant patents at a level of abstraction that is unwise," and he's particularly concerned with the Metabolite claims. The Supreme Court's apparent interest in the case may signal the Court's willingness to step into the debate and clarify the rules on the scope of patents. Correlation patents, in particular, will come under scrutiny.

"If someone observes a correlation between X and Y and then announces he is going to use that correlation in a lab test, is that a patentable process? I think the court is troubled that that sort of correlation would be possible," said attorney Jack Bierig, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Lab Corp. for medical groups including the American Medical Association.

Any decision could have broad ramifications for companies with strong patent portfolios, and some reduction in the scope of patents would seem to be helpful. Yet it's not clear that the Court is the best body to set the rules in this area. On the other hand, if left up to Congress, many meaningful reforms would no doubt be gutted by lobbyists. We'll keep an eye on this one as it develops.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060321-6423.html





Estrada: US Officials Bugged Phone Talks With Ex-FBI Analyst

OUSTED President Joseph Estrada said Tuesday he was notified by an American court that US authorities bugged his telephone conversations with a former FBI analyst who was charged with illegally revealing US government secrets.

Estrada has previously acknowledged receiving American government assessments of Philippine political events from Leandro Aragoncillo, who has been accused of illegally downloading confidential US information and passing them to other people while working as an FBI intelligence analyst.

Estrada told The Associated Press that he received a notice from a New Jersey court, which informed him that some of his telephone conversations with Aragoncillo were wiretapped by US authorities.

The notice indicated that the wiretapping, done in the course of investigating Aragoncillo, was authorized by the New Jersey court, Estrada said.

Estrada said there was no indication that he was being investigated by US authorities.

"The notice said that my telephone calls with Aragoncillo were wiretapped," Estrada told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "The wiretapping was authorized by the court."

Aragoncillo, a 21-year Marine veteran who became an FBI intelligence analyst in 2004, was arrested in the US last year.

He has been charged with conspiring to reveal government secrets, acting as a foreign agent and improperly using FBI computers. Those charges carry a maximum sentence of 25 years.

He has not been charged with espionage, which carries a maximum penalty of capital punishment. (AP)
http://www.asianjournal.com/?c=123&a...25e546f2655507





Judge Agrees: Just Because You Dislike Open Source, Doesn't Make It Illegal
from the in-case-you-were-wondering dept

About a year ago, we noted a bizarre lawsuit by someone claiming that the concept of the GPL (General Public License) was a violation of anti-trust law as it was illegal price fixing that made it impossible to compete. It seemed laughable at the time, and it appears that a judge has agreed, throwing out the case and making the guy pay the legal fees of the Free Software Foundation for its troubles (found via Digg). The judge dismissed the case because the plaintiff completely failed to show specific anti-trust related injury as resulting from the GPL -- which suggests others could still go after the GPL under the same argument if they could present a better case. However, it still seems fairly ridiculous, since the GPL is simply a license choice. In fact, the judge even noted: "the GPL encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access and more innovation." Just because something is given away free, it doesn't automatically make it anti-competitive. In many cases, it's actually much more competitive. It just means that the business model may be different or non-existent.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060321/1256245.shtml





No Copying From First High-Def Players

The first HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc players will ship soon--without any support for consumer copying.
Melissa J. Perenson

Imagine Olympic skaters lined up at the starting line, but the ice ahead of them isn't ready for the race--not a pretty sight. Yet backers of Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD, the two high-definition optical disc formats poised to succeed DVD, are in a similar situation. And consumers are in even worse shape. If they want to enjoy any of the cool, futuristic copying and sharing features that the next-generation formats were expected to support, they still have to wait.

Vendors have been chomping at the bit to release players for prerecorded high-definition content in both formats. But they've been forced to change their product launch plans because of delays in finalizing the content protection specification that both formats will use--and which neither format's proponents control.

Welcome to the world of next-generation DVD. PR wars, misinformation (no, these players won't track what you're watching via an Internet connection), and repeated delays (some in the industry recall when AACS was supposed to be finished by December 2004) have created a messy state of affairs that's only going to get more complicated when products arrive this spring.

AACS: The Interim Solution

After the apparent ease with which the Content Scrambling System copy protection on standard-definition DVD was broken years back, it's not at all surprising that Hollywood and the technology community would want to take their time to work out the details on the Advanced Access Content System and get it right from the get- go.

However, some of those details just weren't ready in time for consumer electronic companies' product release schedules. In fact, Toshiba--which later this month expects its first HD-DVD players to be the first next-generation products on store shelves--was manufacturing the players before the interim AACS spec was reached. (The company expected to add whatever updates were necessary via firmware before the products shipped.)

To accommodate Toshiba and other companies that wanted to start shipping their high-def products, the AACS Licensing Association came up with a somewhat bizarre solution: It released an interim spec that enables Hollywood studios to securely encode and distribute their content and supports playback of that content on players. But the interim version of AACS has limitations, most conspicuously the lack of support for managed copy. "Managed copy" is industry jargon for the technology that lets content providers offer legal free or fee-based ways for you to move content around on a home server, make a physical copy of content for backup purposes, or transfer it to another device such as a portable media player.

"A player that's licensed under the interim agreement will not be able to do managed copy," states Richard Doherty, spokesperson for the AACS Licensing Association. Although Doherty declined to go into detail about the outstanding issues, he did say that they concern how managed copy will be implemented (and what it will, and will not, allow), and not the actual technology. Technologically speaking, the spec is done, which means it is plausible that "a manufacturer can implement managed copy [but not turn it on], and then enable it in any number of ways down the road," says Doherty.

However, copy support won't be forthcoming for the first round of players. Neither Toshiba's $499 HD-A1 nor its $799 HD-XA1 are firmware upgradeable to support managed copy--in spite of the fact that these units have front-mounted USB ports for some undefined future expansion. Ditto for Pioneer's $1800 Elite BDP-HD1 and Samsung's $1000 BD-1000, due out in June and May, respectively.

No Problem With Media

Strangely enough, the interim AACS spec won't cripple first-generation prerecorded HD-DVD or Blu-ray Disc media. Says Doherty: "It is our intent to avoid any kind of legacy problem with discs. There are no issues on the content side. Prepping a disc to offer managed copy is ready to go now."

What will consumers experience when they play a disc that offers managed copy options in a device that doesn't support them? Those options could be grayed out or hidden when the disc is placed into the device.

"One of the challenges in AACS is in coming to an agreement among all of the participating bodies and organizations," admits Doherty. "We expect AACS to carry an obligation for managed copy under the final agreement. But we are still working out the policies for that."

The AACS Licensing Association has a lot of heavy hitters to please: Its founding members are IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, The Walt Disney Company, and Warner Brothers.

The "obligation" Doherty mentions refers to ongoing statements by HD-DVD backers that the format would require managed copy features, implying at least some minimum support for consumer copying. The Blu-ray Disc Association has indicated that its format will support managed copy as well.

In both formats, the basic managed copy policies will be handled by AACS. Blu-ray Disc has two added layers of copy protection--BD Plus and ROM Mark--but neither should directly affect the format's ability to support managed copy, says Blu-ray Disc Association representative Andy Parsons.

Early Buyers Beware

The AACS Licensing Association's logic in releasing the interim license is simple. "We expected the first early players to be basic players," explains Doherty. "And we didn't want to slow down the roll out of those devices."

But since the first players won't support managed copying, the full promise of the AACS security standard won't be available to early adopters who buy one of these devices to complement a high-definition TV.

Perhaps none of this will matter to some prospective buyers of high-def players. If you've never contemplated moving content via USB to a portable device or using your home network to transfer a movie to a server so you can play it on any networked set in your home, the lack of managed content support probably won't affect you.

More to the point, while both of the Toshiba players as well as the Pioneer will have Ethernet ports, the networking in these devices wouldn't allow you to transfer content over a network even if the copy protection technology did. The Toshiba unit's Ethernet is designed for accessing the Internet to download content, while the Pioneer's network support is strictly for streaming content from a home network to the device, not vice-versa.

The Player's the Thing

Maybe the simple ability to play high-def content will be enough--especially if you own a huge display, or plan to. I saw a preview of high-definition content during Toshiba's recent HD-DVD road show stop in Sunnyvale, California, which highlighted the HD-XA1. The content certainly looked impressive--particularly on the $5000 72-inch Toshiba DLP rear-projection set used in the demonstration.

No full-length movies were available, but we saw trailers for Universal's King Kong and Warner's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, among others; the images, not surprisingly, had depth and looked quite vibrant. I was even more impressed by the non-studio-supplied example of high-def MPEG-4-AVC-encoded content: Its image quality was distinctly sharper and more detailed than that of standard-definition content. Tina Tuccillo, vice president of marketing communications for Toshiba, says the company expects to sell 30,000 HD-DVD players in the first three months after they ship. For comparison, note that by the end of 1997 (the year that DVD first appeared) an estimated 200,000 players were sold-- but there wasn't a format war back then.

If you're ready to take the plunge into the coming world of prepackaged high-definition entertainment, you'll be able to do so soon. "By the end of March, we will have both hardware and software on the streets and ready to go," promises HD-DVD promotion group representative Mark Knox.

Just don't count on buying the Star Wars movies, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and all three installments of The Terminator to play on either an HD-DVD or a Blu-ray device. Thanks to the ongoing format war, these blockbusters will not all be available in either of the two formats.
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/arti...RSS,RSS,00.asp





F BluRay

Why you should boycott Blu-ray and HD-DVD

The movie industry loves your money, but when it comes to letting you enjoy it's works of art in the comfort of your home, the love all but disappears. This page details all the things that are wrong with the next generation DVD players, and why you don't want any part of it. If you purchase a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player to watch high definition movies, you are essentially saying that you are perfectly ok with everything on this page, and that's depressing. Therefore, I ask you to vote with your wallet and boycott Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

If you've ever watched HDTV, you know what a treat it is. At 5 times the resolution of normal television, it looks fantastic. I would love to be able to purchase or rent HD movies to watch at home. But I just can't bring myself to do it, for the reasons listed. This is all very unfortunate. They have lost me as a customer. I hope to persuade you as well.

Why the MPAA hates you

· If your HDTV was bought more than a year ago, chances are you won't be able to watch HD movies in HD. This is because your TV probably does not have an HDMI interface, a new type of digital connection that the MPAA is requiring for HD movies to play in full high definition. If you connect your player with component cables (the current analog standard), HD movies will be downsampled to barely-better-than standard DVD quality. Only one movie studio (Sony) has stated they won't enforce this. Otherwise, you are going to have to buy a brand new TV and and a new HDMI cable (not cheap) to ensure all movies play at full resolution.

· On a similar note, you will also have problems playing these movies on your computer with an internal Blu-ray or HD-DVD drive. If you don't upgrade to an HDCP compliant video card and monitor, you're screwed.

· The MPAA and RIAA think that DRM is more important than human life. Wow.

· Mandatory Managed Copy (MMC) theoretically allows things such as making legal backups and streaming content from one part of your house to another, but the studios have the option of charging you money to do that, and you just know that the costs won't be reasonable. All aspects of MMC will also require your player to be connected to the internet. Unfortunately the first batch of HD players won't even support MMC. More details re: MMC can be had in this interview with someone from the HD-DVD camp.

· It's amazing that a thing like MMC even exists, considering that the MPAA and RIAA, among others, would like to restrict your fair use rights even further when it comes to what you can do with the things you buy. Choice quote: "Even if CDs do become damaged, replacements are readily available at affordable prices". In other words, please purchase another copy of content you have already paid for, thank you.

· "Hacking" your player for example to remove the region coding, or playing a pirated disc, may lead your player to self destruct. This only applies to Blu-ray and BD+ (from what I can tell anyways).


· More about internet connections: the MPAA originally wanted that to be a requirement just to play these movies. They have since changed their mind, I guess.

· They also originally thought about having each disc being playable by only one player, meaning after you played a movie in your player, your friend couldn't watch the same disc in his player. They removed this requirement, but that it was even considered is pretty shocking. Sony patented the idea.

Other reasons you don't need HD-DVD or Blu-ray

· The jump from VHS to DVD was dramatic and obvious - superior video quality, digital surround sound, non-degrading storage format, multiple audio tracks, bonus features, etc. The jump from DVD to the next generation does not provide any benefits other than higher resolution, but DVD's still look damn good. Don't fall for the "better sound" hype either. 5.1 channel Dolby or DTS is pretty much the best it's going to get. Do you really want more speakers behind you than in front of you?

· The players and the media are going to be extremely expensive. HD-DVD players will run $500, Blu-ray will be $1,000, and those are minimum prices. Most of the movies will retail for over $30. For computer storage, blank media will also cost around $30 minimum. Obviously these costs will drop over time, but that combined with the format war (see next point) makes it obvious that you should wait.

· Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD will be a format war, leaving both consumers and retailers very frustrated. Do you want to gamble with investing thousands of dollars in a technology that may not be around in a few years? Some studios will only release their movies on one or the other format (Sony Pictures obviously will only do Blu-ray), which means if you want access to all possible movies, you will either have to buy both players or get a dual-format player. Chances are both formats will not be very successful, because of the insane costs and the fact that most people do not own HDTV's. Besides, the future is probably video on demand, not on disc. Even Bill Gates agrees (scroll to the bottom of that page).

· The public is not ready for a new format already. A lot of people have spent a lot of money building their DVD collections, a format that just became mainstream ~5 years ago. Do you really want to go out and replace all of those movies?

http://fuckbluray.com/boycott





Kazaa's Contempt Setback

RECORD companies yesterday won a key battle in their legal fight against music pirates, securing approval from the Federal Court to pursue contempt of court proceedings against the operators of file-sharing technology company Kazaa.

The music companies allege Kazaa's Sydney-based developer and distributor, Sharman Networks, failed to comply with a court order to stop authorising Kazaa users to breach copyright.

Thirty record companies, including major labels Universal, EMI, Sony BMG and Warner had sued Sharman Networks for copyright infringement in the Federal Court last year.

In a landmark judgment last September, Justice Murray Wilcox found Sharman Networks had breached artists' copyright. He ordered Kazaa's operators to stop authorising music copyright infringement, giving them two months to comply.

The music companies launched contempt proceedings last December but Sharman Networks and others named in the proceedings argued that Justice Wilcox's order was ambiguous and could not give rise to a contempt charge.

However, in an expedited decision, the full bench of the Federal Court disagreed. Justice Catherine Branson said the evidence might establish, for example, that Kazaa's operators "jointly decided that neither they, nor any of them, would accord any respect to the orders made by (Justice Wilcox)".

"Rather, both individually and together, they would encourage existing Kazaa users to continue copying the sound recordings ... and recruit new Kazaa users to do the same.

"I cannot see how it could be argued that (the order) had an uncertain application in the context of evidence of that character."

Justices Kevin Lindgren and Ray Finkelstein concurred.

A spokeswoman for Music Industry Piracy Investigations, an arm of the record industry body ARIA, said the labels were "pleased" with the decision and would continue to pursue their contempt case. If successful they will be able to make submissions to the court on punishment of Sharman, which could include fines and jail time.

A spokeswoman for Sharman Networks welcomed the court's "useful" clarification. "We look forward to the opportunity to test the record companies' allegations," she said.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html





Inside Media

Bertelsmann Weighs End to Its Privacy
Mark Landler

Bertelsmann, the global media empire, reported upbeat financial results on Wednesday, propelled by pop-culture sensations like the singer Kelly Clarkson and Dan Brown's thriller "The Da Vinci Code." But the company's most talked-about suspense story continues to be its own.

Senior executives of Bertelsmann, a family-controlled German company, turned away a barrage of questions at a news conference here about how it would respond to a plan by a minority shareholder, Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, to push for an initial public offering, possibly later this year.

"I can only say that we are prepared and we haven't any problem with it at all," said Bertelsmann's chief executive, Gunter Thielen. "Whether we are publicly listed or not, what determines our work on the executive board is that we define the right long-term strategy for Bertelsmann."

Behind the claim of business-as-usual is a flurry of activity, according to current and former executives, as Bertelsmann weighs whether to avoid selling shares by buying back Bruxelles Lambert's stake. To do that, the executives said, Bertelsmann, a company that has always struggled to balance global ambitions with a penchant for privacy, may consider selling one of its six divisions.

The family of Bertelsmann's 84-year-old patriarch, Reinhard Mohn, which controls the company through a 75 percent voting stake, is reluctant to sell shares, these executives said, even though it would retain control.

Bertelsmann took on the Brussels-based Bruxelles Lambert as an outside shareholder in 2001 as part of a complex swap in which it acquired the investment firm's 30 percent holding in the RTL Group, Europe's largest television broadcaster.

The deal transformed Bertelsmann, a 170-year-old company that had concentrated on publishing and book clubs, into a multimedia powerhouse. RTL, which is now 90 percent owned by Bertelsmann, generates more profit than the combined earnings of four other Bertelsmann's units: Random House, BMG music, the Gruner & Jahr magazine group, and book clubs.

But the RTL deal also put a very private empire on an uncomfortable course to the public market. Disagreements over whether Bertelsmann should sell shares to the public contributed to the Mohn family's ouster of Mr. Thielen's predecessor, Thomas Middelhoff, who negotiated the deal with Bruxelles Lambert.

Buying back the shares would be expensive. In a recent research report, Goldman Sachs estimated that Bruxelles Lambert's 25.1 percent stake in Bertelsmann was worth about 3.5 billion euros ($4.26 billion) — a valuation that includes a 15 percent discount because the shares cannot currently be publicly traded.

To raise cash for a buyback, Bertelsmann may have to sell major assets, according to the executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. One possible candidate, they said, would be its stake in BMG music, which is now part of a joint venture with Sony.

In its report, Goldman values Bertelsmann's half-share in Sony BMG, as well as its wholly owned music publishing unit, at 1.6 billion euros ($1.93 billion). That still leaves a substantial shortfall, but these people said that Bertelsmann, with a sturdy balance sheet, could line up additional bank loans.

Bertelsmann recently succeeded in replacing the chief executive of Sony BMG, Andrew Lack, with its own representative, Rolf Schmidt-Holtz. But Sony BMG's revenues plummeted 16.5 percent in 2005, reflecting both the turmoil in the recorded music industry and infighting at Sony BMG.

Mr. Thielen said that Mr. Schmidt-Holtz faced a difficult task knitting together the corporate cultures of Sony and BMG. He said the company also needed to do a better job of discovering new talent.

Mr. Thielen did not say whether Bertelsmann was considering a major divestiture. But he said the company regularly studied its portfolio of assets — it recently retained Boston Consulting Group to conduct one such study — and that it was always open to buying or selling properties.

The hiring of a consultant, Mr. Thielen insisted, is not linked to its minority shareholder's plan. "We wanted to see how our view of the assets related to the outside view of the assets," he said.

As scrutiny intensifies, Bertelsmann's executives are responding with a mix of diplomacy and mild frustration. They can say little until they receive formal notice from Bruxelles Lambert, which they expect on May 23, a day after Bertelsmann's shareholders meet.

Groupe Bruxelles Lambert is a canny investment firm. It is run by the Belgian billionaire Albert Frère, who amassed his fortune through well-timed investments in a variety of European energy and media companies. The firm has left itself plenty of flexibility as to when, or even whether, it will make a move. In a one-paragraph statement last January, it said it would ask for the "possibility that is offered to list Bertelsmann if the market conditions are favorable."

The questions surrounding Bertelsmann's future clouded a generally strong financial performance. The company's operating income rose 13 percent in 2005, to 1.6 billion euros ($1.93 billion), lifted by strong profits at RTL, Gruner & Jahr and Arvato, its huge printing division.

Net profit fell slightly, to 1.04 billion euros ($1.25 billion), largely because Bertelsmann booked some one-time gains, like the sale of its office tower in New York, in the previous year.

Mr. Thielen said Bertelsmann would achieve a 10 percent return on sales, compared with 9 percent last year, by 2007, when he is scheduled to retire as chief executive. The company, he said, will announce his successor in January or February of next year, and the person will probably come from its executive board.

Bertelsmann says it has taken steps to prepare itself to sell shares, which would rank among the largest stock sales in German history. Virtually every major investment bank is angling for a role in a possible future company offering.

But in other ways, Bertelsmann still seems culturally unsuited to the demands of being a public company. It does not disclose the compensation of its top executives, for example, listing only an aggregate number of 39.6 million euros ($47.9 million) for its seven-member executive board.

When asked whether Bertelsmann would reconsider this policy if it went public, as some German companies have done, Mr. Thielen suggested that was unlikely. The Mohn family could still legally limit the disclosure of individual salaries. Besides, he added, "Our shareholders know how much we make."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/bu...s/23place.html





Arts, Briefly

Compiled by Ben Sisario

Chef Returns to 'South Park,' With a Difference

"South Park" lost its Chef last week when Isaac Hayes, who voiced for the character for nine years, quit, saying he could no longer stomach the show's treatment of religion. But the creators of "South Park," Matt Stone and Trey Parker, have acted fast: tomorrow's episode, the first of the 10th season, will feature "the triumphant homecoming of school chef, Jerome McElroy," Comedy Central announced. (Yes, that is Chef's name, as diligent fans know.) Stan, Kenny, Kyle and Cartman are happy to have him back, but "they notice that something about Chef seems different," according to the statement. The episode, titled "The Return of Chef!," will be on at 10 p.m. Eastern time. A spokesman for Comedy Central said there was no word on who would do Chef's voice.

British Police Investigate Pictures of Nude Shoot

British detectives have begun to investigate reports that members of the police have been selling close-up pictures of naked people who took part in a huge group photograph taken last year by an American artist, Reuters reported. About 1,700 volunteers stripped last July in Newcastle, in northeastern England, for Spencer Tunick, who has staged mass nude shoots since 1992, in New York, London, Jerusalem, Vienna and elsewhere. (On Sunday, he gathered more than 1,500 naked Venezuelans in front of a statue of Simón Bolívar in Caracas, The Associated Press reported.) The police said pictures taken of the shoot by closed circuit television cameras were now being offered for sale in the area. "We've spoken to a number of officers and police staff and as a result two (civilian) members of police staff have been suspended," Deputy Chief Constable David Warcup of the Northumbria Police said in a statement.

Justices Reject Photographer's Appeal

The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal yesterday from a New York photographer who said that a federal decency law violated her First Amendment rights to post explicit pictures of sadomasochism and bondage on the Web, The Associated Press reported. The justices affirmed a decision by a special three-judge federal panel upholding the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which made it a crime to post obscene materials on the Internet. The appeal was brought by Barbara Nitke, whose work is featured in the book "Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism," and by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom.

Judge Freezes Notorious B.I.G. Album
Jeff Leeds

A federal judge has ordered a halt of sales of the debut album of the rap star Notorious B.I.G., who died in 1997. A jury determined that the title song of the album, "Ready to Die" (1994), included an unauthorized snippet of an Ohio Players tune. The move by Judge Todd J. Campbell of United States District Court in Nashville would freeze sales of one of rap's seminal albums — it has sold about 3.3 million copies since its release — though it was not clear when the ban would take effect. The decision came as a jury on Friday awarded $4.2 million in damages to the two companies that control the Ohio Players' recordings, Bridgeport Music and Westbound Records. The jury found that the Notorious B.I.G.'s label, Bad Boy Entertainment, improperly used a portion of the song "Singing in the Morning." Bridgeport and Westbound, which also control the music of the pioneering funk group Funkadelic, have filed hundreds of lawsuits to collect royalties over unauthorized samples. Bridgeport's effort began five years ago, after it won a dispute with the former Funkadelic leader, George Clinton, over copyright of the group's songs. In a separate case last year, Mr. Clinton won ownership of the master recordings of four of the group's albums from the 1970's and 80's.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/arts/21arts.html





Industry Uneasy With YouTube Craze
Richard Gray

Bootleg footage from concerts by top artists such as the Rolling Stones, U2 and Franz Ferdinand are available by the thousands along with recordings of pop videos and band interviews. A simple keyword search can unearth a wealth of classic clips featuring Kate Bush, Jimi Hendrix, The Smiths and Take That.

It is the latest entertainment craze to sweep the Internet. Thousands of amateur video clips, rare footage of music concerts and homemade film spoofs are now being uploaded every day to the video-sharing Web site YouTube for the enjoyment of millions of Web users around the world.

Allowing the public to watch and share clips for free, it has become an unprecedented platform for amateur filmmakers to show off their home movies.

However, music labels, film studios and television bosses are now cracking down on the site, and others like it, amid fears they are becoming a virtual breeding ground for pirated material.

Bootleg Footage

They claim video sharing is being used to dodge regulations designed to stop music and films being distributed over the Internet after sites such as Napster were forced to charge for downloads by the courts.

Bootleg footage from concerts by top artists such as the Rolling Stones, U2 and Franz Ferdinand are available by the thousands along with recordings of pop videos and band interviews. A simple keyword search can unearth a wealth of classic clips featuring Kate Bush, Jimi Hendrix, The Smiths and Take That.

More than 20,000 new video clips are sent in to YouTube every day and it attracts 15 million plays every 24 hours. Some films have attained cult status, spreading around the Internet faster than computer viruses. Long-forgotten footage has re-emerged as hugely popular entertainment after being posted by users.

The British Phonographic Industry insists all these videos breach copyright law and says they will "rigorously" seek to have them removed from Web sites with the threat of legal action against service providers who refuse.

A spokesperson said: "Our policy is to prosecute in cases of file-sharing of music and that would be the case where bootleg videos of concerts were also being illegally distributed. Record companies own the copyright of any filming done at concerts, and it is illegal to post such footage on the Internet.

"Tackling the illegal distribution of music as audio and video on the Internet is a priority at present and we will rigorously try to have the material removed."

Sharing War

The war against Internet sharing has gathered pace as broadband capacity has made it easier to share and download entire films and albums in minutes.

One YouTube favorite is a Rice Krispies advertisement from 1964 featuring an embarrassing jingle written and performed by the Rolling Stones. At the time, the band asked not to be identified as being involved when the ad was aired, but video-sharing has allowed Web users around the world to enjoy the fading footage for themselves.

Hollywood studios are concerned that clips from movies such as the "Harry Potter" films, "Memoirs of a Geisha" and the latest "Scary Movie" installment are all available along with segments from popular TV shows.

Earlier this month, NBC Universal forced YouTube to remove hundreds of clips from the site of a sketch from its "Saturday Night Live" show, and CBS News did the same in relation to a clip that had become popular.

A spokesperson from the Federation Against Copyright Theft said: "We monitor piracy online as well as physical materials, and it is a growing problem as technology advances."

The music industry has been leading the fight against illegal sharing since it took Napster, who produced one of the first file-sharing programs, to court two years ago and forced it to charge for legal downloads, but experts claim the music and film industry may struggle to have other more "creative" films removed.

Fighting Piracy

Filmmakers have dubbed songs over personal footage to create their own music videos while others have spliced sections of different films together to create new plots.

In one example, called "Brokeback to the Future," a pair of college students from Boston have combined scenes from Hollywood hit "Brokeback Mountain" with 1980s favorite "Back to the Future" starring Michael J. Fox.

The parody has attracted worldwide attention and spawned a series of copycat spoofs from films as diverse as "Top Gun" and "The Shawshank Redemption."

Dr. Richard Haynes, from Stirling University's Media Research Institute, said he believes file- sharing will see an increase in this kind of "video jockeying." He added: "These Web sites are designed to provide a platform for people to show off what they are recording, but they are open to abuse.

"The floodgates are open, as it is very problematic for the industry to stop this from happening - - particularly if the clips are being used by people creatively.

"If they have been spliced, dubbed and remixed, then it becomes extremely difficult in terms of ownership. The music industry is already rife with this, as lyrics are often used by other musicians and samples are used by hip-hop artists and DJs."
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/...be-Craze.xhtml





Message Delivered

There's no mistaking the political statement in V for Vendetta, in which the hero is also a terrorist.
Steve Persall

V for Vendetta is the boldest political statement against the Bush administration since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Even Michael Moore wouldn't prescribe bombing government facilities as a cure for dubious leadership. A futuristic setting in England doesn't disguise the film's rabid intent.

James McTeigue's movie will be branded as irresponsible, even dangerous, by some viewers, although if the past in any indication, the ones who don't see it will yowl loudest. All those knee-jerk critics need to know is that the film's hero is a terrorist.

V for Vendetta audaciously proposes that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and the difference between good and evil is mostly semantic.

The film is based on a graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd; the book was released in 1989 to protest the political atmosphere of the Margaret Thatcher years.

The plot has been reworked to post-9/11 sensibilities by Andy and Larry Wachowski, who wrote their first draft before The Matrix made them famous. Alan Moore has distanced himself from the production; an adapted dud such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen can make an author skittish.

Or perhaps he guessed a firestorm lay ahead and didn't want to answer for other authors' ideas. The Wachowski brothers are notoriously reclusive, making this a cut-and-run protest of sorts. V for Vendetta will reignite those claims of disconnect between the film industry and the real world that George Clooney eloquently doused at the recent Academy Awards.

The movie begins with a flashback to 1605 when Guy Fawkes unsuccessfully conspired to blow up Parliament, and was captured and executed. "Remember, remember, the fifth of November,'' the poem begins. But people have forgotten by 2019 when a mysterious figure wearing a cape and eerie Fawkes mask plots an explosive reminder.

Hugo Weaving "Agent Smith'' in the Matrix trilogy wears the mask throughout the film, yet his elocution of the Wachowskis' rich, rebellious dialogue creates a fuller character than expected.

He calls himself V, explained with delirious alliteration to Evey (Natalie Portman), whom he rescues from a trio of lecherous government goons. V takes Evey to a rooftop to witness his masterpiece, blowing up the Old Bailey courthouse on Nov. 5, 2019, to protest a totalitarian regime. She becomes his accomplice, both pursued by grim inspector Finch (Stephen Rea). V vows to complete Fawkes' mission and blow up Parliament on Nov. 5, 2020.

The screenplay stacks the cards in V's favor, with vaguely familiar polemics about strength, unity and faith in God spouted by blustery Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt) and a TV commentator ranting like Bill O'Reilly. Color-coded curfews keep dissent down; the media is a spin-control tool; and a Ministry of Objectionable Materials hides books, works of art, even a jukebox from citizens. Possessing a copy of the Koran is reason for execution, lumping Muslims into the same undesirable group with homosexuals and anyone who disagrees.

"The security of this nation depends upon complete and total compliance,'' Sutler says, and we're urged to hiss.

Such words speak much louder than violent actions in V for Vendetta. This is a film about ideas, not entirely popular ones, that could topple a government faster than bombs if enough people took them to heart. The finale of McTeigue's movie, when V's vendetta spreads to the masses, is so revolutionary that I wondered how this movie ever got made, much less distributed by a major studio (in this case, Warner Bros.).

Does it endorse terrorism? Not as much as it decries politicians using fear to rule. More semantics. The future, the film loudly declares, is now.
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/03/16/We...elivered.shtml

[JackSpratts]

Going Cheap

TVs and DVD players cost 45% less, in real terms, than they did a decade ago; in the same period, the price of computers has fallen by 93%. High street prices have never been so low, but what kind of consumers do we become when we can buy a handbag for £3 - and then chuck it away? Andy Beckett on how the bargain boom changed the way Britain shops

It is a brilliant blue winter morning in Oxford. In the city centre, surrounded by golden stone walls and college battlements, the 125th and newest branch of Primark is open for its second day of business. A neat, middle-aged woman comes out of the shop with three full carrier bags. What has she bought? The woman gives a satisfied look. "All sorts. Baby clothes for my grandson ..." She pauses. "Well, handbags mainly, actually." She opens one of her carriers and offers a glimpse of a woven handbag in a pleasing pastel. How many bags has she bought? Her expression sharpens to something between guilt and mischief: "Nine." How much were they? "£3 each." But what is she going to do with nine handbags? Is she going to sell them? "No." She pauses again, as if the answer is quite obvious. "You never know when a bag is going to come in handy when they're £3 a time."

In Britain in recent years, as in other rich countries, many consumer goods have become deliciously, dizzyingly cheap. Since 1995, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the price of women's clothing has fallen by 34%, the price of a vacuum cleaner by 45%, of home audio-visual equipment by 73%, and of personal computers - adjusting the price index to take account of their improved capabilities - by a scarcely believeable 93%. Economists have struggled to find historical precedents for such plunging prices at a time of high consumer demand. "There is a strange conjucture: deflation and boom," wrote the veteran commentator Hamish McRae in the Independent on Sunday in 2004. "There has not been anything quite like this since the 1930s or ... the period 1870-1913," eras when prices fell despite growing consumer appetites.

And in those days there was no Primark or easyJet, no Zara or Ikea, no Book People, Matalan or TK Maxx; no supermarkets or factory outlets; no ubiquitous three-for-two offers; no instant price comparisons via the internet; no weekly women's magazines urging weekly wardrobe revisions; no just- in-time production, and overnight global distribution, and myriad factories humming in China.

"We're in uncharted waters," says Richard Hyman, managing director of the retail analysts Verdict Research. "This deflation is not cyclical. Our forecasts do not anticipate any major increase in retail price inflation ever again."

Hyman, like most adults in most wealthy societies, grew up in the late 20th century decades when inflation was a prominent, recurring anxiety. The public and politicians, and the media, often took rising prices to mean that things, in a cosmic or a very concrete sense, were getting worse. The implications of modern deflation may be equally large. Yet while the production of cheap modern consumer goods, and in particular its social and environmental costs, has justifiably received a lot of attention, the consumption of these products has been examined less. How is the era of the £3 handbag affecting our attitudes to possessions? Are we happier or less content with what we have? Are cheap goods liberating or imprisoning? And what - once we've bought them, and especially once we've finished with them - do we do with them all?

How we shop is the first stage in how we consume, and even a few minutes in the Oxford Primark tells you that shopping has changed. The sound is the first thing: a thick hum of conversation, almost at party volume, anticipation mingling with delight mingling with satisfaction; and the constant plastic clatter of clothes rails and hangers being rapidly rifled. Department stores during the sales sound like this, but not nearly as loud, and the Oxford Primark has opened in February with national consumer activity, according to the official figures, in an even deeper seasonal trough than usual. Yet the shop's plain interior is as busy as Harrods, with people in tracksuits and people in tweed, teenagers, pensioners, mothers and men with fashionable bags. And the Primark shopping baskets they carry are half the size of a beer barrel. In the old days, customers in clothes shops bought things in ones and twos; at Primark, they cater for people buying in dozens.

Many professional observers think this new shopping culture is a great improvement. Hyman says, "There's an American adage: the customer is king. In the UK, all it has ever been is an adage. Now, for the first time, it's reality."

Gareth Coombs of the Cambridge Strategy Centre, a retail consultancy, sees the social implications: "People used to define themselves as shopping at a certain level. 'I'm an M&S shopper.' It defined your place in the world. Those sort of rules aren't sustainable any more." Tamar Kasriel of the Henley Centre, the social forecasters, is blunter: "The idea that cheap goods are for poor people is totally history."

Cheap goods in themselves are hardly new. In fact, it is striking how long the retailers at the centre of the current British bargain boom have been around. Primark began trading in Britain in the early 1970s, TopShop in the early 1960s, and most of the supermarkets soon after the second world war. Resale price maintenance, which restricted by law the ability of shops to discount goods, was abolished in 1964.

Yet, for decades afterwards, more subtle limits on "the value sector", as it was a little dismissively known, endured. Britain being Britain, one of these was class. It is probably not a coincidence that the countries with the longest established cheap retail cultures are the ones with a strong current of social mobility and relative classlessness, such as America and postwar Germany and modern Ireland. In Britain, until the loosening of class structures during the 1980s and 1990s, things were different. "Cheapness had a connotation," says Gillian Cutress, editor of the Official Great British Factory Shop Guide. In 1985, when she started researching her first pioneering book on discount outlets, she quickly became aware that she was entering sensitive territory.

Cutress was an out-of-work zoologist living in Nottingham. She was a Londoner with a determined manner, an interest in factories, and a totally unsqueamish appetite for bargains then considered rare among the professional classes. The East Midlands, she soon discovered, was full of clothing and footwear manufacturers who sold off their seconds and surplus lines at big discounts to staff and people in the know. But these factory outlets were open only a few hours a week and were not advertised: "Many of the manufacturers wanted them to be kept quiet because they didn't want to upset the retailers [which they also supplied]." As Cutress drove round industrial estates asking nosy questions, she also discovered something else: "People made the assumption that our readers would be people with less disposable income."

This assumption proved wrong. "Our readership turned out to be people with time and spare money," says Cutress. Over the next 20 years, her guides got thicker and glossier and came to cover the whole country, selling more than 600,000 copies. More than that, however, they contributed to a slow but significant shift in British consumer thinking.

Until well into the 1990s, the idea that Britain was expensive and that there was little shoppers could do about it was widely held. "Rip-off Britain" became a frequent target for newspaper campaigns, but the solution usually offered was for the government to intervene or for consumers to stock up in the cheaper supermarkets across the channel. Yet while the controversy sputtered on, many shoppers were quietly finding new ways to avoid paying the full price. Factory outlets, like the low-cost airlines that started up in Britain in the mid-1990s, taught people that the price of goods was not written in stone but subject to context and, in particular, the balance of power between seller and buyer. "There is no guilt any more at being brutal about seeking the best price," says Coombs.

Instead of guilt, there is pleasure. As well as the money people save by finding bargains, Coombs and other analysts talk about the satisfaction felt by consumers when they "get a victory" over a retailer - and when they tell their friends about it afterwards. The latter activity, in a sure sign of its popularity, has recently acquired a would-be scientific label: "compulsive price disclosure".

But after you have bragged about your bargains you have to live with them. And at this stage you may become aware that cheap consumer goods do not always go with the grain of other current British social trends. "Over the last 10 years," says Hyman, "we calculate that women have doubled the average number of womenswear items they buy in a year." But over the same period, the cost of living space has been rising as fast, or even faster. One consequence, says David Mitchell, technical director of the Housebuilders' Federation, is that developers are "keeping new houses as small as possible to keep the price down". Meanwhile, planning regulations and the changing tastes of home-owners are filling these dwellings with ever larger and more numerous bathrooms, and more fitted kitchen appliances. The space left over for storage is shrinking accordingly.

"It is a worry," Mitchell says. "Eventually something's got to give between how much we own and how much space we live in."

The solutions may not be elegant. Garden sheds, he says, are growing in popularity, as cheap spaces for general storage rather than tools. "And some developers are making garages half a metre longer than they need to be so people can put stuff at the back." Many homeowners have already gone further: in a current article on outer-London suburbia, the sociologist Paul Barker notes that most garages have been given over to "household junk". The cars are parked in people's front gardens.

For people who have exhausted, or never had such hoarding possibilities, there is the modern self- storage industry. Until the mid-1990s, the idea of keeping many of your possessions in a locked room away from where you lived was largely foreign to Britain, and confined to bigger countries with more mobile populations, such as America. Now there are about 700 British storage facilities, says Rodney Walker, chief executive of the Self-Storage Association, and the business is expanding at 10% a year. "It is a local market in most cases," he says. "Customers live nearby." Does he think the take-off in demand has anything to do with the simultaneous boom in cheap goods? "You're not on the wrong track."

You could see all this hoarding as a sign of a growing attachment to possessions. But Coombs sees it as the opposite. "What was in the living room this year will be in the bedroom next year and in the junk room the year after," he says. Kasriel says the chance to sell to eBay has boosted much we buy. "You can tell yourself you have a sensible financial route out."

Unashamedly "disposable" cheap goods, you could argue, are turning us into traders rather than curators of our possessions. It is another victory for capitalism: we have internalised the unsentimental stock control of the modern retailer. Juliet Schor, an American economist and leading critic of the bargain boom, thinks this new form of ownership is less pleasurable than the old one. "The psychologically satisfying process of personalisation that occurs when products are acquired and retained, is truncated," she writes in a recent essay. "Attachment is briefer and there is the constant pain of divestiture [getting rid of things]." What individual possessions represent to us is, she says, "more externally driven" - by marketing and advertising - and "less under the control of the individual consumer".

Shoppers at Primark in Oxford are cheerier about all this. "I was brought up with thrift," says an elderly man with a cravat and a perfect white moustache. "Brought up not to buy anything unless the old thing was worn out. But three T-shirts for a fiver ..." He holds them up: "They look very good." His eyes sparkle: "This is incredible."

I ask the woman with all the handbags what she does when her cupboards get full at home. "I'll just have a clear-out," she says without hesitation. "Take stuff to charity. Chuck it away if it's broken." Another woman, prosperous-looking, who has bought a duvet, towels and T-shirts for her three children, says with a mildly troubled expression: "I know we live in a throwaway society. It's bad for the environment. It's wasteful. But at home, when we can't fit anything more on the clothes rails, I try and pass it to a collection for the third world." She says her family reaches this point "quite often".

Mending things is coming to seem old- fashioned. "The financial equation's changed," says Coombs. "The price of getting a DVD player looked at is probably half what it cost. And we're time poor. Why waste the time?"

On Tottenham Court Road in central London, the capital's traditional quarter for selling and fixing electronic goods, a man called Vic is living with the consequences of this shift. He has been repairing gadgets round here for 20 years, but his current premises feel less than permanent. At the back of one of the more downmarket shops there is a sign partly obscured by a cheap flat-screen television; through a nearby open hatch, there is a windowless room full of shelves and ailing camcorders where Vic works.

"Ten years ago, people started closing the local repair shops," he explains, with his trademark mix of patience and weariness. "But if anyone brought anything into a shop round here to be fixed, the shop would say, 'Go to Vic.' Now the shops say, 'Don't bother. Just buy a new one.'" He claims manufacturers are deliberately making disposable products: "They only last as long as the guarantee. So they can sell more rubbish. If the machine needs a part, you have to buy it from the manufacturer for £100, £200 - and we have to put labour on top. If I can't charge £50 [for that] I can't survive around here."

He says he can fix so many different gadgets that there will always be work for him. But in future, he believes, electronic handymen won't exist; there will only be specialists, mending the most expensive items. Everything else will be thrown out at the first hint of malfunction.

According to the European Commission, "Electro- scrap is the fastest growing waste stream [in the EU], growing at 3-5% per year", three times faster than domestic waste in general. In 2002, a European directive was issued requiring member countries to ensure the "re-use, recovery and recycling" of discarded electronic goods. Some retail analysts think the directive - especially its sections on the "financial obligations of producers" to be environmentally responsible, and on how "consumers will be able to take [discarded] products back to shops for free" - will have a significant effect on the cheap electronics market. But Britain and several other countries have yet to comply.

The harmful metals and chemicals in many electrical goods, and the difficulty of disposing of them, make the less palatable consequences of increased consumption obvious. The afterlife of discarded budget clothing is more ambiguous. Since 1990, the global trade in secondhand garments has grown tenfold. Clothes are collected in rich countries by charities and commercial traders, shipped to poor countries and sold by local stallholders. In some African countries, more than 80% of people buy secondhand garments, and it is the dominant source of clothing.

"Affordability is the key reason," concluded a report by the charity Oxfam last year, "[but] fashion and consumer preferences also seem to be shifting away from traditional, 'African'-style to more 'western'-style clothing." Oxfam also concluded that secondhand imports were likely to have played a role in the collapse of garment manufacturing in parts of Africa since the 1980s. The trade was tainted as well by "considerable customs fraud", which reduced government revenues across the continent. Yet the report identified considerable benefits too; hundreds of thousands of livelihoods in Africa were supported by washing, repairing, restyling, distributing and selling the clothes.

The charity's real worry is not the ethics of the trade but the quantity and quality of the garments nowadays. "Over the last seven years," says Barney Tallack, Oxfam's deputy trading director, "a greater proportion has been of cheaper quality." A T-shirt that costs £3 new can't be sold for much secondhand at an Oxfam shop in Britain. To make the same profit as before the bargain clothing boom began, the shop needs to receive, sort, clean and sell more garments. "We have to work harder," says Tallack.

At the cavernous Oxfam shop in Dalston, in east London, the most profitable in the country, the clothes rails are like crammed graveyards for discount labels: TopShop, Zara, Hennes, Old Navy, George Essentials. The bright clean colours of many of the clothes have barely faded; the garments look hardly worn. In the storeroom behind the shop there are three booths, each the size of several phoneboxes, piled with bags of clothing."They're usually almost filled to the ceiling," says the manager.

The diminishing returns yielded by discount clothing may also ultimately destroy the global secondhand trade. Such items deteriorate quickly, says Alan Wheeler of the textile recycling association. "People in Africa do not want to wear tatty clothes."

For all the pleasures and popularity and modernity of the bargain boom, a strong sense remains that it is too good to last. Even the Primark shoppers in Oxford share it. I ask the woman with the handbags if she thinks the prices of such things will stay this low for good. "No, I don't," she says. Buying nine handbags suddenly seems less like the confident exercise of a new consumer power and more like the nervy instinct of the old-style bargain hunter: never hesitate when faced with a special offer.

The frivolity of buying a £3 T-shirt can be overstated. For the comfortably off, money saved on cheap basic goods can be spent on luxuries. "Connoisseurship moves to other areas," says the social observer Peter York, such as house alterations and designer labels. "But for everyone else, cheap goods are simply affordable."

For a rich country, Britain has a lot of people who are short of money. One of them was the last person I interviewed outside Primark. She was 21, smartly dressed, and worked for Oxford city council. "I shop in cheap shops," she said. "The council doesn't pay enough and Oxford is an expensive place to live. My council tax is going up. The rent, the travel ..."

Since 1995, according to the ONS, average rail fares have risen 36%, the cost of petrol 63%, and the average council tax by 100%. As many goods have got cheaper, many services - particularly those which cannot, for now at least, be performed from countries with cheaper labour - have got more expensive. The ONS index of the overall cost of services is up by almost half over the past 10 years. Then there are university fees, the pensions crisis, unemployment swelling again, the frightening prices of gas and oil; Coombs characterises these contemporary financial pressures as "a vague rumbling in the background" of the lives of otherwise confident modern consumers. Kasriel provides evidence that the anxiety and the profligacy are sometimes linked: "In one of our focus groups last year, someone said, 'You used to save because you didn't know what was going to happen. Now you spend because you don't know what's going to happen.'"

Ethical and political considerations have yet to check this impulse significantly. Western consumers have known about the Victorian environmental practices, pay rates and working conditions of Asian manufacturing since at least the start of the decade. "Poor people [there] are subsidising the standard of living of consumers in the rich north," as Schor puts it. However, she continues,"The connection between labour conditions and price has not yet been made." Or it has been made by consumers, and then quietly put to the back of their minds. At Primark in Oxford, the shoppers all sounded genuinely concerned when I brought up the cheap labour issue, but they did not linger over the subject.

An even less pleasurable topic never came up at all: that there is a political as well as an economic world order that makes modern discount shopping possible. The overwhelming power of America, the lingering power of Europe and the other traditionally rich parts of the world, and recent economic history all play their part. Schor points out that the bargain boom began shortly after the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s; in countries such as Indonesia and Thailand, there was suddenly an increased supply of people prepared to work for very low wages.

It is hard to read a newspaper without realising that this balance of power between east and west is altering. In this context, the big questions about how we live with our cheap possessions and whether we really like them and what we do when we've finished with them may ultimately be dwarfed by an even bigger issue. "If other countries come to dominate," Schor says crisply, "We may be the ones producing cheap T-shirts".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/retail/sto...html?gusrc=rss





In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory
Sharon LaFraniere

As Solomon Linda first recorded it in 1939, it was a tender melody, almost childish in its simplicity — three chords, a couple of words and some baritones chanting in the background.

But the saga of the song now known worldwide as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is anything but a lullaby. It is fraught with racism and exploitation and, in the end, 40-plus years after his death, brings a measure of justice. Were he still alive, Solomon Linda might turn it into one heck of a ballad.

Born in 1909 in the Zulu heartland of South Africa, Mr. Linda never learned to read or write, but in song he was supremely eloquent. After moving to Johannesburg in his mid-20's, he quickly conquered the weekend music scene at the township beer halls and squalid hostels that housed much of the city's black labor force.

He sang soprano over a four-part harmony, a vocal style that was soon widely imitated.

By 1939, a talent scout had ushered Mr. Linda's group, the Original Evening Birds, into a recording studio where they produced a startling hit called "Mbube," Zulu for "The Lion." Elizabeth Nsele, Mr. Linda's youngest surviving daughter, said it had been inspired by her father's childhood as a herder protecting cattle in the untamed hinterlands.

"The lion was going round and round, and the lion was happy," she said. "But my father was not happy. He had been staying there since morning and he was hungry." The lyrics were spartan — just mbube and zimba, which means "stop" — but its chant and harmonies were so entrancing that the song came to define a whole generation of Zulu a cappella singing, a style that became known simply as Mbube. Music scholars say the 78 r.p.m. recording of "Mbube" was probably the first African record to sell 100,000 copies.

From there, it took flight worldwide. In the early 50's, Pete Seeger recorded it with his group, the Weavers. His version differed from the original mainly in his misinterpretation of the word "mbube" (pronounced "EEM-boo-beh"). Mr. Seeger sang it as "wimoweh," and turned it into a folk music staple.

There followed a jazz version, a nightclub version, another folk version by the Kingston Trio, a pop version and finally, in 1961, a reworking of the song by an American songwriter, George Weiss. Mr. Weiss took the last 20 improvised seconds of Mr. Linda's recording and transformed it into the melody. He added lyrics beginning "In the jungle, the mighty jungle." A teen group called the Tokens sang it with a doo-wop beat — and it topped charts worldwide.

Some 150 artists eventually recorded the song. It was translated into languages from Dutch to Japanese. It had a role in more than 13 movies. By all rights, Mr. Linda should have been a rich man.

Instead, he lived in Soweto with barely a stick of furniture, sleeping on a dirt floor carpeted with cow dung.

Mr. Linda received 10 shillings — about 87 cents today — when he signed over the copyright of "Mbube" in 1952 to Gallo Studios, the company that produced his record. He also got a job sweeping floors and serving tea in the company's packing house.

His eight children survived on maize porridge, known as pap. When they passed a grade in school, their reward was an egg. Two died as babies, one of malnutrition, said his daughter Ms. Nsele, now 47.

"Chicken feet and pap, chicken feet and pap," she said. "That was our meal for years and years."

When Mr. Linda died in 1962, at 53, with the modern equivalent of $22 in his bank account, his widow had no money for a gravestone.

How much he should have collected is in dispute. Over the years, he and his family have received royalties for "Wimoweh" from the Richmond Organization, the publishing house that holds the rights to that song, though not as much as they should have, Mr. Seeger said.

"I didn't realize what was going on and I regret it," said Mr. Seeger, now 86, adding that he learned only recently that Mr. Linda received less than the 50 percent of publishing royalties Mr. Seeger says he was due. "I have always left money up to other people. I was kind of stupid."

But where Mr. Linda's family really lost out, his lawyers claim, was in "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," a megahit.

From 1991 to 2000, the years when "The Lion King" began enthralling audiences in movie theaters and on Broadway, Mr. Linda's survivors received a total of perhaps $17,000 in royalties, according to Hanro Friedrich, the family's lawyer.

A lawyer for Abilene Music, the publishing house for "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," did not return repeated calls for comment.

But Owen Dean, a South African copyright lawyer who also represents the family, said the amount was a mere pittance compared with the profits the song generated.

The Lindas say they knew no better. Ms. Nsele said she remembered hearing her father's tune on the radio as a teenager in the 1970's and recalled: "I asked my mother, 'Who are those people?' She said she didn't know. She was happy because the husband's song was playing. She didn't know she was supposed to get something."

Indeed, few people knew until Rian Malan, the South African author and songwriter, documented the inequity in 2000 in Rolling Stone magazine. In a telephone interview this month, Mr. Malan said he was stunned "by the degree to which everyone was relying on the Lindas never asking the question" of why they were paid so little.

Mr. Malan's article embarrassed several major players in the American music industry and brought both Mr. Friedrich and Mr. Dean to the family's defense.

The Lindas filed suit in 2004, demanding $1.5 million in damages, but their case was no slam-dunk. Not only had Mr. Linda signed away his copyright to Gallo in 1952, Mr. Dean said, but his wife, who was also illiterate, signed them away again in 1982, followed by his daughters several years later.

Ms. Nsele contends the family was hoodwinked by a South African lawyer, now deceased. Mr. Friedrich said the lawyer appeared to have worn two hats, simultaneously representing the family and the song's copyright holders. In their lawsuit, the Lindas invoked an obscure 1911 law under which the song's copyright reverted to Mr. Linda's estate 25 years after his death. On a separate front, they criticized the Walt Disney Company, whose 1994 hit movie "The Lion King" featured a meerkat and warthog singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

Disney argued that it had paid Abilene Music for permission to use the song, without knowing its origins.

But for a company built on its founder's benevolent image, the case "had all the makings of a nightmare," Mr. Dean said — a David and Goliath story in which Disney raked in profits from the song while Mr. Linda's children toiled as maids and factory workers, lived without indoor plumbing and sometimes had to borrow from their lawyer for food.

In February, Abilene agreed to pay Mr. Linda's family royalties from 1987 onward, ending the suit. No amount has been disclosed, but the family's lawyers say their clients should be quite comfortable.

A representative for Disney would not discuss the circumstances behind the lawsuit, but the company said in a statement that Walt Disney Pictures had licensed " 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' in good faith" and was pleased that the litigation had been resolved "to everyone's satisfaction."

Some injustices cannot be redressed: in 2001, Mr. Linda's daughter Adelaide died of AIDS at age 38, unable to afford life-saving antiretroviral treatment.

"I was angry before," said Ms. Nsele, who, as a government nurse, is one of the few of Mr. Linda's descendants who is employed. "They didn't ask permission. They just decided to do anything they wanted with my father's song."

"But now it seems we must forgive, because they have come to their senses and realized they have made a mistake," Ms. Nsele said. "The Bible says you must try to forgive."

"Not 'try,' " her 17-year-old daughter Zandile corrected. "It says 'forgive.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/in...a/22lion.html?





iPeas in an iPod

The Sizzle and Pop of Radio Cooking
Kim Severson

TALMA GUY runs long-haul trucks out of Jacksonville, Fla., with her husband, Roger. To pass the time, they used to listen to political rants on talk radio or music on CD's.

Then they fitted the cab with a satellite radio, and Mrs. Guy discovered cooking shows.

"I could listen to them go on all day and all night," she said.

One day, she got caught up in a show called "EatDrink" on Martha Stewart Living Radio. The subject was chicken roasting, something Mrs. Guy had long abandoned after too many dry birds.

Encouraged by the conversation and a guest's admonishment to always use a meat thermometer, Mrs. Guy thought she'd give it one more try. The minute she got off the road she sent an e-mail message to the host, Lucinda Scala Quinn, asking for an in-depth tutorial on meat thermometers. She got an answer the next day.

"It's not like TV, where there's a celebrity chef and you feel like you could never get through to them," Mrs. Guy said. "I feel like the people on the radio, I know them."

In a world of glossy food magazines, $50 cookbooks and television hosts who seem to care more about make-up than marinades, a quieter, cheaper and decidedly more old-fashioned way to explore cooking is getting new play. Driven by inexpensive podcasting equipment, the freedom of the Internet and a nation obsessed with what it eats, food broadcasting is more democratic than ever.

At the top of the market is the polished work of the Kitchen Sisters, a pair of Bay Area women whose National Public Radio series "Hidden Kitchens" this year became the first piece of food journalism to win a duPont-Columbia Award, widely considered the Pulitzer Prize of broadcast journalism.

At the bottom with a bullet are hundreds of food podcasters, whose ranks have been growing in number and quality almost daily. Since the summer of 2005, when Apple first offered an organized way for people to file and find podcasts, the company's list of free food-related shows to which listeners can subscribe has grown to more than 300.

The rank of podcasters includes chefs and food journalists, among them The Times's restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, and its wine critic, Eric Asimov. General Mills and Sub-Zero produce podcasts to build their brands and sell products. But the real action is among podcasters with not much money or technical expertise but plenty of passion.

AMATEUR food podcasters are filling computers with the practical, the boring, the delightful and the strange. Shows range from the dull but smartly organized "Wine for Newbies" to the political rants of the Vegan Freaks. The Lunch Lady has a cultish following of people who call in to hear her recorded readings of the daily lunch menu at a Northern California convalescent home — embellished with some freestyle song and folk wisdom. She has now moved to podcasting. On "Girl on Girl Cooking," listeners recently learned how to make a hot drink from shaved Scharffen Berger chocolate in a homey show that felt a lot like hanging out at a friend's apartment.

"Sometimes I think it is a whole backlash to the Food Network stuff," said Sally Swift, a radio producer who founded the radio show "The Splendid Table" with the host Lynne Rossetto Kasper.

The show, which began a decade ago on Minnesota Public Radio and has a devoted fan base among the food elite, has doubled its audience in the last five years. The number of stations that carry the show has grown by 72 percent.

Fans of the medium say that radio taps deeply into one's food memories, feeding directly into the brain in a way the written word can't. Where television cooking evokes a sort of slack-jawed passivity, radio requires the listener to hear the sizzle of butter and bread on a griddle and conjure the sight and smell of a grilled cheese.

Television might be the superior medium for actual cooking instruction, but radio fans say it's easier to cook and listen than it is to cook and watch.

"You know how you feel like in your living room and your friends are over and you just have that easy vibe? That's what radio feels like to me," said Ms. Quinn, who was food editor for Martha Stewart Living Television before becoming the host of the "EatDrink" radio show on the Sirius satellite network, which announced earlier this week that it had 4 million subscribers.

The current interest in radio has been primed by the niche community building on the Internet, where one can discover other lovers of hibiscus or create friends simply by posting a photographic record of recently consumed bowls of ramen.

"Food radio nowadays gives you that access you learned to have from the Internet but with the live interactiveness of TV," Ms. Quinn said. "It can be a private experience but it also is a public one."

She recalled a recent show where Peter Hoffman, the chef and owner of Savoy Restaurant in Manhattan, was the guest. He explained how to break down a pig carcass, which prompted a caller from Texas to ask how to get the gaminess out of the wild boar her husband liked to hunt. A listener in Northern Canada called to suggest she soak the meat in buttermilk.

THAT kind of exchange is reminiscent of the radio homemakers of the late 1940's and 1950's, who shared recipes and household tips with listeners in small towns and rural areas. Some versions of those old-fashioned recipe-sharing broadcasts are still going strong, particularly in the Midwest, home to shows like the Open Line exchange on WMT in Iowa.

Technology is moving that kind of longing for connection to new audiences, said Michael Straus, who in 1999 began broadcasting the "Beyond Organic" show in the small town of Point Reyes, Calif. He now uses a mix of e-mail, audio streaming, podcasting, satellite radio and small broadcasting stations to distribute the show, which blends food, the environment and politics.

Steven Shaw, one of the founders of eGullet, a popular food Web site, this year began broadcasting eG Radio. The shows, which are largely interviews with chefs and restaurant profiles, are possible only because equipment that can take sound from someone's dining room to a Web site became cheap and easy to use.

"With $1,500 of equipment and a few hours of training we can do something that to an amateur listener is the equivalent of NPR," Mr. Shaw said. And, he said, chefs might not have the skill to write about their craft, but they can easily spend an hour talking about it.

The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, rely on the same tools they started with when they began working together in 1979: hand-held microphones mixed with shoe-leather reporting.

For the pair, who along with the producer Jay Allison created the series "Lost & Found Sound" and later did an audio history of the World Trade Center for NPR, food turned out to be a rich conduit for telling American stories.

Their latest project, "Hidden Kitchens," which also became a book, takes listeners deep into back street, out-of-the-way places where people cook. The idea came to Ms. Nelson when she was in the back of a taxi in San Francisco and discovered that the city's Brazilian cab drivers liked to eat at a secret temporary night kitchen near a cab yard.

They opened a phone line and collected stories of hidden kitchens across the country. Among them were tales few could have imagined, like how the George Foreman grill became an unexpected kitchen for homeless people, and the saga of the women known as the Chili Queens of San Antonio.

They also found Robert King Wilkerson, known as King, who created a clandestine kitchen during his 31 years in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. He went in for robbery, but his supporters say he became a political prisoner after he joined the Black Panther party.

At Angola, he learned how to make pralines using a soda cans for a pot and scraps of paper for fuel. He's out now, speaking out about prisoners' rights. And he's selling those pralines, which he calls "freelines."

Radio brings an intimacy to his story that requires a commitment of both imagination and emotion. Mix that intimacy with food, and the story becomes instantly accessible.

"If King was a guy talking about prison, no one would have listened," Ms. Nelson said. "The pralines are the way in."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/dining/22radio.html?





Food From the Geek Isles
Jack

For those of you more comfortable with traditional cooking shows, like the ones on TV, check out the first episode of Ctrl+Alt+Chicken. If I couldn’t get all the way through it it’s either because I’m no gourmand, or it sucks. Your call.





Moon, June, Spoon…ah…

Radio Host Fired For Using Racial Epithet

A St. Louis radio station quickly fired a talk show host for uttering a racial epithet as he talked about Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on his morning show Wednesday.

Dave Lenihan apologized on the air immediately after making what he said was a slip of the tongue. KTRS president and general manager Tim Dorsey agreed the remark was accidental but said it was nonetheless "unacceptable, reprehensible and unforgivable."

Lenihan had been heaping praise on Rice, who has frequently said she aspires to run the NFL one day but has more recently ruled out seeking to replace retiring Commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

"She's been chancellor of Stanford," Lenihan said on the air. "She's got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She's African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that."

He said he had meant to say "coup" instead of the racial slur.

KTRS listeners soon began calling the station to complain. Twenty minutes after the utterance, Dorsey went on the air to apologize to Rice and KTRS listeners.

"There can be no excuse for what was said," Dorsey said. "Dave Lenihan has been let go. ... There is enough hate. We certainly are not going to fan those flames."

NAACP chapter president Harold Crumpton commended Dorsey for his swift action.

Reached at home, Lenihan said he was still trying to figure out what happened and was drafting a letter of apology to Rice. He said he never uses the slur he uttered and thinks Rice is "a fantastic woman."

Lenihan, formerly a drive-time host at WGNU radio in St. Louis, had been at KTRS for less than two weeks.

"It was my dream job," he said. "Ratings were going well. It kind of stinks."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/...st-fired_x.htm




BiTtorrent 101: The Complete Guide to Filesharing
David Kidd

This feature story appears in the April 2006 issue of PC Authority magazine.

Few technologies have had a more sordid past than peer-to-peer networking. The Napster revolution in 1999 created an unstoppable crusade from users that wanted to share files, and copyright holders trying to prevent it. But like a multi-headed hydra, with each court battle that shut down one network, another would spring up, and we now have more choice than ever to share files. Copyright infringement may be its main use at the moment, but it's an ignorant assumption that piracy is its foundation. People want to share information, and they want to use the technologies available to them to do it.

And they will. Strings of lawsuits later, and P2P is showing no signs of decline. It currently accounts for more Internet traffic than any other medium, and businesses are trying to harness its power to distribute content faster, cheaper, and wider. Piracy is still rampant, but peer-to-peer is now entering a new phase of maturity, where private, secure networks are helping groups connect together, and technologies like BitTorrent have revolutionised the way files are distributed.

P2P now offers more ways for people to connect than ever before. While Napster dealt a healthy blow, and Kazaa made a slight detour, the future of P2P is brighter than ever. This feature looks beyond the teething problems and examines the future of P2P networking, the latest networks, and how you can make the most out of the original bad boy of Internet.

Power to the people
At its core, the Web has always been peer-to-peer. The fact that any individual with an Internet connection, a PC and HTTP server software can throw up a site contributed significantly to the exponential expansion of the Web, and the Internet as a whole. But while the early web featured interconnected, distributed nodes (web servers), it was still based on a traditional client/server system, rather than the P2P networks around today.

The first mainstream P2P services used a combination of interconnected nodes (or peers) and centralised tracking servers. These servers aren't involved in the file transfer, rather they act as 'matching' services to connect one node to another. The most well known network to use this strategy was Napster. Napster was predominantly a music sharing network, which hosted a server to track users and files. Even though the actual process of file swapping was happening between the nodes, Napster's involvement led to its eventual demise where it was ordered to pay several millions of dollars to copyright holders. Only recently, after being acquired by Roxio, has it relaunched into a legitimate business.

But far from stymieing the use of P2P networks, it initiated increasing interest in filesharing, driving the creation and use of decentralised networks which do not need a centralised server to function. When a node connects to a decentralised P2P network, it will often connect to a small number of nodes that are (hopefully) online. Each node that it connects to is also connected to its own list of other nodes, and so on until, in theory, each node can form a link to every other node.

To search for a file, a request is sent out to only those nodes that have a direct connection, and the request is subsequently 'passed on' to other nodes on the network. By not having a central point of failure, this can keep the network always up and running. However, searching for files can be slow as the user waits for all nodes on the network to return the results.

All networks around now use either centralised or decentralised formats, and often a combination of both.

The old school crew
Since the downfall of Napster in 2001, new networks sprung up to fill in the gaps, with FastTrack, Gnutella and eDonkey being the most popular. The FastTrack protocol lies beneath services like Kazaa, Grokster and iMesh, and relies on certain clients acting as supernodes to speed up file searching. Kazaa is the most recent to hit the headlines, after an Australian court found that the owners knowingly allowed its customers to trade copyright files. The upshot is that Australians can not officially download the client from the Kazaa website.

The eDonkey network uses dedicated servers to track and locate files, rather than relying on supernodes. eDonkey is a massively popular service, and according to research firm CacheLogic, is the most popular method for trading video files.

Gnutella takes a slightly different tack to eDonkey and FastTrack by delivering a pure, decentralised network. It was originally developed by Nullsoft developers, Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Winamp fame. While Nullsoft was working under AOL, the pair released Gnutella without AOL's knowledge. AOL subsequently canned the project, but the software (and source code) had already been downloaded in the thousands. Without a centralised server, the network can't be shut down -- once it's up, it's up.

Looking beyond the major players, there are many more networks lurking in the background. Some, like MP2P are exclusively used for music, and others will restrict clients from connecting unless they offer up a library of files to share. The net effect of the many networks, each with their strengths and weaknesses, provides a collective mesh of peers where you can find anything you want.

But is this just an industry built on copyright infringement? As a whole, few would argue that these networks didn't facilitate illicit filesharing. You could even take it a step further and suggest that these networks not only rely on it, but were created because of it -- something that the court house dramas over the past few years will attest. But if we look past the rampant piracy, there's a whole new world of legitimate P2P brewing out there.

It's raining bits
One of the most significant moments in Internet history is when lone programmer, Bram Cohen, unleashed BitTorrent in 2002. Prior to BitTorrent, if you wanted to distribute a large file you'd likely be charged through the nose in bandwidth, and the more popular the file, the more demanding the load on the server. Consequently, you either have an expensive server farm to keep up with demand, or your server would crawl to a stop as it tried to fulfill the many requests.

BitTorrent changes that by turning the process upside down. By using the bandwidth of each person who wants the file, rather than a series of one way client connections to a single server, popular files are distributed faster and cheaper. That a file could be better distributed with more people was an absurd notion five years ago, but for those that deal in large files, it's now an indispensable distribution method.

In order to start downloading with BitTorrent, you first download a very small file with a .torrent extension. The tiny files contain information about the original file, as well as the location of the tracking server. When the .torrent file is loaded into a BitTorrent client, the client contacts the tracker discover which peers have the data you need. Once you've started collecting data packets, the tracker will then let the other peers know, who'll then start asking you for data. The net result is that no matter how many users are after a file, there's little chance of a bottleneck forming -- and with more users, you'll often get a faster connection. Of course the reverse is also true, where an unpopular file will often be slower than a dedicated server, due to the lack of peers to download from.

Another distinction is its use of the web as a searching tool, where other P2P programs require direct searching of the shared files of other peers, or accessing a designated indexing server. Few search engines can compete with the speed of a Google search, and this a major strength of BitTorrent.

Given its advantage in distributing large files, the most common file types winging their way around BitTorrent networks are videos, games and software packages like Linux distributions. It also has a place in commercial online distribution services, with Cohen himself having been brought into Valve to work on its online distribution service, Steam.

Despite its uses in distributing copyright media, which constitutes the majority of BitTorrent downloads, its robust system makes it ideal -- and in some cases necessary -- for any type of large media. This alone helps BitTorrent attain an air of legitimacy, letting it stand apart from the pirate havens of classic P2P networks.

The new breed
Today, there's more choice than ever with P2P. If you're not interesting in jumping into the wild world of Gnutella, eDonkey and BitTorrent, you could take a look at the latest crop of applications that let smaller, like-minded groups share files in private. Specialised services are starting to pop up which let you trade, for example, just photographs, with Pixpo (www.pixpo.com) being an example. These services effectively turn your PC into an image server that lets you invite others to view or download your collection, without going through a central server.

In addition to individual files being passed among users, businesses can take advantage of P2P to collaborate on group tasks and share files among designated users. This can be a quicker, one-stop solution compared to the traditional use of VPNs, email and attachments. Groove Virtual Office (www.groove.net), for example, combines filesharing, instant messaging, and typical workflow management tools. Additionally, it not only cuts down on the amount of large emails passing between a group, but it also reduces bandwidth by only transmitting the changes made to a file, rather than the whole file itself. Groove is a good example of how a P2P backbone can be customised to different applications.

But to really get a sense of how far P2P has come, applications like Qnext, WASTE and Grouper shine as examples of all-in-one filesharers. In essence, these apps forego the larger world of P2P, instead focusing on private groups. Qnext (www.qnext.com), for example, not only lets you share files, but it bundles in private IRC chat rooms, remote desktop access, and even access to your MSN, Yahoo! or other instant messaging account. WASTE (http://waste.sourceforge.net) takes another approach entirely, offering heavy dollops of security rather than focusing on too many features.

With this recent flood of legitimate applications employing P2P technologies, and with Internet bandwidth being chewed up more and more with filesharing, the future is certain. While traditional uses of P2P networks have been dominated by the swapping of large scale, pirated content, applications like WASTE, Qnext and Grouper suggest many users are interested in sharing personal files with smaller, private groups.

The future of P2P networking
In August 2000, Intel's Chief Technology Officer Pat Gelsinger had this to say: 'The power of this model would be very significant and complementary to the business models we've seen emerge. Out of this early momentum, this technology foundation, we'll make a very bold suggestion today. That peer-to-peer computing could usher in the next generation of the Internet, much as we saw Mosaic spark the last.'

The key point here is not so much Gelsinger's prediction, but that business models would adapt to P2P technologies. Few could deny the immense power of technologies like BitTorrent as a distribution method, and private networks are opportunities to target like-minded groups of people. Games will be first off the block, with Steam and Blizzard already distributing their large, highly demanded files to thousands of users every day. In addition, software makers are already starting to offer torrent files of their applications to reduce bandwidth costs. Furthermore, there are many legal places to download files from. Legal Torrents (www.legaltorrents.com) is one example that lists media released under a Creative Commons license, which promotes sharing.

But what's really exciting is the potential use of P2P technology to form the backbone of television and video distribution to a wider audience. Warner Bros has recently announced it will launch a P2P service in Germany, recognising the need to combat piracy by providing a legal alternative, that's just as easy to use an open filesharing network. In the UK, the BBC has talked about introducing P2P technologies to distribute its online video archive to an Internet audience.

Ultimately, this is just scratching the surface of P2P. If the cost of distributing all forms of digital media is no longer relative to demand, then there's no limit to the size of the audience that content makers can reach. The proportion of illicit copyright material traded over networks will soon diminish as legitimate uses tap into its power. And for the millions of interconnected PCs out there - we'll never be too far from what we need. To say P2P is back with a bang is an understatement. It's about to go supernova!



The next step
The PCA labs team has rounded up the best Torrent clients to help you choose the best way to do your downloading. Be sure to read this to get the most benefit from Bittorrent!

In addition, the labs team has tested the very best Private file sharing applications. These allow you to create a private internet network with friends and colleagues for sharing files quickly and securely.

PCA Labs:

Torrent clients
[url=http://www.pcauthority.com.au/lab.aspx?CIaLID=132Private file sharing[/ul]

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article....CIID=35843&p=1





How To Create A Torrent?

Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create torrents when they need to share something. I have “a lot of” friends who know how to download torrents, but when they need to send me their latest 200MB vacation picture collection, they ask me to “get on msn”.

It’s not that I have anything against msn (allthough the file transfer sucks), but why don’t just use bittorrent? Especially if you want to send something to more than one person because then you can share the bandwith.

So how do you do this? Well it’s very simple. Open your favorite bittorrent client and do the magic trick:

file > create torrent

…..

That’s all? Well almost. All you need to do now is put in the tracker info nad tick some boxes. This can differ somewhat from client to client but it all comes down to the same thing.



µTorrent

1. File > Create new Torrent (or CTRL + N)

2. Select the files and or directories

3. Trackers: This is probably the hard part for most people. But it’s pretty easy, just put in one of the popular public trackers. You can use one or more trackers, but in general one is enough.

Here are some of the most popular trackers at the moment:

http://tracker.prq.to/announce
http://inferno.demonoid.com:3389/announce
http://tracker.bt-chat.com/announce
http://tracker.zerotracker.com:2710/announce

Put one of these in the tracker box

4. Do NOT tick the private torrent box (unless you’re using a private tracker)

5. Save the torrent and send it to your friends



Bitcomet

1. File > Create Torrent (or CTRL + M)

2. Select the files and or directories

3. Select “enable public DHT network” from the dropdown box
This way you can be your own tracker if the public tracker goes down.

4. Tracker server and DHT node list
Again, This is probably the hard part for most people. But it’s pretty easy, just put in one of the popular public trackers. You can use one or more trackers, but in general one is enough.

Here are some of the most popular trackers at the moment:

http://tracker.prq.to/announce
http://inferno.demonoid.com:3389/announce
http://tracker.bt-chat.com/announce
http://tracker.zerotracker.com:2710/announce

Put one of these in the tracker box

5. Save the torrent and send it to your friends



Azureus

1. File > New Torrent (or CTRL + N)

2. Tick “use an external tracker”.
And again, This is probably the hard part for most people. But it’s pretty easy, just put in one of the popular public trackers.

Here are some of the most popular trackers at the moment:

http://tracker.prq.to/announce
http://inferno.demonoid.com:3389/announce
http://tracker.bt-chat.com/announce
http://tracker.zerotracker.com:2710/announce

Put one of these in the tracker box

3. Select single file or dicectory, click NEXT and point to the file or directory you want to share, and click NEXT

4. Do NOT tick “private torrent”

5. Do tick “allow decentralized tracking”

6. Save the torrent and send it to your friends

Happy sharing. Note that you don’t need to upload the torrent to a website or a tracker. This means you control who gets the file and who doesn’t, and it won’t be visible to others!.
http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-create-a-torrent/





TV Here, There, Everywhere
David Pogue

IN the olden days, Americans gathered in front of the television sets in their living rooms to watch designated shows at designated times. You had a choice of three channels, and if you missed the broadcast, you'd feel like an idiot at the water cooler the next day. Quaint, huh?

Then came the VCR, which spared you the requirement of being there on time. Then cable TV, which blew open your channel choices. Then TiVo, which eliminated the necessity of even knowing when or where a show was to be broadcast. What's next — eliminating the TV altogether?

Well, sure. Last year, a strange-looking gadget called the Slingbox ($250) began offering that possibility. It's designed to let you, a traveler on the road, watch what's on TV back at your house, or what's been recorded by a video recorder like a TiVo. The requirements are high-speed Internet connections at both ends, a home network and a Windows computer — usually a laptop — to watch on. (A Mac version is due by midyear.)

Today is another milestone in society's great march toward anytime, anywhere TV. Starting today, Slingbox owners can install new player software on Windows Mobile palmtops and cellphones, thereby eliminating even the laptop requirement.

On cellphones with high-speed Internet connections, the requirement of a wireless Internet hot spot goes away, too. Now you can watch your home TV anywhere you can make phone calls — a statement that's never appeared in print before today (at least not accurately).

Now, if you don't travel much, and even if you do, your reaction to this statement may well be, "So?"

Sure enough, the Slingbox has always been intended to fill certain niches. It's for people with a fancy satellite receiver downstairs in the living room, but who want to watch upstairs in bed before retiring. It's for the hotel-room prisoner who wants to watch a movie on a TiVo at home, having realized that it's cheaper to pay $10 for a night of high-speed Internet than $13.95 for an in-room movie. It's for the traveler who wants to keep up with his hometown news while away.

And if you have friends who can't see the big game because of a local broadcast blackout — really, really good friends — you could even let them download the free Slingbox player software and watch your local broadcast, though the Slingbox folks don't endorse this last use.

Now that all of this is available for cellphone viewing — with no monthly fee — well, the mind boggles.

THE Slingbox itself is truly eccentric-looking. Picture three squares of chocolate broken off a Nestlé bar, cast in silver and blown up to 10.6 by 1.6 by 4 inches. ("It's supposed to be an ingot," a spokesman corrected me.)

For most people, setting it up is a 15-minute prospect, according to the company. An Ethernet cable connects the Slingbox to the router on your home network. ( Wireless networks aren't fast enough to handle the Slingbox's video reliably. If there's no Ethernet jack handy, Sling will sell you a $100 Powerline adapter, which you plug into an electrical socket; it makes the electrical wiring of your house part of your network.)

Another cable connects a spare video recorder or TV output to the Slingbox itself. It has inputs for RCA and S-video cables; you can switch between sources from the road. A third cable is designed to control the channel-changing and other functions of your recorder or cable box; it terminates with two so-called infrared blasters, which are meant to be taped in front of the infrared "eyes" of your TV equipment.

But suppose you're not most people. Suppose you're a newspaper reviewer with bad karma and a router that Slingbox doesn't recognize. In that case, setting up a Slingbox can be a more time-consuming ordeal. Anyone still puzzling over the phrase "the router on your home network" might be in trouble, too.

Once the setup is done, though, and once you've installed the necessary software, your PC's speakers burst to life — and there, on your computer screen, is whatever's on TV right now. By clicking a photographic on-screen representation of your actual remote control, you can change channels, see what's available to play on your TiVo, pause or rewind, or even tell the TiVo to record something. All of this works equally well at home (across the network) and on the road (across the Internet), although your components at home take a couple of seconds to respond.

(Unless you've bought a cable splitter, changing what's on the TV screen from the road also changes it at home, which could alarm anyone who happens to be watching TV in person at the time.)

The sound is excellent — and at home, viewed across your home network, so is the standard-definition video. Viewed away from home, the video is only O.K. There are blotchy patches here and there, not to mention periodic temporary freeze-ups; all of it depends on the Internet connection speeds at both ends. The video resembles a VCR recording, which is still perfectly fine for talk shows, reality shows, game shows and movies where sweeping visuals and special effects aren't the main attractions.

Once that's all running, you can embark on the next adventure: tuning into your Slingbox from a palmtop or cellphone. This task involves downloading and running another installer from slingmedia.com — free to Slingbox owners until April 26, and a one-time $30 payment thereafter.

At that point, you can use tiny tappable on-screen controls to tune in to your home TV and video recorder, and control all their functions, just as you can with a laptop. The Slingbox can direct its video to only one gizmo at a time, however; you can't watch on your cellphone while someone else is using a laptop.

Once again, all you need is high-speed Internet access. For PocketPC palmtops (like the HP iPAQ and Dell Axim), that usually means finding a Wi-Fi hot spot in a hotel, airport or coffee shop. Life is even easier if you have a cellphone with a $60-a-month high-speed cellular data plan like Verizon's EV-DO network (Palm Treo 700w, Samsung i730, and so on); in that case, you can tune in from anywhere in the 100 major cities with coverage. You can kill time watching your own TV while in cabs, friends' houses and the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The mobile Slingbox player also works over Bluetooth or U.S.B. connections to the Internet, meaning that you could watch on your palmtop over an Internet signal provided by a nearby laptop. But that's sort of pointless — if you have a laptop, why not watch your TV on it and enjoy the much bigger screen?

On the small screen, the video once again has perfectly adequate VHS quality. If the Internet connection is very slow — for example, if your cellphone is outside those 100 cities covered by EV-DO — you can opt for "slide-show mode" (one frame of video a second, accompanied by full audio).

On the pocket player, Sling Media has yet to fashion photographic remote-control replicas for all 5,000 different TV components offered by the laptop version. Still, the most important buttons are all available as generic rectangles; they appear when you tap the right "soft key" on your palmtop or phone. Keyboard shortcuts are available for most functions, too: to control a TiVo from the Treo's thumb keyboard, for example, you can press R for record, P for play, F for fast-forward.

The Slingbox isn't the only video-to-go option, of course. TiVoToGo, the iPod TV store and Archos pocket players all let you carry TV shows and movies on your travels — but only if you record material and transfer it before the trip. Orb (orb.com) is free and also works with some cellphones, but gets its video from a PC with a TV tuner card, not from your actual TV and video recorder. And, of course, your cellphone company will be happy to sell you short TV shows — a canned selection of their choosing, not yours — if you're willing to pay a monthly fee and watch exclusively on your phone (not your laptop).

The Slingbox and its simple, satisfying new cellphone/palmtop player join those portable personal-video options. It seems clear that along with traditional TV schedules and traditional TV channels, the next victim of high-tech progress may be the traditional TV couch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/te...s/23pogue.html





Movie Review

James Bai's 'Puzzlehead' Depicts a Love Triangle With a Twist
Jeannette Catsoulis

"Puzzlehead" plays out in a bleak and barren future where people have become so scarce that the only permissible use of technology is for repopulation. Fudging this rule somewhat, a lonely scientist builds a robot companion, an exact likeness of himself down to the bouffant hairstyle and lovelorn memories (Stephen Galaida plays both roles). He calls his creation Puzzlehead and trains him to play chess, clean house and spy on Julia (Robbie Shapiro), the pale, jittery salesgirl whom the scientist has been secretly coveting.

Once Puzzlehead has glimpsed Julia, his vacuuming and dishwashing no longer hold the same appeal; and as man and machine compete for the same, increasingly bewildered woman, their struggle escalates until only one of them will be left standing.

Written and directed by James Bai, "Puzzlehead" maintains a delicious tension between narrative wildness and compositional discipline. Mining the Frankenstein myth and finding psychosexual gold, the movie creates a love triangle that seems to share a single disturbed personality. The cannibalistic themes and low-budget sci-fi grunginess may recall Darren Aronofsky's "Pi," but Mr. Bai's camera is more patient and his energy more slow-burning. Filled with harpsichord music and Freudian passions, "Puzzlehead" reveals the selfishness of creation with style, originality and the understanding that even a tin man can have a heart.

Puzzlehead

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written, produced and directed by James Bai; director of photography, Jeffrey Lando; edited by Miranda Devin; music by Max Lichtenstein; production designer, Jessica Shaw; released by Zero Sum Productions. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 81 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Stephen Galaida (Puzzlehead/Walter) and Robbie Shapiro (Julia).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/03/2...es/23puzz.html





"Impertinent and Presumptuous"
Michael Geist

Pollara, the company that has conducted several surveys on behalf of CRIA (including the CRTC submission), has posted a lengthy 11 page response to my original blog posting (a comment brought the response to my attention as I was unaware of it until this evening). Pollara suggests that my statements are "misleading, incorrect, and inconsistent." The company adds for good measure that my intervention is "impertinent and presumptuous" and that it hopes that it won't "distract us from the serious business at hand."

People can read the memo as well as the original data and judge for themselves (as well as the growing news coverage from CBC, Marketwatch, and Stereophile). I'd offer the following comments in response:

· I noted the Pollara data found that P2P sources constituted only one-third of the music on people's computers. Pollara argues that this only reflects the music on their hard drives, not their downloading activity. I frankly don't understand their complaint here. They didn't ask about downloading activity, they asked about the source of music on their computers. If they were to ask about all their music (online and offline), I suspect the number would be even lower as many users might well have more CDs that they have not digitized.

· Pollara seems to step out of the role of pollster in their memo by regularly offering what amount to legal opinions on music copying. At page three of the response, they lump together P2P downloading, sharing with friends, and copying CDs that might not be their own. Perhaps Pollara is unaware of the private copying user right that exists under current Canadian law that has generated more than $140 million for artists and the industry which specifically covers much of this copying. This is not, as Pollara suggests, "unpaid-for-music" but rather copying that is well compensated.

· Pollara misleadingly recharacterizes some its own questions. For example, it points at page six to a question on whether the person had ever acquired a CD with songs downloaded from a file sharing service such as Kazaa. This is then inaccurately presented as "Ever Purchased or Received a CD That Contained Illegally Downloaded Tracks". One might say that Pollara should stick to polling for its paying clients like CRIA rather than offering up its opinion on the legality of P2P in Canada.

· Pollara takes issue with my characterization of its data that 75% of those polled have purchased songs that they downloaded. Apparently, they believe that the number of purchases should be higher given the amount of downloading, though it is hard to see how they've divined that from the questions they asked in this survey.

· Pollara suggests that I show an "egregious lack of consistency" by stating that the purchasing habits data is inconclusive given that it showed that 28% said they purchased more, 35% said they purchased less, and 37% said they didn't know. I think this is a fair characterization since the 7% difference between more and less purchases is offset by the largest number of 37% who don't know. That leaves the matter inconclusive in my view. Of course, Pollara chooses to step outside its own data by trumpeting CRIA stats to support a different conclusion.

· Pollara notes that I chose to ignore the responses of Canadians attitude toward copyright and downloading. I did not comment because these questions are embarrassing. As noted yesterday, the percentage of those in favour of meeting international standards dropped by 28% in two months. The reality is that most people being polled (and apparently doing the polling) are not copyright experts and relying on such responses only serves to diminish the credibility of those seeking to do so.

· Finally, Pollara wonders aloud why I didn't cite CAB response. The truth is that there are 180 responses and I haven't read them all. Moreover, it was the CRIA data that immediately attracted attention since it included detailed survey data which typically is not released to the public. If Pollara has reviewed all the submissions, however, I suppose one might ask why didn't they mention the submission from Fading Ways Records who have found that P2P has increased the sales of their artists. At the risk of being presumptuous, given this memo, I think that answer is obvious.

Update: CopyrightWatch comments on the Pollara response with a helpful list of what the polling company might have asked.
http://michaelgeist.ca/component/opt...omment_view,1/





Russian Software Developer Beats Pirate in Boxing Ring
MosNews

An employee of Cognitive Technologies computer company has beaten a man who was selling the company’s software illegally.

Manager of the company’s software department, Andrei Smirnov, offered to fight the dealer in a fitness center. He defeated the computer pirate 24-16 in three rounds, lasting three minutes each. The dealer’s name was not revealed, News.Ru web edition on high technologies reported on Thursday.

In February, Smirnov saw the dealer selling CDs with his company’s software at a computer market without a license. Smirnov demanded that the dealer stop the illegal sale. A scuffle broke out, but they were stopped by the guard. After that, the pirate expressed a wish to continue the fight in the street, but Smirnov suggested a fitness center.
http://mosnews.com/news/2006/03/23/beatpirate.shtml





Alizee Est Bien Chaud
Exaton

Take this video in particular, for example. Gotta have some reason to love France... And my God guys, you should understand the lyrics... It's all about her relaxing in a bubble bath, her soft skin, etc. (not kidding). See that "2" logo in the top right ? That's France 2, the most important public channel (and in this country the public channels are neck to neck with the private ones for popularity). Still not kidding.

Now for the less jowful news. I happen to live in France, as you might have gathered, and I'm a bit surprised by the international analysis of the DADVSI law (since that's it name) that indeed got through Parliament tuesday evening.

The fact is that the government has :

· legalized DRM,

· set up a standard parking-ticket style fine for downloading pirated stuff and another for making content available to others (38 and 150 euros respectively, about 45 and 180 USD),

· decided that P2P software makers were liable to pay 300'000 euros and spend 3 years in prison,

· given up on the "monthly subscription to be allowed to download legally" deal, under pressure from the local RIAA associates that forced a vast majority of artists to back them,

· completely forbidden copying of a DVD, even as a personal backup,

· and simply required that DRM'd files be interoperable, which is where Apple's beef is.

I'm very flattered by all the positive light this is being shown in internationally, it's not every day the world has nice things to say about this country, but I must point out that IT enthusiasts over here are miserably decrying this law, and would probably be in the streets themselves if they weren't already chocablock with students demonstrating :-(

http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/06/03/22/2117258.shtml

















Until next week,

- js.


















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